I think you’ll agree with me when I say:
SEO is complicated, and it’s a continual moving feast. Making getting free traffic from Google hard.
Or is it? What’s the real story?
The honest truth is that as Google gets more sophisticated, SEO gets easier. What if I told you, you could dramatically boost your ranking by doing three simple things with each post?
As Google moves from ‘Content’ to ‘Context’, getting good rankings is more about what content works for the user, rather than stuffing keywords and building an army of low ranking backlinks.
Just tell me the tips already! Okay, so here are my 3 top tips to improve SEO.
Tip 1:
Change your URL structure if you have the default /date setting. If you look at this blog, there is no date in the URL, for example –> https://blog.creationagency.com/do-you-need-to-use-socialselling-the-infographic/
If we look at an IBM example –> https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2017/04/one-microservice-three-compute-options-cloud-foundry-container-openwhisk-choice/ you can see the post structure includes the date. in this case April 2017.
Google, trying to be natural, will look at that post and think it’s related to something happening in April 2017. So as we’re now in May, and in the flashiest of flashes we’ll be in 2018. So the post will be in terminal decline.
If this is you. Go change it now. Then come back for the next one.
Tip 2:
Improve your click through rate on each post. If your article has a higher CTR than the one above it, you go up. The important line here is your Title Tag. Ideally aiming for 6 word’s, but how can you improve CTR?
How about…
Publish your post, then write three tweets with your three best title tags you can think of. Ideally, boost those posts with a little budget (just to get the impression up in your right demographic – you don’t need to spend a lot), and see which post gets the best CTR. Then go back to your blog post and change your title tag to the winner.
Here is my example for this post
You can see the clear winner with 200% better engagement
Tip 3:
Seek to improve your dwell time. Google calls this a long click. If someone sees’s your link, clicks on it and then stays on the article or page for a while, Google can see that its the right article for the term, and you get boosted up. A short click, what we call a pogo click, tells Google that the content in that context wasn’t very good.
So…
Make your post relevant of course, but also think about the structure of the post. For example in this post, I’m using a technique called Agree, Promise, Preview in my intro, and breaking the content down into chunks, which should make it more appealing to read and keep you on the page longer.
The bottom line:
Good content is still king, building quality backlinks is important, and working on your onsite SEO is still something you need to do. But thinking about how Google would see your post in the context that you are promoting it is becoming increasing important.
Go try these things now. You may surprise yourself with the results.
