With the advancement in technology and the rapidly shifting digital world, SEO techniques are evolving continuously. Many times, you might not even get to know that the methods have been updated. The hacks that would have got you a front-page ranking in 2018 or 2019 might have become obsolete now. If you are still using them for your website, they can hurt the ranking of your website. Some of these outdated hacks may even get you a penalty from Google. Thus, you need to remain on top of your SEO game.
After consulting with several guest post service experts, we have listed the best-advanced SEO techniques 2020 that will help you in ranking better on search engines and ultimately boost your organic traffic.
1. Understand What the Target Audience is Looking For
You should also research and find out about what the target audience is talking about and the platforms that they are using. Also, consider how you can connect with your target audience. This would help you in formulating an effective SEO strategy.
After you have a good idea about what the target audience wants, just change your SEO strategies accordingly. If the customers are talking about some specific product, you can review it in your blog post. Just try to understand and adapt to the customer’s needs. You can also read the comments that the users post to see which ones are more popular among your audience. While writing for a guest post service, make sure to keep in mind the audience of that website.
2. Optimize the Content for Voice Searches
In the year 2016, Google had revealed that more than 20% of the searches were done through voice. The number is expected to rise with time as more and more people are getting to access the internet across the globe. According to a survey done by Gartner, more than 30% of web browsing would be done through voice searches by the end of 2020. This is also thanks to certain products such as Google Home and Amazon Echo, which have made our lives easier.
The world has already started shifting to voice-based searches. For staying at the top, one needs to tailor the content as well as SEO techniques. Different people tend to express themselves differently when they speak and write. If you are conducting a voice-based search, the content has to be tailored accordingly. A website also needs to be mobile-friendly to rank at the top with voice-based searches. This is because most of the voice-based queries come from mobile devices.
Additionally, more than 70% of the requests made on Google Assistant are made in a conversational tone, and they are not focused on keywords. Voice-based searches generally use long keywords. For example, people are likely to search for “Price of Rome to Paris flight” instead of “Rome-Paris flights” for voice-based searches.
Many voice-based searches also come in the form of questions of What/Why/How/Where. Hence, the content should focus on addressing such questions. You should also optimize the content for conversational keywords.
3. Develop Video Content
It is said that content is king. If this is so, then video content is here to rule the digital world. According to a survey by Cisco, traffic through videos is expected to be more than 82% of the whole consumer Internet traffic by the end of 2021. This popularity of video-based content is not exactly surprising. This is because video content has more retention rate than content that is textual.
However, it is essential to understand how video content is related to SEO techniques in digital marketing. The main reason is that today Google features videos as a part of the results to a user’s search queries. Such videos are mostly how-to videos, which can be seen on the SERP directly. For getting the most out of an SEO strategy, it is important to produce more content that is video related. Additionally, you also need to ensure that you use the correct keywords in the meta descriptions and titles.
4. Update Old Content Regularly
For making the most out of the content, you should go through the old blog posts regularly. This is because, in these old blogs, you might find topics that are still relevant. Taking an example, suppose you had written about the best SEO techniques three years back. Since then, search engines such as Google have announced some major changes in their algorithms. Thus, you would have to update this article according to the latest techniques.
This way, instead of writing a whole new article, one can add more information to the existing article and make it valuable. You should also update the title or the headline so that it becomes suitable according to the latest trends. It is also advisable to edit the article copy and optimize it to make it SEO-friendly.
This particular SEO technique is a fantastic way to create more content in a limited time. It can also help the blog posts in reaching a wider audience. In case you have some popular posts, there are good chances that you would be able to rank higher in the search results page.
5. Get High-Quality Backlinks
If a website that has a high Domain Authority creates a link back for your website, the credibility of your website will increase. High-quality backlinks can help website owners to gain an edge over the competitors. Having quality backlinks also sends a message to the search engines that your website is reliable. Hence, when a site has vast high-quality backlinks, there are good chances that your website would get a high ranking on the SERPs. This is one of the important SEO techniques in digital marketing, which directly affects a website’s score as well as ranking.
One can get high-quality backlinks through guest blogging as well as by collaborating with good social media influencers. In some cases, other websites might create a link back to your site without consulting with you. This is generally not a problem until it is a spammy link or a website that has questionable credentials.
In case your website has such link backs to your website, the domain authority of your site would be affected negatively. Thus, it is important to analyze the incoming links and remove any spammy links. You can use Google Search Console for finding the inbound links. After you have built a strong website, you may even decide to sell it and being flipping websites. Many entrepreneurs have successful businesses doing just that. For any existing website, here is where you can get the best domain appraisal.
6. Research the Keywords Properly
You should find out the relevant keywords before finalizing the topic of the blog posts. This way, it becomes easy to find out what people are searching for. Based on the relevant keywords, you can also make changes to the existing content for matching the user requirements. The website that has the right keywords has a better chance of ranking higher in search engines and thus getting more traffic. Certain SEO tools can help in keyword research. Some of these are Google Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer, and KWfinder.
