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The 17 Most Important SEO Tips for Higher Rankings

Brian Dean

by Brian Dean ยท Updated Jan. 10, 2020

The 17 Most Important SEO Tips for Higher Rankings

Today youโ€™re going to see 17 most important SEO tips that you need to know.

And these tips actually work.

In fact:

These SEO tips have helped me get #1 ranking for keywords like โ€œlink building toolsโ€:

SERP – "link building tools"

And โ€œEcommerce SEOโ€:

SERP – "ecommerce seo"

So whether youโ€™re a new to SEO, or a seasoned veteran, I hope you get a lot of value from the techniques in this post.

Here are the 17 most important SEO tips to follow when optimizing your website:

1. Use Keywords In The Right Places

You probably already know that you should add keywords to pages that you want to rank.

Use your target keyword in your content

But where you use your keywords is just as important than how many times you use them.

Specifically, you want to make sure that your keyword appears at least once in your pageโ€™s title tag.

Include your keyword in your title tag

Webpage URL:

Include your keyword once in your URL

And in the first 100 words of your content.

Include your keyword in the first 100 words of your page

For example, I have a page on my site thatโ€™s optimized around the keyword: โ€œcopywritingโ€.

And I made sure to add that exact term in those key places.

Keyword in URL, title and intro

If you want to get more advanced with your on-page SEO, I recommend checking out this video.

And once you finished with the video, check out the rest of the SEO tips in this post…

2. Keep Users On Your Site Longer

Hereโ€™s the truth:

Pogosticking can make or break your Google rankings.

So: what is pogosticking exactly?

Pogosticking is when a Google user clicks on your siteโ€ฆ

…then โ€œpogosticksโ€ back to the search results to find something that actually helps them.

Pogosticking

And when someone pogosticks, it sends a strong message to Google: โ€œI didnโ€™t like that result.โ€

Needless to say: if your site doesnโ€™t make users happy, Google will downrank you.

Downranking

The question is:

How do you keep users on your site longer?

Use lots of bullets and subheadings.

When your content is easy to read, people will spend more time on your site.

(It also stops them from hitting their โ€œbackโ€ button)

As it turns out, bullets and subheadings make your content MUCH easier to read:

Bullets and subheadings

Which leads us to our next tip…

3. Find โ€œSuggestโ€ Keywords

You probably already know that you can use Google Suggest to find long tail keywords:

Google Suggest example

But what you may not know is that you can use this same approach with OTHER search engines.

Like Wikipedia:

Wikipedia Suggest

YouTube:

YouTube Suggest

And yes, even Bing:

Bing Suggest

4. Delete Zombie Pages

Zombie pages are pages on your site that donโ€™t bring in any traffic.

Theyโ€™re just sorta…there.

And when you delete Zombie Pages, you can get higher rankings and more Google traffic.

In fact:

One ecommerce site saw a 31% boost in search engine traffic (not to mention a 28% increase in revenue) when they โ€œprunedโ€ 11k product pages.

Google Analytics – Screenshot of traffic

And theyโ€™re not alone.

Proven.com saw their organic search traffic increase by 88.3% after deleting 40 thousand Zombie Pages from their site:

Proven traffic increase

Why does this strategy work?

Well, Google doesnโ€™t want to rank sites that are bloated with thin, low-quality content.

In fact:

Google recently stated that they prefer โ€œone stronger page versus many smaller pagesโ€:

Google prefers one stronger page

This is something I pay A LOT of attention to here at Backlinko.

To date, Iโ€™ve only published 44 posts on this blog.

Backlinko – Published posts

And those 44 posts generate 120k+ search engine visits per month.

Backlinko – Monthly users

5. Do An Industry Study

Whatโ€™s the best way to get backlinks from authority blogs and news sites in your niche?

An industry study.

In fact, BuzzSumo found that publishing an industry study can bring you a ton of traffic, social media shares, and mentions in the press.

BuzzSumo – Industry study benefits

A few months back I noticed that lots of SEO blogs were talking about voice search.

Voice search is a popular topic

But I also noticed that these posts gave out SEO tips for voice searchโ€ฆ without any data or research to back them up.

