SEO refers to Search Engine Optimisation.

SEO emerged to cater the needs of individuals who are always on a constant search for information over the internet.  Hence, optimizing content for it to appear on the top of search results gained momentum. 

The idea of search engine optimization has been prevalent for the last two decades now. As the competition in online businesses is rising, it makes SEO relevant more than anytime else.

SEO emerged as a tool to influence the results on the search engine. In the next 60 minutes, the guidebook will give you details on:

• Details of SEO.
• Importance of SEO.
• How SEO Works?
• Elements that impact SEO.

If you are curious to learn how you can improve the ranking of your website, you are at the right spot. 

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of improving a site’s visibility on search engines (Google, Bing, etc.). Better visibility of a website leads to higher chances of it attracting potential buyers which ultimately, adds to increase in revenue. 

SEO-oriented activities include keyword optimization, content creation, link building, image alt tags, improving site load time, measuring results, etc helps in improving ranking.

Higher Ranking ↑ Higher Probability of Website Visitors ↑ More Revenue.

In the section below, we will look at these SEO components in detail in the blog. But before that, let us talk in detail about the relevance of SEO.

Why is SEO important?

In a day, Google handles approximately 99,000 searches every second (Internet Live Stats 2022). The increasing volume of searches poses difficulty for the brand’s website to rank. This is why SEO is essential for brands. 

Google dominates the search engine market which is why it is important for any or every business to place their content on the internet. 

The dynamism of the content has changed. And today it needs to be educational, search-intent based, relevant and shareable, overall SEO-oriented.

Why?

Because SEO is important for businesses as it helps them with:

• Better Visibility and Rankings
• Web Traffic
• Authority
• Better Visitor Experience

Up till here you know that SEO is important. Now let us read how does SEO work?

How does SEO work?

Search Engines use bots to crawl web pages to collect information about what the user 

has searched. Then, all the collected information is compiled to form an extensive index. Further, different Google Algorithms check the web pages (based on hundreds of ranking factors) to identify which page should appear in the search results.

The crawler bots estimate how close a website can serve the searcher’s intent. The evaluation is based on ranking factors like site speed,crawlability, keyword research and content quality. 

How SEO works can be bifurcated into three steps that include:

1. Crawling: It refers to the stage when search engines crawl the pages to look for the content required in the query.
2. Indexing: Indexing is when the search engine files the page most appropriate for the search query. A web page might not be placed for indexing if:

• The content on it is plagiarized.
• The content is low quality. 
• The content could not be crawled.
• There were no inbound links.

3. Ranking: Before ranking the web page, the search engine will check for keyword presence in the title tag, the loading speed of the web page, website reputation, and other factors.

After reading how SEO works, let us read in detail about SEO.

129 Components of Search Engine Optimisation.

Search Engine Optimization refers to improving the possibility of a website’s ranking in the search engine to receive more traffic.

The major 4 pillars of the SEO that the site owners must consider are:

1. Technical SEO
2. On-Site SEO
3. Off-Site SEO
4. Content

When you work to strengthen all the four pillars of SEO, you increase your website’s visibility in the organic search results. 

A search engine no longer evaluates the content based on the keyword usage. Rather, it examines a website based on the user-intent and user-experience. 

It means increasing the relevance of the page content so that the user spends more time on the page. In short, the page should be user-friendly and offer quality content to the reader. 

Let us now look at the different components that influence search engine optimization and hence the ranking.

User experience

Did you know that 47% of internet users expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds? (Source: Web). Time more than this can push the users away from the website because higher load time renders poor user experience. 

User experience is how the users feel after visiting your website. Factors like site speed, ease of navigation, mobile responsiveness, engaging content, and others can affect the user’s experience. If a user gets what they are looking for, the dwell time increases which raises the chances of higher ranking in search results. 

The role of search engines has evolved to quantify ranking and traffic. Its major role has been in improving the user experience and helping searchers find what they want. 

The screenshot below shows how over the years Google’s algorithms have changed.

Across all algorithmic updates, the prime intent is to ensure that the content is authentic and it has a blend of technological advancements. 

Let us read some more factors that can affect the user-experience on a website.

Information layout: 

Information layout is the science of organizing the content on websites at different places. The layout defines the utility and findability of the information. A good information layout coupled with SEO increases the usability of the website further increasing the chances of higher ranking. 

Visitors have a habit of looking at information under a few elements like header, footer, page titles, etc. Planning to place information on these placeholders is preparing an information layout. When visitors get the information easily, it improves the user experience and can increase dwell time.

Other than information layout, the next factor that affects user experience is interaction UI design. 

Interaction User Interface design: 

User-Interface design is a way to build interfaces in computer devices or mobile offering ease of use to the visitors. This UI design is a point of human-computer interaction. The design defines how users interact with the website.

There are four types of user interfaces that designers can create:

• Command-Line interface
• Graphical User Interface.
• Menu-driven Interface.
• Touchscreen Graphical User Interface

Words, visual representations, physical space and media on a website completes the interaction UI design and enhances the user experience.  

An interaction UI design informs a customer through its impressive design. In an example, you can see the website of Digit General Insurance Company that makes navigation easy for a visitor on the website.

The design above explains that this insurance company offers all types of online insurance solutions. It leaves the audience with the complete information hence they would most likely visit the website again. And the repeat visits inform search engines that the website has some valuable information. It pushes the website to rank higher.

Two Way Communication:

Dan Oswald said, “Communication must be HOT. That’s Honest, Open, and Two-Way.”

Businesses are made successful when the communication is strong. The way brands communicate with customers determine the quality of bond that is shared between the two. 

Traditionally, brands spoke just their part making it a one-sided story. But today brands achieve two-way communication by posting about their services/products on social media and other relevant platforms. 

A two-way communication enables:

•  brands to hear the other part of the story like product feedback which gives brands a chance to improve or customize the products. 
• The interaction helps to resolve customer dissatisfaction before they escalate.

A small instant chat window in the bottom left of a website is an example of two-way communication. 

Establishing a two way communication online fosters greater trust and transparency leading to a better user experience.  

Ease of Navigation

Website navigation is the internal link architecture within the website that connects the internal pages. Use apt keywords to interlink pages enabling users to discover and index the new pages on your website. 

Ease of navigation on a website is to ensure that the visitors can easily access information present. For example a navigation bar at the top helps the visitors quickly get the information they are looking at.  It improves the user experience of the visitors. 

These are the few tips to add ease of navigation to users on your website. 

• Make the sidebars stand out by using a different color background. Strategically use the white space to help elements stand out on the page.
• Keep the 12 pixels font to make the content legible. Avoid narrow scripts and fonts. 
• Make the navigation titles clear, accurate and easily recognizable. Use familiar terms like “About Us” ,“Contact Us”, etc.
• Keep navigation menu completely responsive allowing mobile users to use the website on their devices.
• Put clean links on the website footer just as you do on the header of the website. It helps the users move conveniently on the website.
• Include an internal-search function enabling users to quickly look for information they are looking for. 

Offering ease of navigation to the users can:

• reduce the bounce rate
• improve user experience 
• increase the average time of the users on your website. 
• get more traffic, leads, and customers

In the example below, you can see how Philips offers convenience to the users if they want to select products from household, personal care, health, lighting, and other segments.

Next, let us read about ease of finding.

Ease of Finding:

Ease of finding refers to putting up information on a website which a search engine can easily spot and display in the SERP. 

A website can offer ease of finding to the users if you use properly researched keywords, meta-tags, title, and structure in the content is crucial. Ease of finding helps your target audience approach you without hassles.

For example Noboru World is famous as the best digital PR Agency in India. It is easy to find the company when you are searching for the digital PR or digital marketing agency in India.

You can increase a website’s ease of finding and improve user experience by following these:

• Use target keywords within your website.
• Make crawling easy on your webpages.
• Add your website to online directories.
• Include compelling titles.
• Get verified by Google.
• Create quality content.
• Optimize images 
• Use Google Ads
• Provide excellent customer services.
• Do not ignore local media.

Immersive experience:

Immersive experience is creating an illusionary environment that surrounds you completely giving you a feeling that you are a part of it. 

In marketing, an immersive experience for your target audience is to make user experience better so that buyers repeat their purchase. Immersive experience is an activity that pulls a person into an augmented reality to improve everyday life.

Google is investing in augmented reality platforms like Daydream and Tango. And because Google’s intent is to improve searcher’s experience, gradually AR-based content gained relevance. This implies that businesses can incorporate 3D objects, videos, or social sharing enabling masses to reach out to your search. 

Below is a screenshot of Dubai’s famous Palm Jumeirah. Before visiting it, you could take an immersive experience of how it will look when you will be there in reality.

Less time, more information

Studies have proved that the attention span of individuals has shrunk to 8.25 seconds. Therefore, it implies that higher site load time than this can lead to your loss.

It is mandatory that online marketing content be more precise and accurate for higher user engagement. Use long-tail and short keywords to give meaning that is intended. And optimize the content for SEO to improve the user’s experience.  

If users can find more information in less time users are more likely to spend more time on the website. Ultimately, the probability of your sales increases.

Consistent experience across devices

Today the number of mobile users is 1.2 billion which is more than the number of laptop users. 

A study by Kinsta, shows that in India about 74% of traffic comes from mobile devices compared to 26% traffic from desktop use. Now if higher sales is the aim, websites should offer consistent user experience on all devices. The load time should be less and information should be relevant.

Some key features like view profile, messaging, filtered search, and browse should be available for both desktop and mobile. 

See how Nykaa Fashion offers consistent user experience across mobile and laptop.

The mobile version from the same brand appears like this:

Both the websites look the same to leave the user-experience unaffected. 

Option to comeback:

Visitors can often come back to your website and explore what they often look for in your brand. 

To increase your business, adding an option to come back is another way to attract customers. This is what you can do:

• Add a feature of bookmarks. A bookmark is a placeholder for a web page that will allow users to access the page quickly rather than searching for it every time.
• Provide the option of subscribing to the newsletters and monthly updates. Users can add your brand to their favorites and get easy access. 

Here in the picture above, the client offers an option to stay connected via email. The feature enhances their user experience. It is a benefit you provide to the customers to stay connected and come back to your site for any information. 

Style

The Style in SEO relates to writing content that helps your brand rank on the first page of the search engines. Higher the quality of the content,better will be the user experience.

