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Have you been trying to rank higher on Google’s search results, but your SEO strategies have not worked much? It is obviously hard to rank in Google’s top 10 searches but not impossible and the reason your rankings are not going up is that you are focusing on the wrong goals.
I have explained below a few strategies that will help you rank in Google’s top 10 searches;
1. Write Structured Posts:
It is not a secret that a structured blog post is always preferable and often ranked higher. If you write paras and paras of information without using any structure, your article may sound informative, but it would not be delivered to the audience as no one has the patience to read paras. Most of the audience just scroll through the subheadings to understand the content of the articles and if they like the information only then will they spend time reading the entire article. In fact, a blog post without proper structure and breaks are tiring for the eyes to look at as well.
Another important thing you should follow is to stick to a similar article structure for your entire site so that your regular readers know the sections they need to look for to find the most important portion of the article they might be interested in. Consider it just like reading the newspaper and skipping all those pages to reach the sports section, as it is always printed on the same page every day, you know where to look for it quickly.
Following is a widely used structure of writing a blog post;
- Catchy Headline
- Related Image
- Introduction
- Lead-in
- Sub-Headings
- Conclusion
- Request for Feedback
- Comments
2. Focus on User Experience Along with On-Page SEO:
Research suggest that most users ignore the paid search and the skip to the organic search results hence if you do not have the budget for paid searches, do not worry as getting your website Ad listed will only temporarily boost your ranking but effective SEO strategy will improve your rankings and it will stay that way for a long time.
The main element in optimizing a site is to improve user experience. Remember you are not optimizing for the search engines, but the users. Using keywords in a post is not bad but do not overdo it just for improving search engine rankings as it will confuse the readers and search engine algorithms are smart enough to detect such sites. Once the bounce rate of a page is high, the search engine starts decreasing its rankings hence you should focus on keeping your users happy and this will keep the search engines happy as well.
Another aspect you should keep in mind is that the SEO strategy for a minor company cannot be similar to a billion-dollar company with thousands of employees as the global footprint cannot be small and neither can it have minor SEO needs. Such companies require the use of an SEO platform as the company website will contain a thousand pages that require organic reach.
For quality and fast SEO optimization of your website, you can use different SEO tools. For example, one such tool is Sitechecker. This is a comprehensive tool for performing SEO analysis and monitoring your website. This tool is great for ON-Page SEO optimization of your website. You will be able to perform a quality technical audit of each page and optimize content. Sitechecker also has a Link extractor function, which will help you analyze all internal and external links on your site.
3. Create Meaningful Blog Posts:
It goes without saying that the quality of the post matters as how do you expect the audience to purchase from your company if you cannot engage them reading your post? Firstly, write posts on topics that really help your targeted audience because quality does not matter if the post does not interest your audience. Ranking in Google’s top 10 will not happen overnight but if you put in consistent efforts then slowly you will see your rankings improving.
In fact, while writing content, focus on the AIDA marketing model as this has been around for a while and will persuade customers to engage with you.
A – Attention:
Grabbing the reader’s attention is essential to start with as this will entice them to spend some time exploring what your brand has to offer.
I – Interest:
Once the reader has got your attention, your post needs to interest them. Most reader’s do not tend to spend more than 10 seconds scanning a blog before they decide to read further or move on to the next blog hence add catchy and informative sub-headings to make sure that your post interests them.
D – Desire:
Your audience should have the desire to share your content. Breakdown the complicated parts of the post and use bullets so that the reader can immediately identify the important portion of the section. this will increase their desire to stay on the page.
A -Action:
To be able to convince the users to share your content, your post should be up to the mark. Now you need the user to take further action by engaging with you hence make it easy for them. Add share buttons and Pin It and Click to Tweet plugins so that it becomes relatively easy for users to share, this will increase the chances of your content being posted on social media by them.
4. Improving Off-Page SEO Efforts:
We have spoken about on-page SEO, similarly, you cannot ignore off-page SEO as well. Link building is not an easy task as legit backlinks are difficult to achieve, hence you have to be patient and slowly build your links. Paid links will not work as Google algorithm has been updated to trace such links and penalize them. External links improve your traffic and if your post engages the audience then your rankings will improve.
Conclusion:
I have heard experts suggesting that you should spend 20% of your time on writing and 80% of the time marketing your content to rank in Google’s top 10 but ironically the reality is that when you stop worrying about ranking and start focusing on the users, your ranking will automatically go higher on Google because the search engines are out there for making life easier for users hence will reward if you focus on good user experience.