SEO can be a puzzle to many emerging marketers, content writers, and founders.
But not to these folks on this list.
I scoured top experts in the field of SEO to give you some of the best tips and strategies that you may have overlooked or just need re-emphasizing (because yes – they matter!)
Let’s get right into it.
Tip 1: Use Google Operators to Find Content Ideas
Google Operators are a powerful tool that can be used to quickly retrieve data from SERPs. Below are a few for you to find content ideas and gaps your site can fill.
- site:quora.com intext:[insert keyword or topic] – Find content ideas on Quora.
- site:reddit.com intext:[insert keyword or topic] – Find content ideas on Reddit.
- site:researchgate.net intext:[insert keyword or topic] – Find scientific papers & referenced content for specialized niches.
Use these operators for:
- Retrieving indexed content about a specific topic on a specific platform or site.
- Get deeper articles, questions, or threads for additional content ideas.
Name: Nico Bortoluzzi
Title & Company: Founder & SEO Consultant @ SEO LYNX LTD
Social Media: LinkedIn
Tip 2: Use Original Quotes in Articles
I rarely see people adding original quotes to their articles, which makes no sense. Expert opinions provide a unique insight, guaranteeing that each article offers your readers completely original and real-world wisdom. And when applied to an entire content library, you’re on the fast track to being a leader in both thought and Google rankings.
HARO makes it a breeze to get top-quality quotes. Just post what you need and from whom, and your inbox will be flooded with high-quality quotes.
Name: Sam Szuchan
Title & Company: Founder @ SamSzu
Social Media: LinkedIn
Tip 3: Keep Your Content Fresh & Updated
Marketing and SEO experts often place their focus on publishing new content while hoping that the already published articles will continue their lives peacefully. However, writing a blog post and leaving it for years is not a viable option in many industries. In a constantly-changing environment, you must ensure your content is always relevant.
These updates can include changing the year, removing old content, checking for broken links, and much more. Schedule a check every three months, if possible, and pay attention to industry trends and your top-ranking pages so you can help them perform even better.
Name: Shubham Singh
Title & Company: Content Manager & SEO Lead @ DemandSage
Social Media: LinkedIn
Tip 4: Perform In-Depth On-Page SEO Audits
On-page SEO is extremely overlooked by many writers and editors. Without proper on-page SEO, ranking for your primary target keywords is nearly impossible. Many companies use a cheap plugin and publish blog posts when they get a certain score.
The best way to ensure your on-page SEO is being done well is by using an on-page SEO checklist. It will help your team maintain the best SEO practices and ensure consistency throughout the website.
Examples of factors to consider for on-page SEO include optimizing headers, meta titles, satisfying search intent, and more.
Name: Nathan Gotch
Title & Company: Founder @ Gotch SEO
Social Media: LinkedIn
Tip 5: Implement Content Clusters
If you’re serious about SEO, you must focus on content clusters.
A content cluster is a group of content pieces (usually blog posts) related to a specific topic, and it’s also a great way to show Google that your website is an authority on a particular subject. In return, you enjoy more organic traffic and a higher position on the SERP.
So how do you create a content cluster?
The first step is to identify a topic you want to focus on. Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to create several pieces of content (blog posts, eBooks, etc.) that are all related to that topic.
Finally, you’ll need to ensure that each piece of content links back to at least one other component in the cluster.
This will help Google understand how all content pieces are related and will ultimately lead to better search engine rankings.
Despite having some very high DR links to one of my blog posts, its rankings got stuck at pos 9-12 and never moved above that.
As I implemented this strategy, my main blog post started to rank, and the traffic rose significantly.
Name: Palash Nag
Title & Company: Founder @ The Mistaken Man
Social Media: Linkedin, Twitter
Tip 6: Add a FAQ Section to Your Articles
The FAQ section is a great place to capitalize on Google’s rich snippets.
With a simple WordPress plugin, you can add the schema necessary to be featured in the dropdown FAQ answers that appear in search results. To find questions worth answering, look at the “People Also Ask” results for your target keyword or the “Questions” tab under Keywords explorer in Ahrefs.
You can take the SEO value of your FAQs to the next level by optimizing for voice search. Try to answer each question in a concise and easy-to-read format, but still without missing any vital information.
According to Backlinko, the average search answer is only 29 words and reads at a 9th-grade level. As voice search continues to grow, this approach will allow you to capitalize on the trend.