While writing the content, keep in mind the style guide and include:

• Understand the audience: Know who your target audience is and then create the content. It helps you satisfy the readers. 

• Create Title: For title tag, pay attention to the length and use target keywords. Then describe and give a brief of what is on the page. 

• Meta-Tags: Meta tags are placed in the head section of the HTML code. It  allows the crawlers to browse through the information. Each meta element must be placed with an opening and closing <meta tag >.

Meta tags are your page’s first impression in SERP. A clearly defined meta tag informs the search engine about your content. A meta tag comprises Title Tags and Meta Descriptions.

• Include Keywords: Keywords are important words or phrases that enable you to highlight and inform users about your products and services on search engines.

• Tone: Decide the tone of the content you want to offer to your customers. Then after creating the content, it will make sense.

• Link Building: Link building is an activity to get links from other websites to your webpage. The intent is to improve the search engine rankings. Link building, both internal and external, on the web page connects the content and information. When the search engine crawls between web pages and other websites, it evaluates the content for ranking purposes. This is why it is better if you get links from high-ranking web pages.  

• Headings: The content style must include H1 and other headlines H2 and H3. It gets more accessible for a search engine to find the information if keywords are appropriately used in the headlines. 

Global CSS is used to style the elements like the header, footer, and the body content.

Font 

SEO and usability are related to further enhance the ranking in Google SERP.

• Font size doesn’t affect the ranking factor but it makes the website usable. Too small a font can deteriorate the user’s experience and increase the bounce rate.
• A comfortable font 16px X12 px is a standard that one can use. 
• The font you choose must be legible on the mobile sites also as Google now uses mobile-first index to index the web content today. 
• A website with a legible font is more user-friendly and has a low bounce rate. The reader will stay for a longer duration on the website, ultimately giving you a high conversion rate. 

Some websites with bigger fonts than this also works wonders. For example, https://www.indiantypefoundry.com/ is a website that is a library of all fonts. On a website, H1 and H2 fonts are of high relevance which is why their size is important. 

These are the quick tips for typography to increase website usability and user experience:

• Use one type of format across the website. More than one type of font can irritate the reader.
• Create content with mixed capitalisation.
• Use standard font for websites.
• Do not minimize the character spacing.
• Do not use multiple colors of the fonts.
• Avoid making fonts in red or green.
• You cannot keep the font and the background of the same color.
• Blue is for hyperlinks so do not make fonts of the same color.
• Do not keep the text dancing or moving.

User control for content consumption

Give user’s control over the content consumption. It gives them a sense of independence ultimately pushing them to spend more time on the website.

•  Offer your users a convenient option to go back to the previous step.
• Allow them to change languages to read.
• Allow them to cancel a link or close a link.  
• Offer them the feature to adjust fonts for better readability.

All of this allows the user to have control over the website and makes it easy for them to decide whether or not to stay  online. 

Language switcher:

Language switchers can be advantageous from an SEO perspective. It allows you to capture a multilingual market. Optimize your website for different languages to increase the number of visitors.

Targeting local or native languages limits your market. Instead use a language switcher. And to begin with, identify the volume and origin of the traffic. Use Google Analytics to know the percentage of users from different countries. 

For example, if traffic from Southeast Asian countries is higher on your website, you will have to use the language switcher accordingly. 

Though as a language switcher, Google Translate came long back, the exact translation it gave did not appeal to the readers. Hence, came the alternative of switching languages.

As a new-age businessman, if you are looking for fast business output, you must prefer to make a multilingual website. Do that by choosing the appropriate CMS and website structure.  

Font and Size

Search engines like Google like to read the content with 16px or 12pt minimum font. You can use Google’s Lighthouse to measure the suitable font for both desktop and mobiles. Easy to read fonts keep the readers engaged for a longer time.

When you finalize the font size, you can make the edits in the CSS file. 

Other than the font, a few things that are crucial from the SEO point of view include space between the fonts and that between the two paragraphs. 

Mode- light or dark

Studies have shown in the recent past that 47% of respondents prefer light mode for reading blogs, only 10% chose dark interface. In one of the latest updates, Google has expressed its love for dark mode. It is a popular setting in which the white background is turned black, and the black text is converted to white. But does that really affect SEO?

Though SEO is not affected by dark mode, it is a new trend. Broadly, the users are found active in the morning or late evening hours. It is the time when they like to read in dim light to have an easy experience. 

A dark theme is ideal if you prefer to follow the next big thing and want your websites to stand out. But again, you have to choose a user interface that gives convenience to your readers.

Multiformat content

Content is an opportunity to reach the target audience. And multiformat content,  the reach just gets better.

Different cost-effective ways to spread the content and make the audience aware includes website content, blogs, social media posts, podcasts, infographics, photos and other images.

For example, a video for DIY can be better than creating text-based content, which can be boring to read. 

Creating multiformat content can be time-consuming. The secret to bust this challenge is- to repurpose the content. 

To begin with, convert the recent compelling and most popular blog into a video or downsize it to make for a post on social media. The benefit of repurposing the content is that the inventory is ready, and all you have to do at first is pick the blog/content that performed well. 

Let us further look at the content formats you can try.

Podcast

The next generation audience battles to look for trendy things all the time. Podcasts were fabricated a few years ago in 2004. 

The Podcast is a collection of audio series that can be downloaded or listened to on the internet. It is a trendy way to share information in a series that captures the audience’s attention. 

Podcasts involve storytelling which engage users the most. As Google is capable of speech-to-text features, the use of Podcasts grew more than ever. 

These are the popular  podcasts if you want to learn about search engine optimization.

If you also want to lead your target segment and wish to try your hands with a podcast, make sure you keep in mind the trending keywords and build a series around that. Try with the podcasts and you will see millions of users who are active listeners.

Videos 

Studies show that viewers retain 95% of a video’s message as against 10% compared to text. It is because videos evoke strong emotions and encourage the viewer to repeatedly watch it.

Video marketing is effective when it comes to SEO. 

• You can use the video on the landing page as it helps to increase the conversions by 86%. 
• Video SEO is the most suitable way of optimizing traffic as video content is shareable. 
• It increases the chances to get more backlinks that will further increase google ranking. 

Blogs

Blogs have always been there since 1994. Brands used the strategy to develop blogs for optimizing the content and spreading the information about their product and service.

Some of the common tasks associated with the blog SEO include creating a perfect site architecture and HTML Code for search engines. If you are flawless here, the chances of increasing the traffic to the website doubles. 

• Every blog that you create should be optimized around one keyword enabling it to rank on Google. 
• Too many keywords can confuse Google and other search engines.
• Use header tags carefully.

Infographics

Infographics enhance the experiences of the audience and captivate them to read more. The imagery just made the data easier to understand. Remember that the infographics you use should have a bold and creative message with minimal text.

Infographics include imagery, data visualization, and minimal texts. It can be an effective link-building technique. If you can generate links, you can get more traffic to your website. Why?

If you happen to make a unique design it will most likely be shared across social media platforms, giving higher probability of traffic rise to your website. 

The example below explains how infographics make life easier.

Slides

Another form of content that you can try to enhance user experience on a website include slides. Slides are a way to display well-organized pieces of information on a website, one after the other. If you want to captivate your audience’s attention, you have the target to keep them engaged for more than 8 seconds. And for that, slides are the most convenient option. Let us read more why slides are a better choice:

• Motion captures the attention of the visitors, we have already read that. And changing slides can also add that element.
• Slides are effective if you are in a business where you have to showcase a portfolio. Let us see an example here.

Source: www.evok.in

• Web slides are among the popular and effective methods to convey visual content. 
• Website slides are just like carousels that help you display information in a well-organized manner. 
• The main components of slide design could be a box that contains all the information. The information should include images, videos, titles, texts, and buttons. 

When you populate the website sliders with dynamic effects, easy navigation, and pagination it makes browsing better.

Pdfs

PDFs are portable and are the prevalent format of digital documents that are perfect for everyone to read. PDFs are essential for websites as they can contribute to increasing the ranking of the website.

If you are uploading a pdf on your website, this is what you can do:

• Choose a SEO friendly name of the website.
• Use a good title and description.
• Avoid using duplicate content.
• Don’t save pdf as images.
• Optimize the pdf for mobile and file.
• Include image alt attributes and include links

Google and other search engines are capable of crawling, indexing, and ranking these digital documents, but much effort is to be taken to optimize these files.

This is how PDF file looks like:

Source: www.google.com

Not optimizing the data will make these documents look inferior to search engines thereby affecting its possibility ranking in the search engine. 

Make the PDF to include on your website compatible with mobile-display. If not, then the document may not be crawled. 

Visual aids

Marketing is not an easy game! Rather it is a never ending play in which you need to try different things to impress your customers. 

Visual aids help the audience to retain information because they see  messages in pictures and motions. 

You can increase the customer’s engagement on your website by using Visual Aids. 

• The feature helps the audience understand your content better which can infuse emotions in people. 
• For visual aids, use photography, alt texts, quotes, animated GIFs and visual storytelling. 

Another example of a brand that uses GIF to make an impressive website is 

• Visual aids make complex ideas simple to understand for the visitors.

Ultimately, you have more people who visit and revisit your website further leading to higher conversion rates. More the number of visitors, higher the ranking.

Illustrations and examples

Adding illustrations and examples simplify the life of visitors on the website. Just try to make it simple for your audience.

When you add illustrations to a website,it becomes unique. Not everyone does that, right?

Source: www.cred.club

How to add illustrations?

• Use eye-catching vector designs on your site to stand out of the competition. The idea is to communicate messages with the help of images, color, and typography. Illustrations or examples are add-ons to the content that is placed on your website to improve the user experience.

• When you add illustration and optimize it for SEO, it improves your page loading speed and boosts the rank of your website on the search results. 

• Make sure that the illustration images are smaller in size as that occupies less space.

Google Experience

“Experience is what you get when you do not get what you want. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.” -Randy Pauch.

Fundamentally offering valuable content for quality experience to visitors on your website is your priority. Right? 

Google experience is the latest initiative to improve the search results for the users and overall experience. It depends a lot on the quality of the content.

For desktop page experience update, the ranking factors include:

• Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, and FID)
• HTTPS Security
• Absence of Intrusive Interstitials

If your website fails to meet any of the criteria, there will be no improvement noted for page experience ranking. You need to monitor the page experience score using different Google Tools. Low score means you need to improve and work to grow. Note that in the end, it is content that matters the most. 