So we decided to do the first large-scale voice search SEO study.

Voice search study

How did this content do?

Even though this post is less than a year old, itโ€™s already generated over 900 backlinks.

Voice Search SEO – Backlinks – Ahrefs

The best part?

I didn’t need to do a ton of outreach to get these links.

Because my content provides bloggers and journalists with dataโ€ฆ

Voice search data

…they reference (and link to) my content automatically.

Voice search study – Referenced

Sweet!

Thereโ€™s a lot more to on-page SEO than: โ€œmake sure to include your keyword a few times on your page.โ€

(Although thatโ€™s important too).

To rank in Google today, you also need to add synonyms and other related keywords in your content.

Why?

Something called Google Hummingbird.

Search Engine Land – Hummingbird

Googleโ€™s Hummingbird update allows Google to go beyond simple keywords. Instead, they try to understand the topic of your page.

Keyword bubble

(Kind of like how a human would)

So:

How do you optimize your content for Hummingbird?

Include variations of your main keyword in your content.

To do that, just search for your target keyword in Googleโ€ฆ

"paleo diet" Google search

…and scroll down to the bottom of the search results.

"paleo diet" bottom of SERPs

Add a few โ€œSearches related toโ€ฆโ€ terms to your content.

"paleo diet" related searches

7. Add Text to Infographics, Podcasts and Videos

Yes, visual content (like infographics and podcasts) are an awesome way to get traffic and backlinks.

But they have one big problem:

Google canโ€™t understand โ€™em!

Thatโ€™s why I recommend adding plenty of text to go along with your infographic, podcast or video.

For example, hereโ€™s an infographic that I published on my site earlier this year:

On-page SEO – Infographic

But I didnโ€™t stop there.

As you can see, I also added lots of high quality content underneath my infographic.

On-page SEO – Content under infographic

And this text content helped search engines understand what my infographic was all about.

8. Update Old Pages

Do you have a bunch of blog posts on your site collecting dust?

If so, you can probably improve your rankings by updating that post.

Let me show you how this works with a real life exampleโ€ฆ

A few months ago I noticed that this post from my blog wasnโ€™t performing as well as Iโ€™d hoped.

SEO Checklist – Old

Despite the fact that the content was really good…

…my page was bouncing between the first and second page for my target keyword: โ€œSEO Checklistโ€.

SEO Checklist – SERPs change

Not good.

So I decided to give this post a major update and upgrade.

Specifically, I added more external links to authority sites:

SEO Checklist – External links

I also organized the content into sections to make the steps easier to follow:

SEO Checklist – Contents

And wrote a new title and description:

SEO Checklist – SERPs

(Note: As long as you publish your updated content on the same URL, you donโ€™t need to worry about duplicate content)

And those 3 simple changes quickly shot my page up to the top of Google for my target keyword:

SEO Checklist – SERPs position

Which led to a BIG bump in that pageโ€™s search engine traffic:

SEO Checklist – Search engine traffic jump

9. Speed Up Your Website

Having a slow website can hurt your Google rankings. Googleโ€™s โ€œSpeed Updateโ€ specifically downranks pages that load slowly on mobile devices.

Page speed in mobile search

Which is why you want to eliminate anything that slows down your page speed.

Well, we recently ran a large-scale page speed study.

Backlinko – Page Speed Stats post

And we found that, in many cases, using a CDN actually hurts loading speed.

Use of CDN correlates with worse desktop page speed

So if you do use a CDN, I recommend testing your website speed with it turned on and off.

We also discovered that 3rd party scripts (like Facebookโ€™s pixel) slows things down significantly.

Third-party scripts negatively impact page load times

You can see all of the 3rd party scripts on your site using a tool like BuiltWith.com.

Builtwith report for Backlinko

And if you find any scripts that arenโ€™t super important, delete them.

10. Use the Google Search Console

This is one of my favorite SEO tips.

Hereโ€™s how it works:

First, login to the Google Search Console.

