Four Tips for Boosting SEO This Summer
Whether you’re new to this industry or not, you don’t need us to tell you how competitive it is. SEO is a fast-moving, ever-evolving field using techniques to master a field less than 30 years old. In fact, did you know the first time anybody said the word “SEO” was as recent as 1997? It’s true – You’re on the cutting edge of a new and exciting business world. But, over the last few decades – especially in the last five years – The face of SEO has changed significantly.
Chances are, you know some of the basics. Every site needs to carry out keyword research and optimize its tags. Everybody needs to optimize content… But beyond that, what more can you do? In this article, we’ve compiled four of the most helpful ways to drive growth through SEO this year.
Three Rank Boosting SEO Tips for the Summer
This section will cover four of the techniques we anticipate to play the biggest role in the coming summer. This season be prepared to leverage some new tricks alongside your existing best practices. So, without further ado, let’s start with something easy you can start doing today.
Stop Ignoring ‘People Also Ask’
Google has a lot more services now than it used to. You can leverage a lot of these in a positive way for your SEO strategy. It’s not just a matter of typing in a query and poring through those easy ten links anymore. No, it would be best to dig deeper into all of the features Google is offering you. One of the SERP features you should look into is PAA or People Also Ask. On the SERP, you’ll see questions listed alongside your result.
More and more SERPs – Around 40% more at the start of the year – Feature this section. That includes both desktop and mobile pages. Why does this matter to you? Imagine ranking on page 1 twice. With PAA, you can do just that. You can also feature high on SERPs by answering questions your customer asks. Most sites with a PAA result also feature in the top three search results. Try to target this feature whenever you can.
Boosting SEO Tip – Make Better Use of Image Search
The Image Search feature on Google is one of the most popular functions on the website. A little over 10% of all of Google’s traffic is for images.google.com – Indicating a huge portion of use for the SERP tab. In addition, there are more than a BILLION pageviews on Google Images every day. Are you starting to get the picture?
You can blow past your competitors on image results if you start to think beyond alt tags. You should certainly consider alt tags, but you should also work on other things. File names, small file sizes, sitemaps for images, and CDN image hosting contribute greatly. Don’t worry as much about images you already have – Instead, look to the future and ensure your new images are optimized for Image Search.
Use PPC Testing for a Better CTR
The CTR of your pages is a major ranking factor. Two major elements determine your site’s overall CTR. In general, these are the title tag and meta description. Luckily for us, these are two areas where SEO specialists have a good amount of control. PPC testing is an easy way to determine which tags and descriptions improve your CTR by the widest margin.
Set aside some resources to set up a few test pages even if you aren’t running a PPC campaign. We recommend setting up three pages with a different title tag but the same description on each page to test for your title tags. The same works for descriptions but in reverse. Set up three pages with the same title tags but different descriptions. When you have data for both of these, you know the best combination to use!
Boost Your Page 2 Rankings with Internal Links
We’ll end with an ‘obvious in hindsight’ example. If you have keywords getting you to page 2 that you want on the first page of a SERP, internal links could be the boost you need. Internal linking is still obscure enough that using it is often enough to move you from page 2 to 1. Your top linked pages should have internal links for your target keywords. You can find opportunities on Google by using a site: search with your domain and target keyword. If you find any pages with this search that don’t have internal links, add them!
Emu Marketing has some of the state’s best SEO experts. So if you’re looking to drive traffic to your website or overhaul it completely, you can rely on us. Visit our website to learn more, or get in touch with us today.