The brands that successfully provide this experience to the users get easily awarded by Google. A few critical components that are essential to qualify for Google’s latest criteria and to improve the ranking include:

Largest Contentful Paint: 

1. Largest Content Paint (LCP) refers to the time taken before a webpage can load meaningful content. 
2. When a web page takes more than 4 seconds, then your LCP is poor. 

3. The LCP should be less when the ultimate aim for you is to display the information quickly on your website so that your visitor stays for long which might ultimately lead to sales.

Cumulative Layout Shift:  

1. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is the layout shift score that occurs during the entire lifespan of a page.
   
   
2. Shifting content while the page loads is a bad idea. 
3. Web content must not shift when users interact with your webpage. It affects users’ experience and deteriorates Google’s experience.
4. The Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less will help you comply with the Google Standards giving you an edge over your competitors.

First Input Delay (FID): 

1. FID is the time a website takes to respond to the user’s  first interaction on the page. A request on the website could be anything like tapping on a button, clicking a link, etc.

2. The response time by the browser when it actually starts processing the request should be less than 100 ms. 
3. if the time taken is more than 300 ms, it becomes a significant problem.

Load time: 

The time taken for the web page to display meaningful content, on both mobile and desktop, is the load time. A study in 2019 has shown that a 0-4 second load time is best for the conversion rate. So get going and recheck everything at your end!

The longer the load time, the higher the bounce rate will be. It  can be a failure of all SEO efforts . 

The graph below shows that the page load speed is directly proportional to the SEO ranking and conversions.

Graph is the correlation between page speed and google  search position.

Beyond rankings, it is vital to have a shorter load time to help users get where they must be faster. When the users get the information in a short time span, their dwell time increases. In the end, the probability of business conversion is high. 

Metadata: 

A meta data is the information about other information. It is in short the information you provide to browsers to know what lies on your web page. Metadata must be accurate and must contain basic information like the date of the file, keywords, file size, etc.

Metadata helps Google index your pages for the right results.

If the metadata of the page goes correct, there are higher chances of the search engine displaying your page in the search results.

And if you rank higher in SERP, it indicates that your website offers a good experience.

H1 and H2 Tags:

Google looks for the H1 and H2 tags when it reads a content on the website. For a good Google experience, it is important that the content on the website has a structure with H1 and H2 tags: 

Let us break down the tags further:

H1: The main keywords and the subject matter that tells what the overall post is about.

H2: Sections to break the content. The keywords can be similar to the H1 tag.

H3: Subcategories to further break the content making it easy to scan.

Labeling each piece of content with titles helps the reader get the most information quickly. Hence, came the use of H1 and H2 tags. 

In an article/blog post, it is wise to have one H1 tag because the H1 informs you about the article. There can be more than one H2 or H3 tag, which helps break down the piece further for convenience. So you use the H1, H2, and other header tags.

Some bytes while you create the tags include:

• H1 Tag is everything that a page should be: concise, clear, and detailed.
• H1 helps search engines understand what your content is all about so that your page ranks automatically.
• Each heading H1, H2, H3, etc must provide a good user experience. Further it will offer a good google experience.
• Answer the user’s intent in the headings.

H1 and H2 tags affect Google’ ranking but not to an extent that you might expect. Instead if the content and the headings are crafted neatly, Google might find it relevant. And when Google’s experience gets better, the ranking gets better automatically.

The picture below shows the hierarchy of the headers and the priority.

Schema and Structured data markup: 

Schema Markups is a structured data vocabulary that helps the search engine get better information on your website so that it further displays rich results. The markups allow the search engines to see the meaning and relationship behind the entities mentioned on your site.

When it is easier to understand your website, higher are the chances of your website to rank in Google!

And if the purpose of the content is not clear to the search engine, the purpose of owning a website fails. This is why you can use  Schema Markups. 

In the screenshot above, Noboru World-a marketing and advertising company has given clear information about the website address for the users to visit.

In the same search, Google also displays the details about the address and the office hours. It also shares the links for the website and directions. 

Schema MarkUp

• Indicate the products, events, articles, reviews, recipes, business, people, etc. Once you add these, the search engines understand better what the site is about.
• Can be implemented in different languages that include Microdata, JSON-LD, and RDFa.

Read more details on Schema Mark-Up here.

Cross device compatibility: 

The ability of the device and the softwares to work the same across all devices like laptop or mobile is called cross device compatibility.

For a high Google experience, cross-device compatibility is required. 

At present, India has more than 1.2 billion (as per www.statista.com ) mobile subscribers and the nation will pose second with the smartphone manufacturers in the next five years. It indicates the massive number of mobile users that is expected to remain active in the country.

Mobile gives freedom to the users enabling them to browse for information or for shopping anytime and anywhere.

And because the number of users are high, cross device compatibility has become a mandatory requirement for brands if they are willing to capture the large target markets. 

Only if the users get easy accessibility, the brands will probably gain bigger market share. More compatible the website is for the users, the better is the google experience. 

CDN:

CDN is a medium to distribute content to all visitors wherever they are. It comprises multiple geographically distributed servers. The site owner (which can be you) pays for CDN services allowing them to broadcast their website content to each server in the network. The content may include images, videos, audio, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

CDN has now become the optimal way of delivering quality content in the blink of an eye. In a study, Cisco shows that global CDNs are expected to carry 72% of all internet traffic by 2022. 

A CDN passes assets back and forth rather than each asset loading on individual pages.

Let us read it further, but for the time, you must know that CDN is crucial to improve the Google experience for the users.

• An internet user is bothered by the loading speed, ease-of-navigation and quality content. 
• In addition, CDNs reduce page latency by minimizing the distance the site’s content must travel. Hence, the load time improves gradually. When the load time decreases, the user experience gets better, and the chances of your website ranking higher increase.
• CDN also saves your website against denial-of-service attacks. If there are more requests that a server can manage, then the request is routed to another server. So if the website remains secure, the SEO improves automatically, and the Google experience improves.

Read: How CDNs support organizational SEO goals?

Image optimization:

You use images for pushing your visitors to stay for a longer time on the website. 

“A picture is worth a thousand words”- anonymous. 

But you cannot post a heavy image that increases the load time. Right? No wonder your intent to increase the number of visitors will fail.  Then how can you fix it?

Try image optimization that reduces the size of the image as much as possible without sacrificing the quality. When the image is optimized, the load time remains low. 

For image optimization, you can:

• Use image optimization tools like Pixlr, JPEG Mini, FileOptimizer, Trimage, OptiPNG, etc. Apart from these, you can use Yoast SEO, WP Smush, TinyPNG available on WordPress to optimize the image. 
• Use alt tags to enable search engines to accurately index the image. The alt tag provides context and helps search engines to rank a page.
• Optimize image title with appropriate keywords.
• Include captions as it may not affect SEO directly, but captions make your website visible.
• Fill in the information about images in the site map allowing Google to crawl through.

Optimizing web pages is to provide high quality images in the right dimension and size. With image optimization, the page load speed reduces, SEO ranking gets better, and the Google experience is upgraded.

Video optimisation: 

Video optimization is a set of technology that reduces the video buffer time and improves the customer viewing experience. When the customers are happy, they visit your videos often. 

You can post engaging videos across different channels to increase your presence. If the users perceive to have a great interaction on the page, Google views it as a favorable factor to improve the ranking of the page. 

Optimization of video is another factor that improves the Google Rankings of your video and then adds to the increase in the number of visitors on your website.

Here is why videos can be a plus for you if you optimize them wisely:

• Videos are believed to have a higher conversion rate because the colors,characters and motion captures the attention of the users.
• Keep the videos short and interesting otherwise the users will lose interest.
• Reduce the amount of network bandwidth consumed by video sessions.

Here is how you can optimize a video:

• Design a video with a clear goal in mind.
• Include proper call-to-action in your videos.
• Add important information for SEO.
• Analyze your performance and plan future content.
• Include relevant keywords when you post the videos.

Server response time: 

Server response time is the time taken by the server to respond to a client’s request to access a page. 

It defines the time how long it takes to load the HTML to begin rendering the page from the website owner’s server. Potential factors that slows down the server’s response include:

• Slow application logic
• Slow routing
• Slow database queries
• Frameworks
• Libraries
• Memory starvation
• Resource CPU starvation

These are the few things that you must keep in mind when you talk of server’s response time. It will help you with Google Experience: 

• The server response time should be less than 200 ms.
• Measure your server response time and take actions to remove the issues.
• The server response time is measured by Time To First Byte (TTFB). It is the total milliseconds it takes to receive the first byte of the page after the information request was placed.
• Less time taken for a server to respond yields better user experience . Further it affects the Google experience to rank your website higher. 

Robots.txt: 

A robots.txt file can tell the search engine crawlers with which URL the crawler can access your site. It tells the user agents (web crawling software) where they can and cannot go on your website. If the traffic on the web page gets overwhelming, it gets difficult to manage the traffic.This is why you can mark a few pages not to be crawled.

A robots.txt file is use to::

• Primarily manage crawler traffic to your site.
• Avoid overloading your website with requests.
• Instruct web robots how to crawl pages on their website.

If the website is able to manage the load and the traffic, the ranking gets better to ultimately push the google experience positively.

Read What is robots.txt?

 Some must-knows about robots.txt:

• A robots.txt file must be placed in the website’s top level directory.
• A robots.txt file is case sensitive which is why you cannot write Robots.txt, Robots.TXT, or something else).
• The file is available publicly. You just have to add /robots.txt to the end of the root domain to see the website’s directives. This implies that others also know the pages you want to be crawled or not. 
• Each subdomain will have a separate robots.txt file.
• Include the robots.txt file in the sitemaps.

A search engine crawler finds a robots.txt file and then follows the instructions as mentioned. 

This is the robots.txt file for Facebook which is created in a NotePad and later uploaded in the HTML file. Fix your file now to boost the load speed of your website.

Crawl budget: 

 Crawl budget is the total number of pages Google bot crawls and indexes on a  website within a timeframe. 

The crawl budget is important for websites which have thousands of pages. In general, if Google bot comes and crawls all these pages, the time gets exhausted which will increase the load time. 

It is a difficult task unless your website is not crawl- budget optimized.

