When it comes to ranking websites, most of the time we tend to focus more on link building or things like GMB profile development. But as important as those things remain, search engines are becoming more complex with the ranking factors they look for.
Understanding your user’s intent is starting to become the most important step in search engine development. And why wouldn’t it be? Searchers are the prime reason why search engines and businesses do what they do.
The website says a lot about the business it represents. Designing a great website is a crucial SEO factor. Keep in mind that searchers are impatient. There are tons of other sites they can click on so if they clicked on your site and it takes too long to load, the last thing they would do is wait. You would know as an internet user as well.
Following technical SEO strategies means nothing if your website is not at its finest.
1. Content
Surely, content is a necessity on a website. But it is not enough to rank in the keyword search term you are targeting. How can you make sure that your content generates traffic to your site?
The Relevance of Content to User’s Intent
As I mentioned above, understanding your user’s concern and intent means a lot in search engine development.
In fact, Google recently optimized its algorithm to better understand searcher’s intent. This way, Google can offer more of what the users need in their search listings. So as a website owner seeking a high SEO ranking, you should also start taking action base on this idea.
Creating content that users actually need and are helpful is what you should always keep in mind. Before writing, ask yourself. “Will this benefit them?” “What do they want?” What do they need to know?” ”How will this help them?”
Content relevance to a user’s intent is arguably the most important on-site SEO factor that can boost your search ranking performance. Because if your content is not relevant to a search, does it even matter?
Things to Remember
- See what type of content is ranking in your target keywords and base your content on that.
- Understand the intent of your search keywords.
- Study the semantic similarities of the keywords and write your content accordingly to those terms.
Long-Form Content
Long-form or deep content is more preferable by users and search engines. According to the study of HubSpot, a content that is between 2, 500 to 2, 500 words is more likely to receive most of the organic traffic to their site.
The longer your content is the more information you can include and searchers like that.
Add complexity to your blog post. Providing various points of view on a topic can help you create longer and deeper content. Don’t limit your content to the topic itself. Check different angles that surround the topic. Offer new perspectives. It does not only prolong your post but also makes it informative, which is what you should always aim for when writing content.
Become the master of your topic. Through that, you can be a great help to your industry and audience and in return, that will serve as a staircase for your site to rank higher.
Organize Your Content
The rise of content relevance does not mean that SEO tags are something you should not be concerned of. Improving your title tags and header tags can help with many things.
The tags can help clarify the intent of your content. It also helps you organize your content allowing your audience and search engines have an easy read.
2. User Engagement
Designing your website for searchers require a different perspective. Start allowing your site to be engaging for your audience.
Pages Per Session Metric
The Pages Per Session metric is a feature available on Google Analytics that enables you to see the number of pages the user views before leaving your site. Google Analytics also provides Average Session Duration which indicates how long searchers stay on your website.
From these two features, you can be able to see how engaging and interactive your site actually is. So make sure to check your Google Analytics from time to time so you can be able to analyze your website performance.
You’ll be able to discover issues that are hindering your high ranking and sales. This can also help you determine how helpful and engaging your content is. Most of the time, readers that check more than one blog post in your site mean you are doing something that good for their intent.
Things to Remember
- Determine your pages with high bounce rates and analyze what you can do to create a longer session duration.
- Make you site interactive by adding call-to-action on your pages.
- Provide related reading materials by interlinking them, through this you can add more navigation options.
What are Bounce Rates?
Bounce rates indicated the visitors of your site that navigate away from your site after viewing just one page. So in a more direct manner, it shows how users are satisfied with your landing page.
Having high bounce rates can be a good thing for e-commerce pages because it could mean that the visitor already saw what they were looking for on that landing page. But what about other kinds of websites, especially blog post pages?
Things to Remember
- Have a compelling story.
- Get rid of pop up advertisements. It annoys them, you would know.
- Work on your page load time.
Make your landing page suitable for the search query.
Click-Through Rate
The CTR or click-through rate could indicate that your message is not relevant for a number of users and could also indicate that your meta description or title tag is not compelling enough.
Here are some tips on how to optimize your CTR
- Include the exact keyword to your title and meta description.
- Arrange your tags and make sure that they are in a proper length.
- Add a benefit to clicking on your site.
3. Technical Support
The technical structure of a site impacts the user’s engagement and SEO ranking. You can think of technical support as a foundation of your home filled with content.
Security
It’s pretty much a requirement to have a secure HTTPS website because it helps ensure the security of transactions in your website. It is also worth mentioning that is it a factor in ranking in Google’s search listings.
According to Search Engine Journal, “The number one technical error we find on clients sites is linking to mixed content or HTTP pages. This can occur during an SSL migration and arise from a number of causes.”
SEJ, also provided tips on optimizing HTTPS issues:
- Contact your hosting provider for any issues that persist with SSL certification and implementation.
- Run a crawl of your website using Screaming Frog to identify mixed content errors.
- Place sitemaps in your robots.txt file independent of any user-agent commands.
- Rewrite your .htaccess file to redirect all website traffic to a specific domain using the HTTPS URL.
Clean URLs
A content that links to broken and redirected pages is something that you wouldn’t want for your site. It affects indexation as well as the speed of your website. You will want to clear URL structures with status 200 codes.
Here are some tips on how to optimize your URLs:
- Add 301 redirects on broken pages to send users to a more relevant page.
- Arrange custom 404 pages with URLs to redirect users to relevant pages.
- Ask your web host provider for any errors affecting your URLs.
4. Interlinking
Interlinking is one of the most common SEO strategies that can be really helpful and there is a reason why it is commonly used. It helps with the content, crawlability, link building and many more.
But as your website grows older maintaining a good interlinking structure can be a real challenge.
Deep Links
Link the orphaned pages you have on your site from a higher level category page to pass authority from one page to the other and also ensure that page gets indexed. By building a good interlinking structure allows lower pages on your site to get help from the higher pages that you have.
This can also provide your users with more information on the topic they are currently looking at. It creates a longer page session duration.
Start interlinking by using links strategically within your content to offer more reading content.
Another way of organizing links within your website is by creating a well organized Topic Hierarchy. Your hierarchy should be designed in a top-down approach. Tags are also used to help organize and help readers understand the context of the topics.
5. Mobile Responsivity
We live in an age where having a mobile phone is an important part of our lives. Most people use their phones to search for websites and businesses. So when it comes to designing for a mobile-friendly site, you should take into consideration different dimensions of surfing on a mobile device.
You start optimizing the page speed by minifying the onsite resources.
The key guideline in mobile design is to specialize and simplify.
Conclusion
Achieving a higher ranking in search engine listings requires a wide point of view when it comes to SEO. You shouldn’t miss any step of the ladder to get to the top. It does not matter if you follow the most strategic step, as long as you forget to optimize every aspect of your website, it won’t matter.
Ready to work with a full-service digital marketing team? Contact us today and let us discuss you needs!