Name: Daniel Anderson
Title & Company: Founder @ The Money Maniac
Social Media: LinkedIn, Twitter
Tip 7: Content Velocity Matters
Content publishing velocity is one of the essential factors that determine how often you appear in organic searches and how much your traffic is increased. Simply put, the faster you publish content, the faster you can increase the organic traffic and the overall performance of your website without compromising on the quality.
However, you need to make sure the content velocity makes sense for your website and give your content time to mature.
Track your efforts, follow trends, see which articles perform best and make sure you have a content plan for at least one year ahead.
Obviously, you can make changes, but it’s still essential to have some structure and a solid plan so that the articles will have enough time to grow and positively influence your website’s organic traffic.
Meanwhile, you can work on the backlink profile, update your site structure, decrease page load time, and improve overall optimization. All of this combined will all begin to impact your rankings and traffic within weeks, and the published content will do its work in the background.
If you can’t write that much content, you can always try some AI content writing tools.
Name: Bhujal Patel
Title & Company: Founder @ My Digital Kube
Social Media: LinkedIn
Tip 8: Don’t neglect internal linking
Internal linking is essential to every website, but unfortunately, it is often neglected. The marketing and SEO department should focus on link building, optimizing the content, and ensuring the format is correct. However, internal links are also needed – to help your readers find more relevant content and keep them on the website, and also for search engines so that they can crawl more efficiently.
Many people don’t like it because it can be very time-consuming, but you can just optimize the process by using a WordPress plugin. For example, it helped me reduce the time spent on internal linking by more than 50%.
I saw a twelve times increase in my organic traffic only by improving the
Name: Georgi Todorov
Title & Company: Founder @ Thrivemyway.com
Tip 9: Don’t Forget About the Backlinks
Backlinks are the currency of the web. Unfortunately, building links from quality websites is often overlooked in today’s world. Partly because it is difficult to build links and partly because the conversion rates of link-building campaigns are pretty low (almost down to zero).
To build links, create linkable assets. The best example of this would be to develop statistics pages. It is important to note that doing original research and creating these statistics pages is one of the best ways to build links. More about this tactic in the next section!
Name: Kaloyan Yankulov
Title & Company: Co-Founder @ Encharge
Social Media: LinkedIn
Tip 10: Know Your Audience’s Interests
Knowing your audience’s interests will help you craft an editorial strategy that’s tailored to your website’s audience. This step is crucial for developing a quality editorial strategy filled with content relevant to your target audience.
While having a solid brand identity is important, it is also essential to create current and searched-for editorial content to establish your expertise and gain visibility. You can do this by spending time on forums, talking with professionals in your industry, attending events and workshops, looking at trends, and doing keyword research.
Name: Ilija Sekulov
Title & Company: Marketing & SEO @ Mailbutler.io
Social Media: LinkedIn
Tip 11: Rank for Keywords with Low Domain Authority
Focus on ranking for keywords that have low domain authority. Often, these low competition keywords are so specific that they drive a lot of targeted traffic to your site, helping you build brand awareness and generating organic backlinks.
As your domain authority increases over time, you can start targeting more competitive keywords.
Name: Anthony Tran
Title & Company: Founder & Anthonydtran.com
Social Media: LinkedIn, Twitter
Tip 12: Become the End of All Searches
When someone types in a query on the internet, they are ultimately looking for a specific piece of information. As SEOs, we need to understand the meaning behind the search, a.k.a. the search intent. Why would someone be searching for this particular term in the first place?
Google makes their ranking process for an article on how well that particular post answers the search term.
Let’s say you wrote a 3,000-word post on “how to tie your shoelace”, but filled it up with 1,500 words of what a shoelace is before actually getting to your point. How user friendly is that?
People will likely click off your site and find their answer on another site.
A high bounce rate will actively harm the health and reputation of your website, so you need to satisfy them in a way that they don’t click back. The result – you have effectively ended their search, and you get to keep your page one rankings.
Name: Chris Bournelis
Title & Company: Founder @ ChrisBournelis.com
Social Media: LinkedIn, Twitter
Tip 13: Keep an eye on the competition
You can learn a lot from them.
Not only can you see what they’re doing well, but you can also see what they’re doing wrong. This information can be invaluable as you work to stay competitive and improve your SEO strategy.
You can use many tools and methods to spy on your competition, but the best way I’ve found is manually monitoring their rankings on Ahrefs and checking their sitemap. You’ll want to consider their top-performing content, keywords they rank for, the links they’re getting, and their site structure.
Name: Jay Bats
Title & Company: Co-founder @ ContentBASE
Tip 14: Go Deep with SERP Analysis
Content plans are usually driven by what keywords you desire to rank for and then by reading other blogs on the same topic and deciding on a framework for how to write your own content piece.