There are a few ways in which you can attain crawl budget optimization that includes: 

• Keep away Google and other search engines from pages that you don’t want to get indexed. 
• You must design the website content to help the Google bot find the content faster. Keep in mind these factors when you want bots to crawl your website sooner than normal:

→Improve the navigation.

→Remove on-site duplication of content.

→Get rid of errors on the pages.

→Get away with low quality and spam content.

→Improve the popularity and freshness of your important pages.

Google Search Console: 

Google Search Console is the free tool that reports and helps you measure performance and fix errors if any. 

With the free tool service, you are better able to monitor, troubleshoot and maintain the site’s presence in Google Search Results. You simply have to submit the sitemap to Google via Search Console and track how your website performs. 

This is how the Google Search Console will help you:

• Confirm that Google will find and crawl your website.
• Fix the site indexing problem and request the re-indexing of the new or the updated content.
• It watches the Google Search Traffic for your site. It gives data like CTR, underperforming keywords that are affecting your traffic.
• Alerts when Google encounters issues with your site like indexing or spam.
• Bring the report of the sites which link to your website.
• Troubleshoots issues of mobile usability.
• Resolve site load issues, security issues like hacking and malware.

Website owners can resolve the issues with their site to offer improved page experience to the users. And if Google observes that, the Google experience increases.

Read: You can get to know more about Google Search Console here.

Security: 

These days, SEO spam has become the major reason that leads to SEO ranking drop. In this, a spam content is introduced in the website that redirects the visitors to the pages that are not valid or important. It is a breach of security of the web page.

Some of the activities that can bump your website’s security include:

• Website Hacking.
• Building several spammy links.
• Creating fake profiles
• Removing the best links from your website
• Pointing your website links to several low grades websites.

These activities can affect traffic to your website.

Here are important information about website security:

• The top search engines like Bing or Google impose penalties on sites whose security is compromised. The idea is to safeguard your business against cyber crimes and keep the Google experience unaffected.

• Security is prime for SEO as the website traffic drops.
• If the security of the website is weak and any entity hacks your webpage, the Google bot may not access your page as it can go missing. 

So why lose all that hard work when it is the time to reap the benefits? All you have to do is just fix the security measures.

Canonicals:

Duplicity of the content is a major concern when it is about ranking on a search engine. 

If you have a single page that can be accessed by multiple URLs, Google can see that as a duplicate content. The search engine then chooses a canonical version and crawls that. Crawling different URLs with the same content can cause an SEO issue like ranking on search engines. 

This is why you must use a canonical tag. A canonical tag tells search engines that a specific URL is the master copy of another page. It prevents you from the problem of duplicate content that appears in multiple URLs.

Suppose a web page that contains a piece of content can be accessed through either of these links:

http://www.free.com

https://www.free.com

http://free.com/index.php

Http://free.com

These links can direct to the same page content, but the crawlers can report this as content duplication, reducing your SEO ranking. To prevent this from happening, you must use canonical tags.

For SEO and a better google experience, when you are auditing a page, you must check these:

• Does the page have a canonical tag?
• Are the pages crawlable or indexable?
• Does the canonical tag point to the right page?
• Make sure that canonical does not point to the page blocked by robots.txt. You can’t give different directions like disallowing with robots.txt and then canonicalize the same page when the crawler searches for the page. This will be an error keeping you stuck in a loop.

Read: Canonical Tags: A simple guide for the beginners.

Next let us read about the redirects.

Redirects: 

Every page has a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). At times, the content moves from one URL to another (new location). This is when you need a redirect. 

A redirect makes a browser go from one url to another when a page is deleted or when the domain name is changed.

When you want to send the user or the search engine to a different URL from the original one, it is defined as a redirect. It takes the visitors to the correct destination where they would want to be. 

In common, there are three types of redirects 301,302 and 303.

• 301 is the permanent redirect to communicate that the document at this address has moved permanently to a new location.
• 302 Found (a temporary redirect) indicates that the document is here but is not available at the moment.
• 303 See Other was introduced to prevent bookmarking or refreshing of the page. 

Of these, 301 and 302 are essential because you want to use the first one while the second one needs to be fixed faster.

Let us see an example of a redirect. Say a visitor types https://www.mirror.com/About-Us/ to see the handcrafted mirrors. Note the capital letters A and U. In this case, a 301 redirect can help the visitor redirect to a lowercase version of the https://www.mirror.com/about-us/ page allowing the visitors to find out about the makers of the beautiful handcrafted mirror used for home decor.

If redirection is executed properly, your SEO rankings remain unaffected. And if the rankings are good, Google experience is unaltered.

Want to know more about redirects? Read here.

XML Sitemap: 

An XML sitemap is a file that contains all information about a website’s essential page. It is to make sure that Google can find the pages and crawl them.

Without an XML sitemap, there will be no direction to This is how you put the right layout for things to fall in place. 

• With a good sitemap, you have a roadmap that will enable Google to visit all your important pages. It is essential and perfectly suitable for SEO even if the internal linking is not perfect. 
• Sitemap is important as Google may rank your pages if not the complete websites.
• You have pages on your site created dynamically.
• Large sites are more likely to have updates so they must include XML sitemap.
• A new website must have an XML sitemap if they have just launched their brand.
• Sites that are consistently publishing new pages, articles, or features in sites, a well maintained sitemap will make sure search engines are up to date.

A site map makes browsing easy, further adding to Google’s experience.

Duplication: 

Duplication of content is a big NO when you talk of search engine ranking. “Always be yourself and have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and try to duplicate it.”

There will be no benefit if you are placing your high quality content at two places as Google does not appreciate it. Same piece of content cannot attract more visitors. 

How to fix content duplication?

• The best solution to remove duplication is to opt for redirection. Pick 301 as it can be the easiest way to fix the duplicate content issue on your site. Using the Redirect you can forward all the duplicate content to the original page.
• Do not create duplicate content.
• Add a canonical link to the duplicate page.
• Add an HTML link from the duplicate page to the canonical page.

Fix content duplicity to prevent confusion for Google and improve the experience. 

For more information on Duplicate Content, read here.

Subdomain vs Subdirectory: 

A subdomain is the child of the parent domain and used for hosting the blogs, stores, query forms, etc. Whereas a subdirectory is just another page of the main domain. 

Subdomain	Subdirectory
A subdomain sets your website to establish a specific content that is distinct from the root domain.	A subdirectory is a folder that is located within another folder or directory.
There is a smaller variety of content covered in a subdomain than a root domain.	Subdirectories have a lesser variety of content.
SEO experts say that subdomains are easier to navigate which leads to a better user experience that leads to better user experience.	Subdirectories are complex to browse.
Subdomains can be helpful if you have a large website and a wide variety of content is to be shared.	On the other hand, subdirectories help smaller websites that do not have a large variety of content.
Subdomain sits before the root folder.	Subdirectories sits after the root folder.

While preparing your website, you may build a subdomain and a subdirectory. Both of these impact your website’s SEO and results in SERP, let us find that out. 

Suppose you sell novels (all kinds) online and choose to make the main domain as www.newnovels.com .  Now, for a blog section of your website,  

subdomain will be: blog.newnovel.com  

Subdirectory will be: newnovel.com/blog/  

Which one is better?

• Well when it comes to SEO rankings and better Google experience, subdirectories stand better. 
• In a subdirectory, you can concentrate on your keywords onto a single domain. 
• On the other hand, subdomain strategy spreads the keywords further into separate domains.
• When you keep your website content separate from the main domain, you decrease the SEO value of the main website. This affects your business drastically. 

Next, let us read about plagiarism.

Plagiarism: 

Plagiarism is copying someone else’s ideas and portraying that it was yours. Copy and Paste, may look easy but it can cost you your whole business. Your efforts can go in vain and there is no point making any new investments. Why? It is simple because Google will charge you for plagiarism if you do not give credits to others. 

Yes, COPYING A CONTENT IS A NO. It is not allowed as it affects the ranking and deteriorates Google Experience.

Quick notes for plagiarism. Know why you should avoid Plagiarism.

• Google penalizes the content that is 10% plagiarized.
• Plagiarism can harm your SERP ranking and Google may remove you from the list.
• Your website will get less organic traffic.
• It affects the reader’s experience.
• Plagiarism will affect your reputation.
• Website bounce rate will increase due to plagiarism.
• The content on your website will get fewer backlinks.
• Due to plagiarism, your content will not be shared on social media.

How can you avoid plagiarism to offer a good Google experience?

• Always cite the sources of the information used.
• Do not forget quotes and paraphrasing.
• Make sure to use a plagiarism checker before submitting your content.
• Monitor your content before and after it is posted. The tools include Copysentry, SEMrush Position Tracking, and Unplag. Keep monitoring so that you do not end up losing your SEO business. 
• Also, you need to give out straightforward guidelines for writing the content, verify what the writers write, check that the content is original and don’t hire writers who pick, copy and paste the content for you.
• Aim for plagiarism not more than 2-5%. But remember 0% is the best option.

Mirroring: 

Mirroring is preparing replicas of the website. But why would you do that?

Mirroring is important to make the site access faster when the original site is geographically distant from the visitors. It is a step you can take to boost the Google experience. But it is important to understand that a mirrored site is not an exact copy of the original website. It is a static copy which implies that the owner cannot make edits like post comments, log-in, or post comments.

Why mirroring?

Mirroring a website is done to provide information that can be made available to places where access is censored. It saves bandwidth and time for the website copy to download. Ultimately, the user experience is least affected that adds to improving the Google Experience.

Some more points on mirroring are:

• The concept of mirroring applies to access network services through protocols such as HTTP or FTP. 
• Mirrored sites are located in different continents allowing the user to access a website to get reliable access and that too fast. 
• The urls of both the original as well as the mirrored site may be the same with the identical subdomain. 
• Mirrored sites distribute the traffic load across different servers to servers in the proximity of the users that reduce the latency.

Some of the tools that you can use to mirror the websites include:

• Website Ripper Copier
• GNU Wget
• WebRipper
• SurfOffline
• Backstreet Browser
• Visual SEO Studio
• BlackWindow

Flipping: 

Website Flipping is buying a digital asset, working on it to improve value, and then reselling it to make profits. 

 It is the practice of purchasing a website with good content to improve revenue and then selling it for profit. Well the practice becomes successful only when the Google experience for the visitors remains unaffected. 

Website flipping started when people thought of scaling the business and earning money. Well, selling a profitable website is worth the money it guarantees after sales. Some of the platforms you can use to sell the websites and domains include Flippa, Trademysite, Afternic, and Website Broker. 