And head over to the Performance Report:

Google Search Console – Performance report

Next, hit โ€œPagesโ€:

Google Search Console – Performance report pages

This will show you which pages bring you the most traffic.

Google Search Console – Performance report pages close

Hereโ€™s where things get interesting:

If you click on one of the pages, you can see all of the keywords that page already ranks for.

Google Search Console – "increase website traffic" keywords

And if you dig deep, youโ€™ll find LOTS of keywords that you didnโ€™t even know you were ranking for.

For example, when I ran this report on this page from my site, I found 3 keywords that I had no clue I was ranking for.

Three surprise keywords

Why is this important?

Well, if Iโ€™m ranking for these 3 keywords by accident, imagine if I actually tried!

So to get more traffic from those search queries, Iโ€™d just need to sprinkle those terms into my post.

And now that Google sees those keywords in my content, theyโ€™re probably going to boost my rankings for those search terms.

Sprinkled keywords

Easy peasy.

11. Create Content Around Shoulder Niches

Publishing high-quality content is one of the most important SEO tips.

But what if youโ€™re in a so-called โ€œboringโ€ niche? Isnโ€™t it impossible to create content that people will link to or share on social media?

Fortunately not..

All you need to do is create content around โ€œShoulder Nichesโ€.

Shoulder Niches are closely-related topics that you can easily create awesome content around.

For example, Mike Bonadio used Shoulder Niches to boost his clientโ€™s organic traffic by 15%:

Mike Bonadio client traffic increase

How did he do it?

Well, Mike was in a niche that couldnโ€™t be more boring: pest control.

Now, you might be wondering:

โ€œHow do you create an interesting piece of content about pest control?โ€

You donโ€™t.

Instead, go after closely-related niches that are actually interesting.

(In other words: โ€œShoulder Nichesโ€)

In fact, thatโ€™s what Mike did:

Mike Bonadio shoulder niches

And this ultimately led him to create an excellent infographic on the related topic of: โ€œpest control for gardenersโ€.

infographic animated gif

Because Mikeโ€™s infographic got featured on a handful of authority blogsโ€ฆ

descriptive anchor text

…his clientโ€™s traffic skyrocketed:

Google Analytics referral traffic

12. Get Backlinks From Your Visual Assets

In a perfect world, website owners would link back to you when they use your chart, visualization, or infographic.

But we donโ€™t live in a perfect world ?

On the bright side, Iโ€™ve found that most people are happy to link to you when given a friendly nudge.

So if you tend to publish a lot of visual content, spend an afternoon executing this technique.

And I can almost guarantee that youโ€™ll come away with a handful of backlinks.

Here are the exact steps:

First, find a visual asset on your site.

For example, hereโ€™s the on-page SEO infographic that I mentioned earlier:

On-page SEO – Infographic

Then, right click and โ€œcopy image addressโ€…

Copy image address

…and paste the filename into Google โ€œSearch by imageโ€.

Paste into search by image

And youโ€™ll get a complete list of sites that use your image.

All sites using an image

Now itโ€™s a matter of finding pages that used your image on their contentโ€ฆ but didnโ€™t link to you:

Infographic without link

Finally, send them a friendly email asking them to add a link to the original source (you).

Ask for infographic link

13. Create Branded Keywords

Guestographics.

The Moving Man Method.

The Content Upgrade.

These are all terms that I coined.

And because of that fact, I rank #1 in Google for all of them.

Guestographics – Examples

Thatโ€™s why I highly recommend creating your own terms.

How?

First, develop a strategy, technique, process or concept thatโ€™s unique to you.

This sounds hard.

But it really isnโ€™t.

All you need to do is take something that already existsโ€ฆ and add a twist.

For example, a while back I noticed that lots of people were building links from guest posting.

So I simply added a twist where you pitch an infographic instead of a traditional guest post.

Infographic pitch

Next, give it a name.

This is more of an art than a science.

But in general, you want the name to be:

  • Short
  • Easy to pronounce
  • Easy to remember
  • Unique
  • Descriptive

For example, when I started guest posting with infographics, I combined โ€œguest postingโ€ and โ€œinfographicsโ€ into one term: Guestographics.