However – not enough attention is paid to the finer details which can make or break that piece of content.
- Look at the DA/DR of the sites ranking in the SERP – is it higher or lower than your site?
- How many links does each page in the top 10 have? Are those links real or just directory sites or scrapers?
- What’s the anchor text internally and externally to the pages that rank?
This analysis will help you better plan internal and external link efforts before publishing a piece of content. It’s also more accurate than just using keyword difficulty as a metric on if you should or shouldn’t rank.
Name: Patrick Herbert
Title & Company: Director @ Singularity Digital
Social Media: LinkedIn, Twitter
Tip 15: Don’t sleep on content pruning and consolidation
While this doesn’t apply to all companies – if you’ve published lots of content with no traction in the past, it may be a good idea to prune or consolidate it.
Because here’s the thing – underperforming content can hurt your SEO and lower your overall rankings. In a way, you want to think of all your content as equity. If you have 10% of your content doing well and 90% of your content is irrelevant and underperforming – that 10% will be affected too.
By pruning and consolidating your content, you can get rid of the bad, expand/update the not-bad, consolidate and repurpose any other content and raise the overall quality of your content.
Name: Will Donnelly
Title & Company: Co-founder @ Lottie
Tip 16: Move in Content Bursts Instead of Droplets
Common wisdom in digital marketing is that you want to publish as much content as possible as fast as you can. However, at the same time, you also have to build links like crazy, regularly audit your website, and build relationships. It’s overwhelming, to say the least, and when faced with so many things to do today, most people get discouraged and do far less than they could have.
Content writing, editing, and polishing are by far the biggest timesuck. And because you go one by one, the results are always very weak at first, and many bloggers give up before seeing any substantial success.
What’s the answer here? Batch content publishing and move in bursts instead of droplets (the analogy of droplets of water falling into a bucket).
Have 2-3 periods during the calendar year where all you do is publish as much content as possible. And in between those periods, do everything else – promote your site, focusing on link building as that’s where the high Google rankings are made.
Name: Nikola Roza
Title & Company: Founder @ NikolaRoza.com
Social Media: LinkedIn, Twitter
Tip 17: Build High Authority Backlinks with HARO
HARO (Help a Reporter) allows you to submit expert quotes for websites including The New York Times, Shopify, Wordstream, Wall Street Journal, Cloudways, Reuters, Mashable, and more.
If your response is selected, you’ll be quoted on these sites, along with a high authority do-follow backlink to your site.
It’s free to sign up. Each day, you’ll be sent HARO queries in line with your areas of expertise to answer. It can take a fair amount of work to get selected (we aim for one successful link per 20 responses), but the links are worth the effort – we average DR67 for our clients but regularly see DR70, 80, and 90+ from some of the world’s best-known websites.
Name: Sam Browne
Title & Company: Founder @ HARO SEO
Social Media: LinkedIn
Tip 18: Write on Low Competition Keywords That Competitors Rank For
One of the best ways to get easy competition keywords to write about is to do competitor research on a tool like Ahrefs.
When a competitor’s site comes up, you can click on the organic keywords they rank for and filter keywords by difficulty. For example, if you filter the keywords and choose a keyword difficulty between 0 to 10, you can get dozens of keyword ideas that are easy to rank for.
Once you’ve finished doing this with one competitor, go to another site and rinse and repeat. This process can help give you hundreds of very low competition keywords to start giving your site some traction.
Name: Tobias Biberbach
Title & Company: Director, Split My Fare
Social Media: LinkedIn
Tip 19: Use Exit Intent Pop-Ups
Many businesses focus on getting traffic to their site, but very few capture and turn those users into leads for their business.
One of the best ways to do this is to use exit intent pop-ups on your website. With exit intent pop-ups, you can have visitors on your site put in their email addresses, and you can add them to your email list, thus, prolonging their customer journey.
You can create a large email list by leveraging exit intent pop-ups and turn those prospects into paying customers for your services. You can use many free plug-ins to start adding exit intent pop-ups on your website, and your email list can accumulate quickly, depending on the size of your SEO traffic.
Name: Melanie Balke
Title & Company: Founder @ The Email Marketers
Social Media: LinkedIn
Tip 20: Leverage Journo Baiting
Journalists are always looking for data, research, and studies that they can use in their articles. So why not start creating content pages focused on these topics to attract them to your site?
You can uncover some hidden opportunities that journalists might be interested in by doing keyword research on terms like numbers, statistics, reports, and case studies.