So if you are thinking of buying a website or selling it for profit, you know where to login. Try it and give your business a push.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): 

The number of mobile users crossed 765.8 million in December 2021. The fact is every second person is a mobile internet user. This is why it has become essential for companies to offer mobile users a fast and engaging experience. It brought AMP in function, which is lightweight pages improving user experience. 

Some quick notes about AMP are:

• Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source framework launched by Google to create mobile websites that would load instantly. 
• Through AMP, the web pages with videos, animation and graphics could load faster for the best mobile experience for the users.
• AMP prioritizes user experience through restrictions on ads and user interface design.
• It limits CSS to 75KB, JavaScript to 150 KB, and moves all the hurdles out of the critical rendering path.
• AMP pages are hosted on Google’s server.

• Ideally, the load time for pages with AMP is 0.7 seconds and for non-AMP pages is 22 seconds. Lesser load time will improve the user experience leading the ranks higher in the search engine.

With the rapidly rising number of mobile users, AMP will be an essential tool to consider as people are using mobiles for their search and browsing. 

Bing Webmaster: 

Like any business even you want to be there on the first page of the search engine asap.Right?

Ranking is not biased with the amount of money you spend on your website in making it colorful. Instead, the whole dynamics of ranking falls on adopting use of keywords and other practices. Apart from Google, Microsoft offered free services of Bing Webmaster Tool to allow webmasters to add their websites to Bing Index Crawler. 

Bing webmaster is an easy to plug in API that websites can notify as soon as there is a content update. The tool can help you in these ways:

• It allows fast crawling, indexing, and discovery of the site content.
• The tool will allow you to monitor the overall health of the website. 
• You can also see how your customers are finding your website.
• Bing SEO also focuses on the link quality and not on the quantity. A few inbound links can help to boost the rankings.
• The tool allows the website owners to have their keyword research, SEO report, site scan to remove technical glitches, and evaluate the site’s backlink profile to study the domain and anchor texts.

A quick monitoring of website performance keeps you upbeat and helps users to have a great experience.

Read here about Bing Webmaster Tool.

URL structure: 

URLs are a ranking factor in Google. It simply means that optimized URLs are a ranking factor in Google. 

What is the URL?

• A URL is the Uniform Resource Locator which is the address you enter in the search engine to access a web page. 
• URL is the link that informs the visitors about how they can spot your business. 
• A common structure of the URL comprises protocol, domain name, and path.

• URL structure will vary depending on the requirement of the business. For example a URL structure for an eCommerce website will be different from a blog website.
• An intuitive structure of the URL makes it easy for the user to navigate. It is better for SEO if the URL structure includes keywords as then a URL becomes easy to read and simple. 
• When you optimize the URL (no over-stuffing here), you enable the search engine bots to crawl and index the website. 

Now you must be thinking about how to design a URL? Know that it is a completely different segment. But a few things that you can take care of include:

• Hide www prefix.
• Follow a simple URL structure.
• Use HTTPS protocol.
• Make sure that the URL is descriptive of content.
• Keep it short and easy to understand.
• Use hyphens to separate words.
• Use meaningful keywords.
• Use lower case letters.

URLs will attract your visitors and help you increase the traffic by improving the user experience.

Orphan pages: 

Website pages that are not linked to from any other page of the website are Orphan Pages.

Search engines can browse or visit a page of your website only if the page is followed from a link. It means that the user cannot reach the page without knowing the direct URL of the page.

To find an orphan page, you can re-run a crawl in Lumar without integrating Google Search Console. Now if there occurs a page that shows up in Google Search Console but not in Lumar, then that page is orphaned.

Even if your orphaned page has high quality content, it may not be displayed in the search engine. It means that there will be less visitors on the page because of which ultimately the ranking in SERP will reduce.

You can fix orphan pages by updating proper messages (404 or 410)  on the old pages that are still available. It will help readers know that the content does not exist. 

Some tools that you can use to find out the orphaned pages include:

• Lumar
• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Moz Link Explorer

Rectify the page links to improve Google experience and further increase the probability of ranking in SERP.

Indexing: 

Indexing refers to the process by which Google crawlers store and categorize information they find on websites which is ready to display on SERP.

Indexing is important because it determines whether or not the website will appear in the search results. 

Not optimizing the page means the site will have reduced chances of getting indexed. Further it will lead to decreased traffic and take the site’s ranking lower.

Google can treat this as a black hat technique that can attract penalties.

When you index all the webpages, the search engine bots would crawl for different keywords, metadata, and related searches to tell where to rank the content.

• To not miss any page from indexing in Google, you can do a Google Web Search for “site:mywebsite.com”. 
• And if you want to submit more pages to be indexed in Google, you can use Google Search Console to submit your request. 
• Similarly, a no-index tag can help you prevent indexing a page from Google. 
• When you no-index a page, Google will drop that page after seeing the ‘noindex’ tag or the header. 

You save unnecessary page bounce and take the traffic to the right place. Gradually, you will have an increased ranking and a better user experience.

Core Web Vitals: 

Despite all the marketing efforts, you are not sure of the website’s performance! Use Core Web Vitals Report that gives details based on the real world usage data.

Core Web Vitals show how your page performs based on real world usage data. The web vitals report shows the performance which is grouped by:

• Status- Poor, Need, Improvement, Good. The report will show URLs that need improvement and also tell Why URLs aren’t good. 
• Metric Type- CLS, FID, LCP. The values for the performance metric are:

	Good	Need Improvement	Poor
LCP	<=2.5s	<=4s	>4s
FID	<=100ms	<=300 ms	>300ms
CLS	<=0.1	<=0.25	>0.25

• URL pages are grouped to show which pages have similar user experience. 

Core Web Vitals stand for responsiveness, visual stability, and performance. These are the vital factors that Google considers highly relevant when it comes to evaluating web page overall user experience.

Source: Core Web Vitals

User interaction measurements depend on largest contentful paint, cumulative layout shift, and first input delay.

For better performance of the web page, you can do these:

• Upload the quality keyword rich content
• Keep reserve space for ads
• Keep videos and images optimized to improve the page experience.

Google Policy Compliance: 

The standard guidelines laid by Google to use its product and services are Google Policies. Every business that hosts their website on Google has to comply with the Google policies because you don’t want a dip in the number of visitors on your website. 

The webpage owners must adhere to design and coding standards for all the page contents. If you follow the rules, you can have high accessibility, links, relevance, and visibility. 

For a website, Google has laid the standard rules that include:

• It must have substantial content hosted on the webpage.
• The website must have updated events and information.
• There should be a clear navigation of the page.
• The call-to-action must be clear for a quality user-experience.

Unique Doorway to SERP

Doorways are the sites or pages that are created to rank for specific queries.

They push the users to some intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination. 

These are the benefits of the doorway pages:

• Doorway pages are indexed quickly.
• The pages can fetch fast and genuine traffic to the website.   
• It helped the website rank well in the search results. 
• Doorway pages are easy to set up.
• These pages represent the relevant portion of a website.

Disadvantages of Doorway pages:

• The users might be pushed to empty pages.
• The pages at times can be spammy.
• The users can land on the duplicate content.
• These pages deteriorate the user’s experience.
• The practice pulled the visitors to a doorway page that ranked well because of high keywords stuffing. But practically, the page did not always have any valuable content. This became a popular reason why the unique doorway technique did not work.

Broken Links: 

A broken link is a web page that cannot be found by a user for various reasons. 

Valuable information on a page can leave it undetected. It happens when the links to the page are broken.

Reasons for the broken link include:

• The destination page has been moved or it no longer exists. 
• An incorrect URL has been entered by the website owner.
• 404 error when the destination website removed the linked web page.
• The user has a software that blocks the website access. 

Some example of broken links include:

• 400 Bad Request: The host server cannot understand the url on your page.
• 404 Page Not Found: The page/resource does not exist.
• Timeout: HTTP request failed during the link check.
• Empty: The host server returns an ’empty’ response with no content.

Broken links will affect user experience which increase the bounce rate. 

Read: How to fix the broken link?

Thin Content: 

If you are not giving any quality to the visitors, the results will obviously be dissatisfying! 

With that, understand that thin content is the piece that has no or little value to the user. 

Doorway pages or pages with low-quality content are considered of no value for Google. 

You can identify a thin content page using: 

• An SEO crawler to find the pages with least word count.
• An SEO crawler to find the content that can have duplicate content issues.
• Look at the backlinks.
• Check if the content is stolen.

You can also use some tools that can help you find out thin content:

• Screaming Frog
• Market Muse
• Copyscape
• Grammarly

When you have found the issues with the content, this is how you can fix it:

• Expand the content and make it bigger with wise keyword stuffing.
• Rewrite the content and remove errors. Include long-tail keywords.
• Remove the duplicate content pieces. Pull the exciting section and include that in the higher ranking content piece.

If the content you provide is not of high quality ,you will have to face Google Thin Content Penalty. Also the google ranking will fall because of poor user experience.

Follow Google Webmaster’s Guidelines to fix your website. 

Read: What is Thin Content and How to Fix it?

HTTPS Protocol: 

HTTPS is the secure version of Hypertext Transfer Protocol. 

HTTPS is a protocol that keeps the communication secure so that the data is kept safe and there is no security breach.

Google has made it mandatory for the business to  upgrade their website to the HTTPS version. The version is safer, faster, and it makes the visitors feel secure and authenticated.

Source: HTTP VS HTTPS

Why HTTPS?

• With the secured version, the users feel safe and know that their personal data will not be compromised. 
• Google and search engines use HTTPS as a ranking signal. 

Though HTTP is a past, but if you want to follow HTTPS protocol, keep these things in mind:

• Utilize relative URLs for resources that are using the same secure domain.
• Do not use no-index meta tag for robots.txt
• Carefully push the migration from HTTP to HTTPS.
• Decide and know how you would migrate from HTTP to HTTPS using your tools and analytics software.

HTTPS prevents anyone from tampering with the communication between your website and the user’s browser. Ultimately, the user experience remains unimpacted and the site gets a higher ranking. 

Cannibalisation: 

Cannibalisation happens when identical keywords are spread across the content on the website. Because of this, Google cannot judge which content should it rank?

The two pages compete with each other and affect the site’s performance in SERP. If many articles are optimized for the same set of keywords they are eating each other’s chance to rank. 

