In the world of SEO, dominating the “Search Engine Result Pages (SERP)” is the major objective of every website and business owner. And this can be achieved using the right SEO techniques.
Despite widely held opinion, your website appearing on the subsequent pages of a user’s query results other than the first page does not mean that you don’t post quality content that is tailored for your audience’s interest.
Most times, it simply implies that the SEO industry is very competitive, and it is almost impossible for you to outsmart your competitors. But it’s not that impossible.
What do I do then? I know that this question must have been lingering in your mind by now. I know the feeling, but not to worry.
We’ve had the same thoughts and then came up with a list of SEO techniques that can help you to overcome this hurdle within the shortest possible time, once implemented correctly.
Let’s mention that there are various techniques you can use to outrank your competitors. These techniques can either be the “White Hat SEO Technique” or the “Black Hat SEO Technique.” But it’s preferable to use the White Hat method as the Black Hat method violates most search engine policies, including Google’s.
Applying these SEO techniques on your website and web contents will greatly improve your visibility, and enable you to see and reap the results by being ranked on the very first page of query searches.
Effective White Hat SEO Techniques That Can Help Your Website to Rank
Below are the lists of some White Hat SEO methods. It covers both the basic and advanced SEO techniques.
1. Citations
Citation is the mention of the name, phone number, and address of a local business online. It can be done on apps, websites, local business directories, and other social media platforms.
Citation is a technique that enables internet users to find local businesses, and it can impact local search engine rankings as well.
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing involves writing a high value content that provides fresh insights to your prospects.
Content marketing is an important SEO technique because it fulfills the demands of SEO.
Churning out fresh web content consistently, and inserting the appropriate keywords strategically throughout the content is one of the best ways to make your website rank on the first page of SERPs.
3. Guest Posts
Generally, a well-written guest post is a good SEO technique that you can use to generate leads to your website.
But you have to consider the type of platform you are making the post on, as well as the type of audience that the website develops content for.
Sharing guest posts on the wrong platform or to the wrong audience will not attract any traffic to your website, because the content wasn’t speaking to anybody directly.
Also, for the guest post method to be effective, you have to write in your area of expertise so that you won’t bore your readers with irrelevant content that doesn’t have good quality.
4. Improve User Experience on Your Website
When optimizing your website for SEO, you need to remember that you cannot get your ROI if users who visit your site cannot get satisfied after their visit.
If your website looks outdated, amateur, cluttered, or loads slowly, potential users who have already clicked on it will most likely bounce back to the SERPs and click on another site.
When this happens, you have lost a user who is a potential conversion and the bounce rate of those affected pages will increase.
You can improve your website’s user experience and boost your existing content in search engines by doing the following:
a. Writing simplified posts
As a person in the SEO industry, you must have been conversant with the phrase ‘formatting content for the web.’ If you want to increase your organic rankings, you have to take a step further by optimizing your content for easy readability.
You can do this by:
Writing quality content.
Using bullet points.
Strategic use of H1, H2, and H3 headings.
Using shorter paragraphs.
Attaching images or screenshots.
Making use of mixed sentence lengths.
b. Using bucket brigades
A bucket brigade is a copywriting technique that is designed and used to capture and keep the interest of a reader.
‘Bucket brigade’ as a phrase means a chain of people that passes buckets of water from one person to another to quench a fire.
But in the writing context, it is a series of words that can bridge an idea to the next one to keep the flow. And when you keep the flow, you have kept your reader’s interest.
Some examples of bucket brigade are:
General bucket brigades
Examples:
I know the feeling
Do I have your attention?
OK, I know what you are thinking, etc.
Introductory bucket brigades
Examples:
Have you wondered why?
Do you want to learn how to?
Imagine what it would be like… etc.
Content body bucket brigades
Examples:
Let me explain:
Let me show you how:
Let’s get started: etc.
Conclusion bucket brigades
Examples:
Let’s recap:
In a nutshell:
In short: etc.
c. Using the ‘inverted pyramid style of writing’.
This style of writing implies placing the most valuable information at the beginning of the article, with the less important ones appearing in the latter part of the text.
Using this technique will help readers who just scan articles to get what they want from the website as soon as the web page loads.
5. Optimize Your Website for Mobile
In recent times, the majority of searches and half of all the purchases made online have been done with mobile phones.
Statistics show that about 77% of Americans have a smartphone and that 79% of smartphone users have purchased a product online in the last six months using their mobile phones.
Also, 80% of people who shop in a physical store use a mobile phone inside the store to either compare prices, check product reviews, or find other store locations.
Looking at these statistics, you have seen the reason why you need to design the mobile version of your website so that visitors who view it with mobile phones can do so seamlessly.
Failure to do so means you’ll be losing a huge chunk of potential conversions that would have yielded you some ROI.
6. Write Longer Content
According to Backlinko’s SEO study, longer content tends to accumulate more backlinks, and that often leads to more traffic and better rankings of the website.
However, always writing long content for every blog post is not only time-consuming but intensive as well. They are not always necessary.
So, know the keywords or topics that need longer content and the ones that don’t need so much emphasis being laid on them.
But if you think that long posts are necessary, you can simply refresh some old content and add more words to them to make them longer, e.g. from 1,000 to 1,500 or 2,000 words.
7. Optimize Your Website for Voice Search
Statistics have it that 25% of U.S. adults own a smart speaker, and this number is expected to reach 55% by 2022.
Also, 2 in 5 adults use voice search once every day, and 25% of individuals between the ages of 16 to 24 make use of voice search on mobile. Additionally, voice commerce sales amounted to $1.8 billion last year and are predicted to reach $40 billion by 2022.
So optimizing your website for voice search is a step in the right direction which will bring more conversion for your SEO.
8. Measure Your SEO Performance
Analytics and reporting are two essential elements of SEO, and they are very important for the improvement of your marketing strategy.
You cannot make significant improvements without monitoring and reporting your discoveries regularly.
To do this, here are three basic tools you can use:
a. Google Search Console.
b. Data Studio
c. SEMrush
9. Don’t Overlook Technical SEO
The last on the list of these effective SEO techniques is that you should never overlook technical SEO. You could be working and getting everything right, but if your website isn’t technically sound, then its performance might be slow.
There are some advanced SEO techniques that you need to implement when it comes to technical SEO.
Some of them are:
a. Enabling ‘Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)’ for mobile.
b. Investing in some crawling software like botify, deep crawl, sitebulb, etc.
c. Making sure that every part of your website loads on HTTPS.
d. Fixing the “Page Not Found” 404 errors by redirecting URLs.
e. Correcting your semantic markups.
Black Hat SEO Techniques or bad SEO techniques
Black Hat SEO techniques are simply the disapproved practices that are prohibited in the SEO industry but are capable of increasing a page’s ranking in SERPs. They include:
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Content automation.
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Cloaking.
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Automated queries to Google.
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Hidden links or texts.
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Creating domains, pages, or sub-domains with duplicate content.
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Pages that contain viruses, malware, trojans, or ones that have malicious behavior like phishing.
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Article spinning.
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Keyword stuffing.
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Reporting a competitor (also known as negative SEO).
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Rich snippet markup system.
Since these methods are against the search engine’s terms of service, they can result in the banning of your site from other affiliate sites and the search engine as well. So you should deviate from making use of them.
In a nutshell:
These white hat SEO techniques will do your site a lot of good when you implement them the right way on your website.
If you are not an expert yet or you’ll find it difficult to use these strategies, you can hire the service of a competent SEO expert to help you run them on your site.
When you do this, you will see your website’s click-through rates (CTR), rankings, and engagement improve exponentially.
