Scaling the Search Engine Result Page  

You might know the basics of optimizing your website for search engines, but today knowing the basics isn’t enough. Competition on the Internet is intense and gaining rank organically is difficult if you’re not exactly sure what you’re doing. Paid search marketing is one way to drive traffic to your site while you develop its organic ranking; but when you stop paying, you stop seeing results. Here are a few lesser-known SEO tips to help your website gain rank organically; they might not produce incredible results overnight, but they are an excellent first step in ranking higher on search engine results without paying for ads. 


1. Keywords – Don’t be Afraid of Getting Creative

If you’ve been producing content for a while, you might have a bit of crossover with your keywords. However, Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner aren’t your only option for finding terms. If you’re having trouble, try using other sources to find new and exciting keywords around which to build your content. Sites like Reddit, and Wikipedia can be used to discover keyword options you might have passed over or not considered.

Another way to improve your keyword selection and ranking is to use LSI keywords. LSI keywords are semantically-related terms to your keyword. Be careful, they’re not necessarily synonyms of your term because they have to take into account the context of your keyword. For example, suppose your keyword was “Bee” because you were writing a piece of content about DreamWorks’ 2007 film titled “The Bee Movie”.

Good LSI keywords would be “Bee Movie”, “DreamWorks” or perhaps “animated films,”, instead of a synonym like “insect” or “bumble bee.” LSI keywords help give context to your main keyword to make sure you’re only competing for searches that are connected to your subject. Here’s a handy tool to help find LSI matches for your keywords.




2. Build Your Website for Success

To help each page of your website stand out, it’s important to make sure each webpage has its own unique title. Try to keep your URL’s under fifty characters and test out using your keywords to build the URL (example.com/my-exact-keyword). Another good tip is to create compelling metadescription tags – Google will sometimes pull these to use as snippets on search engine results pages.

Additionally, it’s a good idea to make sure you have privacy and terms pages that are easily found on your site. This can help you stand out from illegitimate sources and lend your site more authority. This might not have a direct correlation to higher rankings with Google, but is always an effective way to build trust with potential customers and leads.



3. Make Social Media Work for You

Hopefully by now your company knows the power and value of social media and is using it in your marketing. However simply running accounts on different platforms doesn’t mean you’re truly optimizing your social media presence and the ways it can help your website. First, make sure your social share buttons are easy to find and use. Generally, it’s a good idea to have links to all the platforms you use and have the share buttons at the top of each webpage or as moving links that follow the website visitor’s mouse.


It can also be very helpful to develop a posting schedule for your social media to ensure the greatest interaction and reach. Most of the various social media platforms have data regarding the optimal time to post and what days content reaches the most users. Don’t be afraid to try out a few different times and days and find which works best for your content. Depending on the audience you wish to reach, your peak times and days might vary.



4. Use Internal and External Links to Help Legitimize your Content

Links are your friend so don’t be afraid to use them! Embedding internal and external links in your content is a wonderful tactic. By linking to your own content internally, you create another path for a visitor to stay interested and engaged in your brand. On the other hand, linking to outside content is a good way to legitimize and strengthen your presence in the eyes of readers and Google. Linking to influencers or trusted figures in your industry will not only lend your own site authority, but can also help build relationships with other brands and inspire them to link back to your content as well. Linking your content, and in turn encouraging others to link to your content improves your ranking and increases the likelihood that consumers will find and absorb the content on your website




5. Make Your Content Appealing

The importance of quality content cannot be overstated. It might seem like tired advice but relevant and appealing content is invaluable to a digital marketer’s campaign. Research shows that articles over one-thousand words generally perform better than their competition, and in-depth pieces generally outperformed ones that only skimmed the surface.

Another good practice is to create a schedule to re-launch older content. Hubspot found that by re-publishing content they’ve more than doubled the number of monthly leads generated by the old posts they’ve optimized. They also increased the number of monthly organic search views of old posts by an average of 106%. Good content can take a while to produce so don’t be afraid to use what you’ve got. Sometimes it might take a little bit of editing, but it is certainly less time consuming than creating new content entirely. So focus on creating solid, in-depth content, and repost as you wish.


If you follow these SEO tips, your website can begin to gain rank organically on search engine results pages. It may take time to implement these best practices, but the results are rewarding and well worth the effort.