Cannibalisation can occur not just for the same keywords but also for the ones that are approximately the same. You can check your website for keyword cannibalisation using different tools like 

• SEMrush
• Keylogs Keyword Cannibalisation Checker
• Google Search Console
• Moz Keyword Explorer

Now let us understand keyword cannibalisation with an example:

KW 1: What is SEO Guide?

KW2: SEO Guide

Both the keywords direct to the same destination page to www.moz.com. 

• Simple way to resolve cannibalisation is to check and edit your content. 
• Analyze the website content performance and decide which content you want to keep. 
• Merge, delete, or redirect the content to improve the SEO and google rankings.

Read: How to Spot and Fix Keyword Cannibalisation?

Structure of Blogs: 

Blogs are used to improve the SEO for a brand. People will keep reading and the engagement increases.

Well, this means that blogs are highly relevant for a company to inform their users about their product and services. This makes deciding the structure of blogs of high priority.

Keep in mind a few things while deciding the structure of the blog to improve the ranking in Google SERP.

• Use long-tail keywords in your blogs. Include them in the title, meta description, Alt Image Text, Body Text, and URL.
• Create unique informative blogs consistently, it will help you drive more traffic to your blog.
• Update the old content. Older the blog, the higher will be the authority. 
• Optimize the blog-Include bullets, numbered lists, short paras, add subheadings to break the paragraph. The optimization helps the crawler bots to crawl your website.
• Featured snippets are best from an SEO perspective. Include a direct answer to any query in the featured snippet, your chances of ranking are higher.
• Develop link building strategy for SEO. Apart from backlinks, you can also develop internal linking as it helps the search engine identify the context of the post. 
• Choose integrative responsive design and optimize your website for the use of mobiles as a major part of traffic comes from mobiles these days.
• Includes optimized videos and images. 

Read: How to Structure a Blog Post?

Domain Authority and Page Authority: 

Knowing exactly how your websites are performing on the search engines is important. Two metrics that help you evaluate include Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA).

Domain authority(DA)  is a metric that tells how well your website is doing on the search engine. DA score ranges from 1 to 100.

The above image shows the domain authority of Noboru World. 

In common, sites with a large number of high-quality external links have high domain authority. The DA score helps to predict the site’s ability to rank within its competitor’s landscape.

Page Authority (PA) is a score developed by MoZ that tells how a particular page will rank on search engine page results. The ranking is a score that ranges from 1 to 100.

When the score of the web page is higher, the likelihood of a page ranking higher is more.

This is how you can increase the Domain Authority:

• Work on off page SEO.
• On-Page SEO optimization.
• Technical SEO. 
• Improve page speed.
• Build responsive websites.
• Acquire high-quality backlinks.
• Create link-worthy impressive content.
• Audit and remove bad links.
• Optimize website for a great user experience.
• Improve internal links.

Once the domain authority gets better, the chance of higher page authority rises.

• Improve link profile.

Read: Practical Steps to Increase Your Website’s Domain Authority.

Spam Score: 

Spam Score defines the percentage of sites that are similar with the features to the site you are researching. Google can penalize heavily if the spam score is high.

Score	Percentage
Low Spam Score	1%-30%
Medium Spam Score	31%- 60%
High Spam Score	61%-100%

A high spam score means poor ranking and bad google experience.

To identify the authenticity of the website, Moz also developed a tool that could check whether the websites are spammy or trustworthy or not? The range or the metrics of the ranking varied from 0 to 17. In this 0 meant, most trustworthy whereas 17 indicated the least trustworthy site.

Read: Spam Score.

Backlinks or Spammy Backlinks: 

A backlink is also called the inbound link, that is the links on other websites that direct the traffic or connect the readers to your website. 

Penguin 4.0 update Google Algorithm filters site with low-quality backlink profiles.

Traffic falling on your website from a webpage higher authority can help improve the ranking in search engines. This is why backlinks are the strong ranking factor.

To get backlinks you can find opportunities with the top referral sources. Apart from these, you can:

1. Use Google Search Console to get backlinks.
2. Check what the competitors are doing and use the same type or same backlinks.
3. Check for the broken links and fix them to maintain the traffic.
4. Mind to create high-quality content that’s link worthy.

Outbound Links: 

Outbound links are the links that point out from your website to another.

It is done to link the user to another link to get more information about the topic. Outbound links are important for SEO and planning marketing strategies. 

With Outbound links, you can:

• Strengthen topical signals of the web.
• Add value to your content.
• Build reader’s trust.
• Demonstrate expertise.

Outbound linking is providing more information to the readers by linking them to another website. Outbound links send visitors to completely new pages on different websites.

These are the things you can keep in mind for outbound linking:

• Link to pages that add value to the topic you speak about.
• Link to pages with good domain authority and page authority.
• Avoid link farms that are not a part of a private blog network.

Read: Outbound links-Do They Affect SEO?

Inbound Links: 

Inbound Links are the links that come from another site to your website.

If you have more inbound links, Google thinks that you have high quality content. And with that one point goes in your kitty. 

One effective strategy to build inbound links is to get involved in the local community to help locals know that you exist. 

Other strategies to build inbound links are:

1. Getting featured in the blogs published by the local influencers. They have millions of followers and the people who follow them can visit your page.
2. Join a business association as that can provide you backlinks.
3. Try to get listed in the local business directories.
4. Know which sites already have their links with you. Use a tool to get the complete list of backlinks. 

Once you get backlinks from high reputable websites, your website will rank higher in the search engine. 

High-quality inbound links have these qualities:

• They come from authoritative sources.
• They use anchor text.
• They are diverse.

Read: How Inbound Links Help You?

Domain Reputation: 

Domain reputation in simple words is a measure of how trustworthy is your domain considered when people receive email from your domain.

It is the overall health of the branded domain as interpreted by mailbox providers. Your website has a credit score which defines domain reputation. 

A higher score means higher engagements, less spam complaint rates,  less bounce rates, and low spam traps.

Important things about domain reputation:

• It is important that you maintain a positive domain reputation metrics and inbox placement. 
• Use Google Postmaster Tool  to gauge the overall health of the domain and see reputation shifts in real time. 

Steps to improve domain reputation:

• Decrease email sending frequency.
• Clean-up email list that does not respond.
• Send good emails with catchy lines.
• Personalize emails.

A poor domain reputation will put your mails in a spam folder to affect your business.

Read: Ways to Check and Improve Domain Reputation.

Intent Enabled Content:

Intent enabled content is a content that satisfies the user’s search intent. Google now does not display content in the search results that are based on the keywords alone. And with the changing time and the perspective, it all became important to have intent-based content. 

Intent-enabled content can also help in SEO and helps to create significant impact on the conversion as well.

Optimizing the content for the user’s search intent is of high priority if you are looking for Google ranking. 

Different type of intent that a user may have include:

• Informational
• Navigational for comparison
• Transactional 

Making content around high search volume will not make any sense. In the current trend and scenario, considering Google’s Search Intent is the best way to find your way up Google Ranking. This is what you can do to create intent-enabled content:

• Convert long-tailed keywords into content.
• Turn frequently asked questions into content.
• Avoid promotional approaches and write helpful content.
• Create seasonal intent-based content.
• Make sure the content is shareable and downloadable.

Read: How to create intent-based content to improve conversions?.

Comprehensive and Concise Content: 

Stories are good to read but not everyone is interested to read!

A Comprehensive and Concise content is high-quality content because:

• It answers what the searcher’s are looking for.
• Keeps them away from leaving the page, that is, low bounce rate.
• Increases the dwell time.

These are the ways in which you can create comprehensive and concise content.

• Place the important information at the top of the page and end it with the conclusion. Google also ranks a content that is structured and helps users to conveniently find information. If the content is of high quality and is structured for high engagement, then the possibility of visitors spending more time on the page increases.
• Don’t stuff with keywords, rather consider using LSI. 
• Choose a topic based on semantic search.
• Choose words carefully and keep your language simple enabling readers to understand your message clearly. 

Remember for Google Content, you have to create E-A-T: Engagement, Authority and increase Trustworthiness.

Read: How to create Comprehensive Content?

Keyword Density: 

We know keywords are highly regarded ever since writing content gained relevance. 

A ratio of keywords used in the content helps to earn higher rankings in Google. Before understanding the ratio of keywords in the content, let us know what keyword density is. 

Keyword Density is the number of times a phrase appears in relation to the amount of text on the page. 

It is achieved by dividing the number of keywords by the number of words multiplied by 100.  

Some facts on Google Keywords:

• Keyword density is important for SEO because Google tries to match a user’s search query to the best-fitting web pages. Keywords help to link the intent of the web page. 
• Use Keywords or the phrases for which you want the page to rank.
• Over repeating the keywords all through the content can confuse Google for the phrase you want to rank. It can reduce relevance of the content failing your efforts to rank.

Initially, stuffing the keywords as much as possible without content making much sense was the practice. And to everyone’s dismal, Google’s algorithm changed. Gradually a rule of 1% of keywords in an article became popular. 

Much later, the relevance of content rose and shifted towards context writing. Some of the tools that you can use to derive Google Keywords:

• Google Keyword Planner 
• Moz Keyword Search Tool
• Google Trends
• Answer the Public
• Ahrefs Keyword Generator
• SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool

Use the keyword tools to improve the content ranking, relevance, and offer better user experience.

Pagination: 

Pagination is an automated process of adding consecutive numbers on pages to identify the sequence of pages.

 Pagination is bringing close the content pieces that can help the readers.

• Pagination can improve the user experience with the lots of information present in manageable chunks. For example an online retail seller can sell multiple products on the same platform. 
• It is the process of separating the digital or print content into discrete pages.
• At times, a website content broken into pages make it more user-friendly Apart from convenient information browsing, the navigation gets easier on paginated pages. 
• Pagination delivers structure and feedback helping users to see content that has links further.
• Pagination refers to shorter pages in general that helps in navigation.

Read: Scrolling Vs Pagination: Which is Right For You?

Breadcrumb: 

A breadcrumb shows the page’s position in the hierarchy of the site. 

Breadcrumb is a small text path which is located at the top of the page indicating where the user is on the site. 

It is a small menu usually located at the top of the page. The breadcrumb acts as a navigational aid that assists the users to come back to the home page from the current page.

On the page of Noboru world, you can reach the section of insight and core web vitals blog here.

