If you manage a website or care at all about ranking well on Google, you’ll know about the constant SEO battle many of us face. Let’s be honest, SEO techniques from 10 years ago seem like child’s play compared to what you need to know today. But I’ll play devil’s advocate for a minute and remind everyone that it really is for the better. Google frequently professes that it has the user’s experience at the forefront of their decision making and by delivering high-quality, relevant content they meet this goal.
Improving your site for relevancy (keywords, freshness, or query intent) are more commonly known tactics. But, what about improving the quality of your pages and posts? Here are a few indicators and some suggestions for improvement.
Quality Indicators |
Tactics For Improvement |
|---|---|
| Grammar, spelling, depth | Hire a copy writer or editor. Or for DIYers, learn to write better. |
| Expertise, Authority, Trust | Call out your awards, certifications, news coverage, and use trust symbols (especially important if you conduct financial transactions online). Make it easy to contact you, and easy to find privacy policies, terms of service, and returns information. |
| PageRank from links | Build high-quality links. There are thousands of great articles out there about it. |
| Testimonials | Have some happy customers or clients, ask them for a testimonial. |
| Query refinements | Query intent is the concept of attracting the “right” visitors and delivering what you promised in the search results. This will help to reduce bounce rate. |
| Dwell time on site | To start you can comb through your Google Analytics data to determine what your stickiest traffic sources and content area and develop a strategy to apply this to new or existing content. You can also improve the length of time someone stays on a page by improving the overall design and adding images and video. |
| Pages per visit | Improve internal linking, suggest related content, customize 404 pages. If you have a large topic your wanting to cover, think about splitting it up into a series of smaller posts. |
| Conversion rates | Do A/B testing, make your messaging very clear, follow CRO best practices. |
| Ad placements | Do not have any ads above the main content on the page. Reduce or eliminate annoying ad blocks or pop-ups. Think about what you prefer on sites you visit. |
| CTR from SERPs | Craft better title tags, URLs, and descriptions. Grab attention. Gain trust. Make them want to click. Add schema markup when appropriate. |
| Page speed | Test to see how fast your site is performing by visiting https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/. |
| Mobile experience | Google rolled out an update a while back where responsive and/or adaptive design on a mobile device started to be favoured in search results. Also consider having less text, easier navigation, loads lighting fast, or shorter forms. |