Once you enter the target keyword, these tools would fetch the relevant keyword combinations. One can also check the volume of the search for the respective keyword. While listing the keywords, do not use generic terms. Words such as “camera” or “car” are considered broad and may not help with SEO. You should be more descriptive and specific while researching keywords.
The keywords should also be used organically in the content. One also needs to ensure that there is no keyword stuffing as it would harm the content more.
7. Optimize the Website for Mobile
The people across the globe are gradually shifting from desktops to smartphones. In the year 2018, more than 52.2% of the website traffic around the world was coming through smart devices. With this change, a website also needs to evolve. For appealing to mobile users, a website needs to have a mobile-friendly design. This makes it easier for the users to access the website on different screen sizes, and there is no need for the user to zoom in or zoom out.
While a responsive and effective mobile-friendly design is suitable for the users, it can also affect the search engine rankings. Most Google users access the internet using mobile devices. Hence. It has introduced the concept of mobile-first indexing, which means Google prefers the websites that have been optimized for mobile devices. This SEO technique is quite useful if you want to rank high on search engines and want to attract more traffic to your website.
8. Analyze the Website’s SEO
One of the best search engine optimization techniques is to analyze a website thoroughly. You should take out some time to understand the pain points of your customers and identify the improvement areas. Conducting SEO analysis of your site regularly and timely can help a website in staying ahead of the competition. You can conduct an SEO audit to get an insight into the current status of a website. This particular SEO technique might not sound advanced. Still, it is an important one and ends to be overlooked by many.
The page titles, spam scores, descriptions as well as the page speed are some things that can get overlooked. Conducting an SEO audit would help you in evaluating your website performance while helping you set goals for your website. There are specific SEO tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Pro Rank Tracker that can help in simplifying the process for your website. All one needs to do is enter the website URL. After that, these tools would send you a detailed report about the website’s performance.
9. Make use of Internal Links
The ultimate goal of a website is not to get a user to the homepage of the website. If you want a user to spend some time on a website and read it thoroughly, you can achieve this goal by linking the articles internally. When you link the content internally, the website, as well as the content structure, becomes more organized.
With such an SEO technique, you would be able to ensure that the web spiders of search engines can crawl through the content easily. This way, your old blog posts would also get more traffic.
10. Improve the Loading Speed of the Website
The loading speed of the website is the time taken by a user to get to your site after he or she clicks on it. If this time is too long, it can turn away potential customers and drive users towards your competitors. Even search engines view this as a red flag. The page loading speed is a crucial metric that impacts the SEO of the website. It is also one of the top-ranking factors on Google.
In the year 2018, it was announced by Google that the loading speed of a web page was an important ranking factor for even mobile searches. Google also released data that claimed that 53% of its users leave a mobile site if the site takes more than 3 seconds for loading. For improving the loading speed of the page, one needs to analyze the different factors that might be making the pages slow. After that, you need to address those factors one by one.
For getting a better insight, one should start by testing the page speed of the website with the help of tools such as PageSpeed Insights by Google. If you are looking for personalized reports, tools such as TestMySite and Lighthouse can be used.
11. Upload the Content on Social Media
One should not rely only on the website for gaining credibility or traffic. It is also essential to build an excellent social media presence. The best social media platforms that can be used are Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest. But if you want to rank higher and get more traffic, you need to look beyond building authority and improving the search rankings.
Slideshare, Quora as well as Medium are some great platforms for reaching out to the target audience through some good-quality content. You can also develop the visibility of the brand as well as creating awareness about your business. This SEO technique would also help in building a following and generating a higher number of leads.
12. Use Better and Catchy Headlines
The main objective of writing a blog post is not limited to engaging customers. Still, it also includes ranking the website higher on search engines. This can be done by using the right keywords to enable search engines to find your website or blog easily. If you stuff the headlines with keywords, it might seem robotic. To find the right balance between better rankings and creativity, one needs to write different versions of a headline.
Also, for making the headline SEO-friendly, you need to rework on it and also include relevant keywords. Through this process, you would become appealing not only to the search engines but also to the social media audience. You should also double-check the headline and make it enticing enough for the users. Although keywords give visibility to a website, audience engagement cannot be ignored entirely.
Conclusion
Every website owner or blogger wants to enhance their search engine rankings and ultimately get more traffic. For this, one needs the right SEO techniques to improve and optimize the website. You need to keep up with the changing and latest trends of the SEO world to stay ahead. The above SEO techniques 2020 would give you the required exposure and help you in increasing the search traffic to your website.
About the Author
Akash has 5+ years of experience and qualified #SEOprofessional with having robust SEO strategies to develop #SEOcampaigns to achieve the desired goals. Currently, he is associated with Stan ventures as Senior SEO Strategist. For more Connect with him on Twiiter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Email for more information.