And if you make your content even more relevant by adding calendar terms such as 2020, 2021, or 2022, you’ll be even more likely to attract journalist attention.
Once they find your page and cite your research, they’ll naturally link back to your site – which can help boost your traffic and visibility.
So if you’re looking for a way to get noticed by journalists, creating data-rich content pages is a great strategy to try.
Name: Matt Gardner
Title & Company: Founder @ Matt Gardner
Social Media: LinkedIn, Twitter
Tip 21: Optimise the Page Speed on PC and Mobile
Engaging with a slow website is extremely frustrating. No one likes waiting for a page to load, especially when other options are just a click away.
Slow loading times can harm your website’s search engine ranking. Google stated that page speed is a factor in their ranking algorithm, and they are not the only ones.
Search engines want to deliver the best possible results, so fast-loading websites are vital. Studies show that even a tiny decrease in page speed can impact conversion rates.
Simply put, improving page speed is essential for SEO, ranking in Google, and general user experience. If you want your website to be on page one of search results, you must make sure your site loads quickly on all possible platforms.
Name: Marcos Isaias
Title & Company: Founder @ Misaias.com
Social Media: Linkedin, Twitter
Tip 22: Prioritize wisely
The first step to any good SEO strategy or campaign is to figure out your priorities, goals, and KPIs.
- Are you trying to get more traffic?
- Are you trying to convert clients?
- Are you trying to build an online presence?
Your business goals determine the SEO initiatives you need to prioritize first. There’s no point in building a bunch of links if you haven’t set up good service pages or re-designing your blog page if there are no blogs (and traffic).
Define your goals, then work backward to identify the strategies that move the needle.
Name: Simon Bacher
Title & Company: Founder @ Ling App
Tip 23: Have a Good User Experience (UX)
Google wants to ensure their users get the best possible customer journey when they visit a website, so they are now taking user experience as one of the main ranking factors.
Many factors go into having a good UX, such as using easy-to-read fonts, having a mobile-friendly design, and having fast loading times – things that have all been discussed above! You can read a more in-depth article on the topic right here – Three ways (and tools) to improve the user experience of your content.
If you want your content and site to rank well, you must ensure your UX is up to par. It’s also a good idea to make sure your website is accessible to people with disabilities. For example, many articles on the Convince & Convert blog have an audio version, as well.
Name: Tiffany Homan
Title & Company: Editor @ Rental Property Calculator
Tip 24: Consider content for all stages of the sales funnel
Most companies make the mistake of only creating content for the top of the sales funnel – that is, people who are just becoming aware of their problem or need.
But if you want to rank well and get more traffic, you must consider all sales funnel stages. That means creating content for people who are in the:
- Awareness Stage: Just starting to become aware that they have a problem or need
- Consideration Stage: Comparing different options and solutions
- Decision Stage: Ready to make a purchase
Once you’ve considered all stages of the sales funnel, you can start to create targeted content that will help move your prospects through each stage until they’re ready to buy from you.
This is also a great way to prioritize content if you don’t have the resources to nurture leads from Awareness to Decision.
Name: Mark Buff
Title & Company: Founder @ ProfitFrog
Tip 25: Update content for more traffic
Posting new content all the time is great, but it doesn’t guarantee never-ending traffic. Every hour or even every minute, the keywords you try to rank for will get more competitive as new content gets published. And since Google wants to give readers only the most relevant information, you’ll see your articles slowly getting pushed down to the bottom of the barrel.
But there’s a way out.
The moment you see your content slowing down or not moving fast enough — update it! Add more content, answer more questions, refresh data, add more visuals — whatever it takes to prove to Google that your content is AND has been relevant for quite a while. With that plan, you can definitely get on the first page in Google AND stay there, even if your domain authority is not that high.
P.S. But don’t forget to be realistic about the keywords you should and shouldn’t target. If it’s too competitive, it’s not worth the trouble.
Name: Anastasiia Andriiuk
Title & Company: Head of Content @ Kaizo
Social Media (LinkedIn/Twitter): LinkedIn
That’s a wrap!
SEO is constantly changing and evolving, so it’s essential to stay up to date on the latest trends and techniques. Here is just a glance from experts in their field.
However, it’s important to note that SEO isn’t static. Just because one strategy works for someone doesn’t mean it’ll work for everyone.
You should always consider your business goals first and execute based on your needs. Set hypotheses, experiment, and double down on the things that work.
Happy SEO-ing!
The post 25 Experts Reveal SEO Strategies You Need to Rank in 2022 appeared first on Convince & Convert.
