In the age of ever-limiting attention spans, the importance of ranking within Google’s top 10 results has become increasingly essential. According to HubSpot, 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results. This statistic isn’t surprising considering how quickly we scan, click a few links, and arrive at our desired answer or destination in our searches.
Creating compelling content is only half the battle when competing across the world of the search engine results page (SERP). Developing strategies and techniques underneath the hood that drive sessions, clicks, and conversions is also crucial. In the first of our two-part series, we’re sharing our SEO best practices for rising in search rankings. By following these four effective methods, you’ll build a foundation that propels your SEO ranking skyward.
What is search intent? Search intent (or user intent, audience intent) describes the purpose behind or why someone is conducting an online search and usually falls into one of four categories:
To drive search traffic to content, you’ll want to focus mostly on informational and commercial investigational intent. If you sell financial services, you could, for instance, optimize a product (or category) page for “buy financial services.” Moreover, you will also want to align articles with this search intent by writing posts about the benefits of financial services (more on this in the next section).
Finding the right keywords is a critical piece of any SEO strategy, but where you place them is just as important. It starts with page copy, but for full optimization, marketers need to think beyond the words on the page. Meta and alt text offers important opportunities for SEO success, including:
Page load speed is often overlooked when it comes to SEO, but it’s an important part of UX, which can seriously affect how long visitors stick around (and Google will notice). Speeding up a slow site may sound like a complicated process, but some simple steps can bring your page loading up to speed in no time:
Internal links are simply any link from one page on your website to another. They connect your content and give search engines an idea of the structure of your site. When used strategically, links can establish a hierarchy on your site and assign greater value to the important pages and information.
Each of these strategies can each boost your SEO on their own, but implementing a holistic approach that includes elements of all of them is when you’ll see substantial gains in your site's SERP performance. But these techniques are only the beginning. Stay tuned for the second part of our SEO best practices series, where we’ll share even more tactics to rocket up the rankings.
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