Focusing on Google’s key factors can help determine search results and outperform the competition in your domain. Here are 8 white hat SEO strategies to boost your search traffic.
Often you might feel you are stuck with the cycle of optimizations that never give you the expected results. If this describes what you are experiencing with your SEO mission, this post will teach you some white hat SEO tactics that can help multiply your traffic from organic search.
The system Google has implemented to rank websites consists of a set of algorithms that are developed to assure you the best results.
These algorithms consider several factors like the words inputted in a query, relevance, usefulness of a page, geo-location, source expertise and settings.
In addition, how these factors are weighed fully depends on the nature of a query. Talking of current topics, freshness holds a lot of weightage. For a definition of dictionary type, the page authority and page trust play the key role.
Google has employed a list of Quality raters to ensure that the algorithms work well as intended.
They follow Google’s guidelines strictly to make sure that the output of algorithms match with the standards that have been established for meeting the needs and ensuring Page Quality. If you are serious about building a top-performing website, understanding these guidelines is crucially important.
Google says that its search algorithms look at 5 key factors to decide which results to display at the top of their search results including the meaning of the query, the relevance of the webpages to the query, content quality, usefulness of the webpages, and context and settings.
If you can address these five factors adequately, you can gain an advantage to outperform the competition. The tips given below can let you know how to achieve this.
1. Never underestimate the power of ‘Mobile First’
When Google introduced this concept many webmasters quickly caught up with this strategy in SEO and dubbed ‘mobilegeddon’, Google’s pending mobile update.
The update did not result in a big upheaval, though those who took it lightly and overlooked the warning to go mobile had to pay a heavy price later.
Today, Google has an all-in on mobile presence.
If you are not sure about whether your website meets the criteria specified for being mobile-friendly, you can view the Mobile Usability Report by logging in to your Search Console account.
As Google has reported mobile issues here, you can ensure compliance by taking the right actions.
2. You must claim your business listing
Google offers a free business listing facility via its Google Business Profile, earlier known as Google My Business.
Claiming your business listing can help show up your business across Google Shopping, Google search and Google Maps. You can create a Business Profile on Google if your business works from a physical location or reaches customers on travel.
Top 5 benefits of Google Business Profile
1. This is a free advertising platform which is much faster than SEO and cheaper than paid search.
2. Google Maps and 3-Pack prefer businesses that have geographical relevance
3. Your business profile can strike the best impression with an optimized profile
4. A good star rating you garner can help build trust and earn social proof.
5. Google Business Profile lets you check the profile performance and also gain some valuable insights
Google is more focused on enhancing its capability to deliver hyper-local results. Therefore, it is very important to have up to date and accurate details on your Google Business Profile.
Many businesses have not claimed their business listing so far and therefore you can find an easy win in this route.
3. Build-up on your page experience
Google defines page experience in terms of a few signals that indicate how users react to a webpage. It employs core web vitals, which are a set of metrics to measure a page’s loading performance, visual stability, interactivity, and mobile-friendliness.
Google’s page experience is defined by a set of signals which are designed to measure how users react to a webpage. This measurement stretches much beyond the basic information value.
In circumstances where many pages can satisfy the search criteria of being relevant for a given search term, page experience is given a top consideration in page ranking. If a page delivers the information that is highly sought after, it can easily win over a page that has a better page relevance, but falls short of a good page experience. So, we can say that page experience is the tie breaker when it comes to SERP.
4. User experience needs a greater focus (UX)
Google’s top advice to webmasters is to focus more on providing a great user experience.
Google’s algorithms get smarter and websites assuring a great user experience enjoy greater benefits. A good user experience is more important than a clean code.
A study published in the Oxford Journal says, “The goal of UX design in business is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product.”
Considering that your website is the product, your objective must be to determine the user intent first and develop a methodology to achieve a smooth navigation – this can trigger positive emotions and result in an overall good page experience.
To achieve a better UX, you can get tons of ideas from advices and templates found online.
5. Why Keyword Research is important
Google provides less keyword data and hence some third party sources like Semrush and Ahrefs offer their own keyword tools to fill the gap.
However, RankBrain and BERT have changed the way how keyword research is done and how the results are used.
RankBrain can be explained as machine learning, which lets Google to approach things contextually than merely relying on metadata strings. Now Google understands the nuances of language like synonyms, stemming and answers.
Expanded as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, BERT’s principal goal is the enhance search results for conversational and longer searches in which the context of the query is impacted by prepositions like ‘for’ and ‘to’.
When it was launched in October 2019, Google predicted that BERT would influence 10% of all searches done across the US.
The keyword tools of our times consider this and generate relevant data like search intent, parent topics and keyword groups. When you are equipped with this idea, you will find it a breeze to develop content that is contextually relevant.
6. Have a balanced content marketing plan
The Content Marketing Institute records the opinions of more than 51% of all respondents by saying that capturing the attention of the audience has become more difficult now than it was a year ago.
Content has become a prominent factor for Google to rank and hence it is very important to get it rightly. If you are willing to invest the time necessary to make it happen, you have a huge opportunity in front of you.
When we stress on the importance of creating a great content, we must first understand what makes a great content.
Great content boils down to useful content, and discovering and reaching the right audience. This need not be a tough exercise. It only means that you are going by your empathy to responding to your prospects and customers.
Great content can be delivered in different forms like blogs, visuals with data, images, info-graphics, slide share presentations and videos.
7. Work towards on-page optimization
Google’s Starter guide for SEO is a wonderful resource for you if you want to maximize the chances of your page appearing on Google’s search results.
The guide lists best practices for optimizing in addition to covering the key on-page basics including Headers, Page titles, Image Alt-text, Page URLs, Meta Descriptions, Internal Linking, and Structured Markup.
Some additional resources for improving on-page optimization you can depend on include the following.
1. How Search Works
2. Google Search Central Twitter
3. Google Search Central Blog
4. Google Search Central YouTube Channel
5. Google Search Central Help Forum
8. Link Building significantly enhances all your SEO efforts
Getting the right kinds of links is a vital topic in SEO as links are an important criteria to decide ranking. The three types of links include the links that are relevant to your site, links that need an editorial review, and links that are earned.
Building a resource center is a great way to earn relevant links. A resource center can work well with any kind of website. Besides attracting links, a good resource center also helps build authority and trust.
Take away
Organic Search is a game you must approach steadily and consistently putting in a lot of efforts from different directions. Though there is no single best way to dominate the search results, the process need not be overwhelming. With the right focus on the strategies discussed above, you can multiply your traffic several times.