10 Essential SEO Hacks You Can Use

Ranking at the top of Google’s search rankings is tougher than ever.  It’s important to optimize everything you do, to appease their algorithm.  Enjoy these 8 quick but essential SEO hacks you can use to improve your rankings right now.

You’ve likely hit a drop via a Google algo update, plateau in your web traffic or you’d like to build more traffic from Google and Bing. Applying some improvements to raise your rankings (SEO hacks) is a good thing.

Hacking can help you fix technical problems, improve keyword strategy and get you on a path to more traffic. And you’ll get an appreciation for the sophisticated engineering that a top flight SEO pro will use.

Yet one more reason you might want to use SEO hacks is to reassure yourself of the value of strategic SEO. You might not be a believer that bringing in an expert search engine optimizer is worth the expense. Yet, we know that it’s an investment that keeps on delivering year after year. If you’re a start up entrepreneur, SEO remains a superb way of getting your content to the premium level and building visibility and traffic cost effectively.

Remember that there are few things better than a number one ranking on Google. The prestige, credibility, and visibility deliver exceptional business value. Lead conversion rates from #1 rankings are excellent.

Let’s take a look at the top advanced SEO hacks you might implement:

Tip 1. Improve your Page Loading Speed

Check your page loading speed and core metric numbers. You may as well check your technical issues first and get this one out of the way. You can click on through to the Web.dev page speed checker and see your performance numbers.

As you can see, my site’s pages load very fast. Fast means more engagement, clicks, and lower bounces. This is because I’ve chosen a fast website template. It might not be the most elegant, exquisite artwork and presentation, but it’s lightning fast.

You may need to pare down big photos, infographics, and WordPress plugins as they’re usually the problem.

Getting fast is important because in your ranking position, you need all the ranking assets and quality signals you can get. Pagespeed on mobile in particular means Google searchers won’t be waiting too long to download the page. Other important issues the page speed insights checker looks for are core metrics issues such as first contentful paint, time to interactive, and cumulative layout shift. These related to annoyances for users.

To resolve these issues, you are wiser to use a new website template. Hacking your current template requires a web developer who will charge you $80 an hour for fixes that likely won’t work. Don’t throw your money away, find a fast, Google AMP friendly template and hire a developer to customize it so it works perfectly. A lightning fast website will help (since Google uses Mobile sites for ranking purpose, not your desktop version).

Google amp comes with its own CDN network (fast servers located everywhere) and Google hosts the amp version of your web pages. It will be more likely to show up in Google’s special information boxes (e.g., Interesting web sites).

Tip 2. Improve Your Content

Thinking of hiring someone to write hundreds of blog posts? Don’t. Google wants people to slow down and take their time to produce really good content. Therefore, hiring an expert SEO/copywriter with proven skill in producing epic content is called for.

Creating exciting content that reflects your business as the top brand. People engage with the top brand’s content and they’re more willing to share posts and link to those pages.

Tip 3:  Build Cornerstone Content

Cornerstone content is your core, more important content pieces, the one’s people will read most (on topic) and share on social, and will rank on Google, Bing, and Duckduckgo. In general, more of the links in your site and from other websites will point to these pages.

Ensure this content is well planned to be coherent, valuable, engaging and provide a sequential user experience. Gaps in the content can cause people to leave, and too much SEO chit chat can make it less readable. Google’s algorithm can pick up this dissonance in your copywriting. Spend lots of time editing your epic content to make it really impressive for readers.

Add photos, illustrations and even videos to increase the visual and entertainment quality of it.

Link out from your cornerstone content to other key pages you’d like to boost. Try to link to topically relevant pages, because Google suppresses ranking power to unrelated content. A big part of advanced SEO services is planning and wiring the linking between pages.

Tip 4: Create Sharable Downloadable Content

If attracting links from other websites is critical to rankings, then you must give your followers and fans something impressive to share and post on their webpages and social sites. Video is one such content type that can provide SEO value simply because it’s sharable and can reach a lot of people.

Infographics used to be very popular, and still can be effective if done well. You should create lots of variations. If thousands of people download your infographic and link to your site, Google may penalize you. Once an infographic is very popular, end distribution, and create another unique one. The best strategy is always uniqueness.