Finally, get the word out.

This is key.

For your term to catch on, you need to promote it like crazy.

In my case, I published a case study of Guestographics in action.

Guestographics case study – Post

Then, a few months later, I published ANOTHER case study:

SEO Strategy – Post

I also made sure to mention โ€œGuestographicsโ€ in interviews:

Guestographics mention

It took a few months to catch on.

But before I knew it, LOTS of people were writing about Guestographics.

Guestographics examples

And whenever someone talks about that technique, they link to me ๐Ÿ™‚

Guestographics mention

14. Add โ€œWhat is Xโ€ Definitions to Blog Content

This is one of the most important SEO tips that people tend to overlook.

Hereโ€™s how it works:

When someone searches for a high-level term (like โ€œsearch engine optimizationโ€), theyโ€™re usually looking for a definition.

And as Ross Hudgens points out, results on the first page of Google for definition terms tend to answer the question: โ€œWhat is X?โ€.

For example:

If you do a search for โ€œinbound marketingโ€, 2 of the top 3 results answer the question: โ€œWhat is inbound marketing?:

"inbound marketing" SERPs

So if youโ€™re gunning for a definition keyword, make at least some of your content focused on answering the question: โ€œWhat is X?โ€.

Thatโ€™s why I always include a โ€œWhat is Xโ€ section whenever I target definition keywords:

What are backlinks

Youโ€™ve probably noticed more and more Featured Snippets in the SERPs:

Featured Snippets in the SERPs

And if youโ€™re like me, youโ€™re asking yourself: โ€œHow can I get my content in the Featured Snippet?โ€

Fortunately, thereโ€™s no need to guess.

SEMrush recently did a massive Featured Snippet study (they analyzed a whopping 80 million keywords).

Featured Snippet study

And they found that adding a Q&A section to your content works really well for grabbing the Featured Snippet spot.

For example:

This page on my site is optimized around the keyword โ€œChannel Descriptionโ€.

Channel Description – YouTube Marketing Hub

Like any good piece of content on this topic, it has lots of helpful tips on writing a YouTube channel description:

Channel Description – Helpful tips

But I also made sure to include โ€œSnippet Baitโ€ in the form of a short Q&A section:

Q & A section

And it worked!

"Channel description" Featured Snippet

Bottom line?

If you want to get your content to show up in the Featured Snippet spot, try โ€œSnippet Baitโ€.

16. Find More Guest Post Opportunities

Hereโ€™s a simple SEO tip that will help you find sites to guest post on.

First, find someone in your niche that tends to guest post a lot.

Larry Kim – Twitter

Second, grab their headshot (you can usually find this on their LinkedIn profile) and pop it into Googleโ€™s reverse image search.

Sujan Patel – Reverse Image Search

Voila! You can see everywhere theyโ€™ve guest posted:

Larry Kim – Guest posting

And you can use the same process to find interview opportunities (like podcasts).

In fact, podcasts might be the most underrated link building strategy on the planet.

Why?

Well, itโ€™s 10x easier to hop on a podcast than pitch, write, edit and publish a guest post.

And just like with a guest post, you get a sweet link back to your site (in the show notes):

Podcast backlink

Unfortunately, finding podcasts can be a chore.

That is, unless you use Google reverse image search:

Google Reverse Image Search “rand fishkin” example search

Bingo!

17. Improve Your Organic CTR

When you improve your organic click-through-rate more people will click on your site in the search results.

Clicking in SERPs

Which means you can get more trafficโ€ฆ without needing higher rankings.

When we recently analyzed millions of Google search results to learn more about Googleโ€™s CTR, we found that using question title tags significantly boosted CTR.

Question titles have a 14.1% higher organic CTR .vs. Non-question titles

So whenever it makes sense, I recommend using a question in your pageโ€™s title.

Hereโ€™s a real-life example:

Question in post title

Did I Miss Anything?

Now Iโ€™d like to hear from you:

Which strategy from todayโ€™s post are you going to try first?

Or maybe I didnโ€™t mention one of your favorite SEO tips.

Either way, let me know by leaving a comment below right now.

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