Breadcrumbs are important because they make the navigation easier. 

• These are good for SEO as they encourage the visitors to visit more pages before they want to leave the page.
• Breadcrumbs are a useful UX feature that makes the site’s navigation easier. 
• Breadcrumbs are important for SEO as Google now shows the breadcrumbs in search results and categories the information accordingly. It helps to navigate and categorize your website.

There are 3 types of breadcrumbs to include 

1. Hierarchy-based breadcrumbs
2. Attribute-based breadcrumbs
3. History-based breadcrumbs 

Read: What are breadcrumbs & Why do they matter for SEO?

Cache: 

Cache is defined as a snapshot of web pages that Google creates and stores after it indexes a page.

Caching requires storage of certain assets locally so that the assets can be used locally without requiring a full round trip to request to the server. It can involve a text-only version of cache which is important for SEO so that the site is loaded fast to improve the user experience.

• Google cache is of high relevance for content creators and marketers. 
• It provides a lower scaled version of the original website content without images or infographics.

• A cache server saves web pages or internet content locally. When the information is stored in the server, the speed to access the data improves and the load time reduces. 

If the load time improves, the user’s experience just gets better. 

Color Selection: 

Color selection has its own role to play when it comes to creating a soft note at the end of planning online business. You can stir the visitor’s emotion or take them to respond to a call-to-action. 

Colors help to capture the attention of the visitors, in simple words you can use colors for brand recognition. 

Using a soft color tone on your website is favorable as it increases the chances of a visitor to stay longer on the website. 

Quick tips for color selection:

• For a higher ranking on SEO and better user experience, selection of color is important as it affects readability. 
• When the colors used are perfect, they are easy to scan, legible, and understandable. 
• Choose colors that reflect professionalism, trust, and dignity. But keep color contrast in mind so that the sites are easy to read.

Copied Design:

Why copy when you know you are Unique!

Copying a website design can attract legal actions against you.

Google can categorize it as web design plagiarism. It can at times cost business for companies that own the original design. 

Most common acts that define website design copying include:

• Copying website designs and elements of UI/UX.
• Copying landing pages.
• Copying administrative structures.
• Fonts on the same website design can be considered a copy.

Copying designs affects your credibility in search results which can further impact your market. 

If you do not take care of keeping the design original, your website can:

• Be seized after receiving warnings.
• A heavy penalty can be imposed if you are found guilty.
• You lose the chance to get original business.

Read: Are you Guilty of Web Design Plagiarism? Here’s all you need to know.

Favicon: 

Favicon is a small 16X16 pixels icon that helps people to identify your brands. It is a graphic image that is associated with a particular web page.  

Favicon= “Favorite Icon”

It helps visitors locate your page easily when there are more than one tab open. 

Why Favicons?

• They help users remember your site while browsing through multiple urls.
• With Favicons you add legitimacy to your site and it pushes your credibility which is essential when you connect with your target customers. 
• It helps the users recognise your website whether it is in the search history or list of bookmarks in the website. Favicons make it easier to access a website. 

Make sure that when you create Favicon for your website, use the space wisely, keep it simple and maintain the brand identity. It improves the user experience and helps them connect with your brand easily.

Read: Importance of Favicon to increase the SEO ranking.

Social Media Links: 

Your website cannot be the only way to inform people about your existence. What more you can do is connect with people on social media platforms. The wisest thing to do and remain in competition!

Source: https://www.noboruworld.com 

Why social media linking?

• Making this an SEO-friendly activity, make the social media profile with the same name as that of your brand and company. It enables people to find you. 
• Gradually, you will observe more people visiting your website through social media than website. Social media can help you get quick results.
• Social media links help in increasing your brand reach and awareness through the user’s network.
• It helps people to increase brand followers.

Leave information about your social handles on the website and everywhere else allowing people to connect faster with you. It makes the user experience better.

Contact Information: 

Contact information is the details like your phone number, email, and your name. For businesses, it also includes your professional profile. 

It aids the visitors to contact the organization or individual owning the website. 

Source:https://www.noboruworld.com/ 

Why do you need contact information on the website?

• A good contact information makes you look accessible. 
• It helps people trust you and build your authenticity.

This implies that contact information is as crucial as owning a website itself. If your customers are not able to connect with you by any means, there will be no point in the existence of your business.

Upload the correct and latest contact details so that people can reach you right.You can place it in the footer or on the main page navigation making it easier for people to access. 

Service Pages: 

Service page is an open canvas to tell the target customers and others of what you do. 

You can also tell the people how you are distinct from other competitors.

Source:https://www.noboruworld.com 

• Explain all the services in the clear content and make efforts on providing users with the best experience.
• Apart from adding quality text, add elements that capture the attention of the users like graphics and images. 
• For an effective service page, choose simple layout, subtle transitions, make good use of white space, easy navigation, and include numbers.

The service page analytics help you pitch business to newer clients.

Read: Tools needed by service page administrator.

FAQ Section: 

Give the world more than they need. Create content to answer all the queries that individuals may have about your products/business.

Other than adding the content, like about us or brand story, you can add basic frequently asked questions. 

The FAQ section gives a lot to experiment for the users. They can use long-tailed keywords and try to increase the page ranking for the keyword.

Some more tips on adding FAQs are:

• The best way to add questions is to search on Google the ones’ that are commonly asked. 
• Include keywords to optimize this on-page content. It will enhance your ranking and optimize the content for SEO purposes.
• Make a dedicated page for the FAQ section.
• Hyperlink each query with another page, either on your site or on Google.
• Add FAQ page to the sitemap.

Provide the FAQs with the best answers to the questions that your audience asks. Helpful content is now easy to rank on Google as the search algorithms are looking for such content.

Read: 12 Crystal Clear FAQ page example and how to make your own.

Help Center and Support: 

Helping your customers in all their queries is your first priority because that is the way you stay connected with your customers. 

Making your presence identifiable and installing a help or support center gives your customers a chance to connect with you easily. 

SEO tips for help center page:

• Add relevant links on the help center page to other pages of the website.
• Use long tailed keywords on the page.
• Give clear information to enhance the customer’s experience. 

Phone Numbers: 

Phone numbers are the first contact option when a customer wants to connect. It is because of the response time it takes to connect via a call. 

Connecting over email can be more time consuming than you think. Mails can be a slow process to reach out especially when the customers are in a hurry. Phones save time to inform the customer.

Tips to leave phone numbers:

• Leave a number like “Contact our dedicated team of brand name at XXXXXXX.” Including the name of the company is a plus giving you an option to .
• Add a phone number that works. Make sure there are no connectivity or billing issues so that you can respond quickly over that.
• A working phone number increases your credibility and builds trust.

Content and Page Structure (hierarchy): 

Content and page hierarchy refers to the strategic arrangement of content on the website. 

Important content must be placed at the top of the page and the less relevant content is kept at the bottom. Content hierarchy is relevant from the reader’s perspective. If your website furnishes the information which is easy to scan, trust it will be winning half the race. 

With classic well-structured content, efficient navigation and processing becomes faster.

With a page structure, you can add:

• Page Regions: Mark regions on web pages using HTML5.
• Labeling Regions: It is to help users to distinguish regions on pages.
• Headings: Headings distinguish the content and help readers browse through conveniently.
• Structure: Add structure to the content which should be enriched with the meaningful element.

When you add page structure to the website, 

• It guides Google and the customers to browse through the website. 
• It gets easier to rank higher. 
• A simplified structure boosts the navigation of the website ultimately leading to improved Google experience. 
• The upscaled Google experience will increase your chances to convert the sales.

iFrames: 

iFrames are in-line frames which are an HTML element that loads another HTML page within the document.

It helps to put the page within the parent page. iFrames allows you to bring the content from another website onto yours. 

You must choose to use iFrame when you want to share non-text based content (which is difficult to duplicate).  For example, putting a video telling how your product works.

• iFrames are largely to inform your audiences better. 
• It neither help nor hurt your search engine ranking. 

How do iFrames work?

Website owners can add iFrame in the web code. Google search bots crawl the iFrame and read the <iFrame> tag to identify that it is content replication and not duplication. Apart from adding the iFrame tag, it is important to index iFrame with robots.txt helping the bot to allow or disallow a search engine crawl.

iFrames may allow the 3rd parties to inject malicious virus or worms into the user’s device this is why it’s use became disputable.

Read: 4 iFrame Security Concerns You Should Know.

Author or publisher information: 

Adding author or publisher information has been a common practice for years when talking of SEO. When there is information about the author on the webpage, it can help the readers build trust in the website.

This information is available below the post or the page on the footer of the website. Including author information gives a direct impact on organic search performances. Authorship is more qualitative in nature giving an edge to the website.

You can check about the author or explore more about it:

• By checking About, Team, and Contact Us Page.
• Verify the Copyright notice in the footer.
• Use the “WhoIs” tool to find out the information about the website publisher.
• Browse the legal pages of the website like that of “Terms of Service”, “Refund Policy”, and “Privacy Policy”.

Further the strength of the author’s bio can add relevance to the content area of your website. If the authorship is established, your website gains relevance and higher ranking.

Interlinking: 

Interlinking is creating any link from one page of your website to another page on the website. Like link from one article  to another so that the readers are more related and they can be redirected on your site only. 

Links help the users as well as Google to navigate through the content on your website. 

Interlinking is way more important than inbound liking and outbound linking. You must include links on all pages like home page, menu, or anywhere within your content.

Benefits of interlinking:

• Google bot crawler helps establish relationships between the two pages and two posts. 
• Link value changes. Google divides the link value between the two pages. On a website, the highest link value is found on the homepage because it has the maximum backlinks. So, if you add a new article, it is better you link it with the homepage. 
• Linking two pages on your website, funnels the authority to help search engines understand more about your website. It happens because internal links pass PageRank with anchor text.
• Improves the fitness of the website. 
• Helps reduce website’s bounce rate.
• Helps to increase the ranking of your website.
• Interlinking can increase the number of page visits.

Read: What is interlinking and why is it one of the best SEO practices?

Anchor text: 

Anchor text is the link title that is added to optimize the title for SEO. 

This text helps to determine the ranking that the page will get in the search engines. To make it simple, Anchor Text is clickable text in the hyperlink. By default the anchor text appears blue and underlined to stand out from the simple text.

A keyword-rich anchor text allows search engines to find the topic on the web. 

