It has always been a challenge to boost any website on the SERP.
The Internet suggests tons of pieces of advice on this. However, you can never know what SEO strategy would work for one hundred percent.
What’s more important, you can’t waste your time experimenting with the strategies at your own risk and peril. Competition doesn’t wait and Google can penalize your site if you’re using some shady SEO tactics.
Therefore, you need validated SEO methods that could help your site for sure.
In this post, you will find 8 fast and actionable SEO tactics that work like a charm.
Let’s cut to the chase!
- Use internal links to power up important pages
If you want to improve the performance of your site’s pages in Google, you should use internal linking.
Internal links are important according to these two reasons:
- These links help the flow of PageRank on your site (PageRank is one of Google’s ranking factors)
- Webmasters avoid placing links that redirect to your transactional pages. Thus, you can acquire links to your informational content and place internal links to the transactional pages (this is called a “middleman method”
How does it work?
First and foremost, you create a list of the pages that bring you money. These pages are product, category, and landing ones.
Then, explore internal linking opportunities that would be relevant contextually. To find these pages you can use the “site:” Google search operator. For instance, you want to add some internal links to a video chat plugin:
In this case, you can add an internal link within one blog post only.
Run this process and boost your “money” pages with internal links.
- Don’t forget to install a caching plugin
Page speed is important. No one likes to wait while your pages are loading. Eventually, people leave your site. It hurts your overall business strategy.
To improve your site’s speed you should install a caching plugin. This plugin helps store temporary copies of files and get them delivered to website visitors faster.
- Explore lost links and reclaim them
Any page has its life span. In other words, some pages on your site may be dead. They can’t rank. Nevertheless, these pages may include links. These links become lost and should be fixed.
How to do this?
Site Explorer tool from Ahrefs will help explore these links with their SEO stats. Go to the “Best by links” report and set the “HTTP code” filter to “404 not found”:
Review the pages and get the broken links reclaimed.
- Find top-ranking pages and optimize their title tags
Title optimization is not critically important but you should do it for top-ranking pages. A compelling title tag for your top-ranking page provides more chances that the users will click the URL.
To find these pages you can review the “Organic keywords” report available on Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. Just copy/paste your website domain and set the “Position” filter to 2-5:
Review the pages and figure out which of them require a title tag optimization.
To make sure the title tags look great, here are a few tips:
- Use power words (these words induce emotions)
- Include parentheses
- Add some sort of curiosity (but don’t confuse it with clickbait)
Use these simple tips. It prevents you from using any SEO content writing service or asking the help of a professional content writer.
- Chase for the featured snippets
Featured snippets are a gem of the SERP. They stand above a #1 position on Google. And your pages can be there as well.
How to do this?
First, identify keywords with decent search volume where your pages currently rank in the SERP. Plus, Google must already show a featured snippet.
To find these keywords go to the “Organic search” report of Site Explorer tool. Set the “Position” filter to 1-10. Afterwards, apply the next filter “SERP features” and click the “Where target doesn’t rank” tab:
Skim through the list and find the opportunities where you can get a “featured snippet” position.
Your next step is to prepare information for the featured snippet. For example, you have a piece of content that covers the topic related to SEO for affiliate marketing.
You can see that the featured snippet for this request includes the definition of affiliate marketing SEO. Hence, by adding this definition to your content you may win the featured snippet as well.
- Update outdated content
Sometimes it is enough to update your old content to boost its rankings. You can do this by filling content gaps.
Content gaps are keywords that your competing pages rank for but your – do not. What’s more important, these gaps may be important subtopics you haven’t covered in your content.
How to find content gaps?
You can use Content Gap tool for this purpose. Just grab a few competitor’s pages and copy/paste them + add the URL of the post you want to boost.
For example, you have an old post on automation testing. Now, review the keywords and figure out which ones your content misses.
- Borrow content ideas from your competitors
Keyword research allows you to explore target keywords related to your business. Some of the keywords are hard to rank and the others – are easy.
How to find these keywords?
Go to the “Matching terms” report available in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool. Set the Keyword Difficulty filter to 10 (maximum.)
For example, you want to cover a topic related to personalization trends. Your target keyword is “personalization” and you need to figure out low-hanging fruits for your content.
Review the opportunities and choose those keywords that are relevant to the topic.
- Explore guest post opportunities
Guest blogging is one of the most legitimate ways to build links, promote your business, and raise awareness. That’s why any marketing team hires content writers who would write guest posts to get them live across third-party blogs.
However, there is always a challenge to find good guest post opportunities.
Likely, there is a simple solution for this.
Use a search request like “[niche] + write for us” in Google to see a list of sites related to your business that accept guest contributors
Once you have a list of blogs, review them carefully. Then, read guest post guidelines. It helps you know the audience of the site and what topics would be preferable to cover.
For example, if you stumble upon a marketing-related site that accepts guest posts, it may be interested in a certain direction of marketing, like SEO. In this case, the guidelines demand topics around SEO solely.
In other words, it won’t make any sense to pitch topics that are way off SEO like content writing tips, conversation intelligence, sales-related aspects, etc.
To Sum Up
SEO is many-sided. There are lots of tactics that can perform magic in terms of optimization.
Nevertheless, it is far better to apply tried and tested SEO tactics.
These eight SEO tactics work like a charm. Don’t shy away from using them in practice.
If you think the post lacks more tips on SEO, feel free to share your ideas in the comments.