Tip 5: Focus on Your Brand and Value Proposition

If your brand promise is irrelevant or low quality, then people don’t understand why they would support it. Ensure you understand via a digital marketing audit, why customers want your product/service. Know what your brand needs to be and achieve in terms of communicating high quality, key benefits, total value, and how it compares well to top competitor’s weaknesses.

Consumers want the market leader as their preferred brand, so your brand messaging must convey why your product/service is a better alternative.

You may not not know it, but a weak brand might be the reason you lack rankings and low conversion rate. Don’t blame it all on poor quality, amateur SEO. In the end, people buy your brand and why you do what you do. There’s lots of opportunity to show you care and appreciate customers than the big, cold hearted corporations.

Tip 6: Think Strategic – Advanced Strategies Work

What is the real purpose of your pages? How well do they actually contribute to your brand picture and informing people who visit your site? Advanced SEOs are strategists because this is where business people are weakest. People pleasers and creative people especially are broad minded and affable, and unfortunately may not be able to build the laser focused path to purchase.

It’s wise to delve into military style marketing strategy and understand the battlefield goals your content must achieve. Your content too has a keyword mission and the better it’s weaved into your content and linking, the power the message Google and Bing receive about it’s relevance to keyword searches. And advanced SEO strategist can help you utilize semantics to funnel more ranking power through your links.

Pick your top ten keywords, and perhaps initially focus more on those that you can compete on. It may be a long time before you can challenge the top sites for the best phrases. However, top search engine optimization techniques can give you a good shot at it.

Use flow charts on paper, to plot out how you intend to master keyword rankings. This helps you get focused on what content will support your rankings and find content gaps.

Tip 7: Use SEO Software Tools

Advanced SEOs don’t use SEO software frequently, but for certain tasks its very necessary. Tasks where SEO software is very helpful:

• keyword research
• finding content gaps
• analyzing competitors top performing content
• finding competitors top performing social posts
• analyzing changes to competitors content after ranking changes

Competitive and performance intelligence is important to high level SEO. Ahrefs content explorer is a handy tool to help you find effective, on topic content that has performed well. Definitely head on to ahrefs.com and try out their excellent SEO software tools.

Tip 8:  Don’t Play the Spam Guitar

Spamming search engines using low quality tactics is unwise. Google and Bing detect it and may over punish you for it. Buying guest post or sponsorship links, misrepresenting your actual content, over-optimizing with too many keywords, and getting links from low quality sites can stop you from entering the top ten rankings.

Google’s system can see when you’re trying too hard and they know the spam guitar music when they hear it.

Tip 9: Review your Stats in Google Webmaster Console

Open a Google account and use the Google webmaster console dashboard. It gives you a daily running report on your rankings, impressions and clickthroughs.

Using the advanced keyword tool, you can check specific keyword phrase rankings and rankings involving a keyword phrase, or searches involving a general keyword or phrase. For instance, your ranking for “hotels in San Diego” might be sinking while overall, your rankings, impressions and clicks on other phrases involving hotels might rising.

Take note of your rankings rise and fall through the days and weeks and you’ll better understand why you lost rankings in a core algorithm update. There are other analytics tools, and ultimately, it’s your content funnel path software that will generate the greatest value.

Tip 10: Use a Social Sharing Widget.

Social Warfare or Shareaholic are two social sharing plugins that encourage your visitors to share your content.  The ribbon bar you see on this page is an example of it which encourages visitors to share this post on social media.  This in turn may lead to new backlinks from websites. Ensure you’re posting on your own social accounts at the optimal time where they’ll be seen by customers. Be selective about timing.

Monitor the Results of your SEO Hacks

You’re on your way to make the most important changes to improve your search engine rankings. Monitor your rankings using ahrefs SEO software and keep reviewing what’s working for your competitors.

Learn more about high level SEO, and how you can use elite level strategy to boost your results. Also, understand the relationship between content quality, user experience, and conversion process on your Google/Bing rankings. They do look at content engagement and whether users are getting a useful experience on your site.

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