Good anchor text could be:Read here more about SEO, Click here to know What is SEO? Are you thinking how this can happen?

The intent of the anchor text is as good as the importance of the keywords.

Adding anchor text is a part of the SEO strategy. It :

•  Affects the user experience 
• Search engines index and rank web pages.
• Increases the trust of the user.
• Boosts SEO efforts and gives the right signals to search engine crawlers.

Next, you can read about Copyright.

Copyright: 

Copyright is an intellectual property that protects the original work of the author. It gives the exclusive rights to distribute, copy, display, or perform a work to the original author only.

Your website is your idea and it is your genuine work. It is important to get your website copyrighted as it protects your original work and builds authorship for you. Under copyrighting, you can include photographs you uploaded on your website. 

Website copyrights are easy to get when you have authorship of original work. 

The procedure to file for a copyright is simple.

• You have to login to the geographical authority website.
• Fill in the copyright application.
• Conform to the legal requirements. 

Copyrighting is important as it can save you from troubles like work leak, privacy, etc.

Link density: 

The number of links placed on the content page refers to link density. 

Both internal and external links are important for SEO as it helps to establish how much traffic your site will receive.

For any business, higher link density can bring the convenience of navigation on the website. 

Google while verifying the link density for ranking, looking at the number of links on the source page. The link density also checks for the text in the segment around and evaluates what percentage of this text is covered in the link. 

Text to Code Ratio: 

Text to Code Ratio is the percentage of actual text that is present on a web page. Text is the actual content that you upload on the website whereas code is the HTML code that is required for the web page to run.  

You can use softwares like these to check the text-to-code ratio for your website.

Quick bytes for text-to-code ratio:

• The ideal text-to-code ratio is 10%. 
• If the ratio is less than 10% then you must consider optimizing the HTML Code, JS Code, and CSS Code.  
• A good text-to-code ratio ranges from anywhere between 25% to 70%. 

You must check your website’s text-to-code ratio to optimize the content and increase your probability of ranking higher.

When the ratio for Text (actual write-up) to Code is higher, the user experience gets better. And when the user experience is rated higher, the overall Google experience improves.

Responsive website:

Responsive website is the one that creates dynamic changes to a website depending on the screen size and device. 

Let us see responsive websites with an example. 

Check Slack which is a digital platform that allows you to send audio and video at a workplace. The website when opened on a desktop or a laptop shows 3 columns of the companies at the bottom of the page. 

But if the same page is opened on a mobile, the website responds with company names one below the other.

The website is responsive and it does not give challenges to the users. In short, the user experience remains unaltered which influences the Google ranking positively. So, the next time you are thinking of a site upgrade, you know what not to miss.

Some of the reasons why you should work on responsive web designs:

• Higher ranking:Google ranks mobile-friendly websites.
• Better usability: Responsive web designs make websites easy to navigate, more accessible, and faster. 
• Improved user-experience: Responsive web designs are essential to offer improved user-experience.
• Lesser load time:Websites that are responsive load faster on both laptop and mobiles.
• Reduced bounce rate: A responsive website has reduced bounce rate as it satisfies the visitors.

Read: Top 7 benefits of Responsive Web Design.

Hreflang: 

Hrefland is an HTML attribute used by Google to direct geographical targeting of a web page.

It allows search engines to offer correct pages in different languages.

You can have your webpages in different languages depending on the country or part of the world you are serving. It helps you to increase your business presence globally.

But how does the website know which page should be shown when the user is searching for it? 

Hreflang tag informs Google about the language you are willing to show on a specific page. The Hreflang attribute is rel= “alternate” hreflang= “preferred language”. Below is the Hreflang tag mentioned on https://www.apple.com/

Benefits of Hreflang Tags:

• The Hreflang tag helps Google to know the relationship between web pages in alternate languages. WIth the tag, you can conveniently take the target audience on the page they are looking for. For example, for a Spanish version of the English page, you will use the tag hreflang=”es”. Now the search engine will give the Spanish version of the page to the readers who are in a country where Spanish is the primary language. With Hreflang tag, the bounce rate of the website decreases and the user experience remains unaffected. 
• It engages more of the local audience.
• Hreflang tags reduce bounce rate.
• Improves search engine rankings by pointing the users in the right direction.
• Hreflang allows the search engine to differentiate between duplicate and similar content.

Average Time Spent: 

If you serve quality content the users will stick to reading what you offered as information. But if the content is poor, you will not have many visitors. 

The average time spent on the page is the time spent on a single page. If you want to increase the visitor’s time spent on the page, including videos on your site is a good idea.

The average session or average time spent can be calculated using Google Analytics. It can be calculated with the total duration of each session which is further divided by number of sessions. Suppose you visit a single page in 3 sessions for (100+60+80) 240 seconds. So the average time spent will be 240/3= 80 seconds.

If the average time spent is higher, it indicates that the user experience is better. And if the page experience is better, the Google experience report will be excellent, further pushing your website’s ranking.

Bounce rate: 

Amount of visitors that leave a website and navigate off after viewing the page only once, refers to the bounce rate. 

Lower bounce rates do not signify lower Google Ranking but indicate single-engagement visits on a website. 

The image below shows benchmark bounce rates for different website types.

Bounce rate measures the number of people who come to your page and then leave without engaging with the product in a meaningful way. The bounce rate can be higher on the contact us page because the user will come and leave after checking the information. 

High bounce rates can be due to other SEO factors that can influence the visitors decision to stay on the page. At times, a website can have high bounce rates and high dwell at the same time which can be damaging. Let us understand the concept with the image below.

The picture shows that with a high bounce rate the chances of high dwell time increases as the website most likely satisfies the needs of the visitors without linking. 

But on the other hand, if the website flow is problematic and the page load time is higher, the bounce rate can be higher.

Bounce rate is a metric that helps the website owner to determine how best the user’s journey is optimized. And if the user’s experience is good, the possibility of ranking gets better.

Read: Does  Bounce Rate Matter in 2022?

CTR: 

Click Through Rate (CTR) is the number of clicks received on your ad divided by the time the ad is shown. 

The clicks on the ad are Clicks and the Views of the ad are called Impressions. For example if your ad has 1 click against 1000 impressions, a CTR is 0.1%. 

CTR is an indication of how relevant your ads are to the website owner. It tells the Ad Rank in the search engine. This is why it is crucial to know the CTR on your ads.

A high CTR indicates that your ad is highly relevant and a low CTR means that the ad is less relevant. The goal of running ads is to push people to visit your website so that it is converted into sales or filling a contact form. 

A few factors that affect CTR include:

• Imagery
• Call-to-Action Copy
• Keywords
• Ad positioning
• Audience Targeting
• Competition and your bid

Ways to improve CTR are:

• Include CTA
• Optimize your copies and headlines
• Use hashtags
• Use images 

Read: 2022 comparison of Google organic clickthrough rates (SEO CTR) by ranking position.

Optimize CSS and Javascript: 

A website’s performance can increase the conversion rate. When the load time is high, the user experience gets affected and it further leads to a high bounce rate. 

The site performance can improve the conversion rates for you which is why optimizing the CSS code and Javascript is important.

A type of CSS declaration is:

There are ways in which you can optimize the CSS and Javascript. These include:

• Minify CSS and Javascript to remove unwanted characters so that the file size reduces and it takes less time for the code to work. You can manually comb the codes by removing extra space, comments, and new lines. 

• Use Inline Small Javascript and CSS to consolidate the code to improve the page speed. But keep in mind if you add too much code to HTML files, it can get bigger and all the speed gain can go in vain.

• Order styles for more efficient loading. A browser will not display the website information until it accesses the page’s CSS. This is why CSS has to load faster so that the user experience remains uninterrupted. Place CSS in the <head tag> and JavaScript on the <bottom tag>.

These are the ways in which you can optimize CSS code of your website.

Local pages: 

Local pages are web pages for every business location. Businesses that want to serve customers across different geographical locations, use local pages. 

Marketing business in search engines using the local pages to capture the market can also help improve SEO. But before you start using it, find out whether or not you need it.

When you highlight your geographical location, it builds your credibility which supports your search results.  

Below is an example of why local pages also push your business.

It is an image of SERP that shows the presence of JKJ and Sons diamond manufacturers on the first page of Google. 

The same diamond makers have optimized their page for Jaipur city also. See in the image below:

Highlights of local pages:

• If you rank higher in local search for all products, business, services, or for any other information, it increases your online visibility. 
• Local pages and SEO can also bring more foot traffic to your location.
• When visitors know your location, they trust you more than your competitors. Gradually, you have more targeted traffic that increases the chances of conversion.

Apart from local pages, you can also claim GMB (Google My Business Listings) to enhance your local SEO strategy. Try and optimize your website for mobile screens. If you build local links, it will be better for your website as it gains domain authority.

Disavow file: 

If you feel that the link from another website is not giving you much of a benefit, you can’t just give it away. Right? But how to handle it?

Use the feature of Disavow a file. 

Disavow file is a text file that helps you deactivate a link from another website that links to your domain. With the text file you tell the search engines which backlinks should be removed from your website. If you have an irrelevant link then search engines might devalue your website.

These links can be harmful and give a negative affect to your ranking hence it is wise to remove them from the SEO point of view. 

You can see the notepad file that can disavow a URL or domain.

To set up a disavow file this is what you can do:

• Check the list of all the backlinks from all available sources. Use tools like SEMrush, Majestic, MOZ, and Ahrefs.
• Copy all the links and collate them in a spreadsheet.
• Choose which backlinks you want to keep and which ones you want to remove.
• Create a Disavow.txt file.
• Login in your account and then upload the file to Disavow.txt file.

Make sure that you do not remove all the backlinks as it won’t be wise from the SEO point of view.

Read: What is a Disavow File in detail?

Keyword Research- 

Keyword research is the process of finding the relevant words that people enter into search engines for the purpose of finding information.

The keyword research helps you find words that are useful for the target audience. It is because we do not create content around what we want to speak about, rather it is the content that the people are already searching for.

With research you select the most appropriate words that give you higher opportunity to rank well. 

There are different methods to choose the keywords. 

1. Simple Google Search: Type in the Google search a word that relates your industry, and the related words will display. You can manually select the long-tail keywords.One way could be to choose the important phrases that are relevant to your industry. To begin with, identify the language preference of the  target customers they use while searching for product or service.

2. Use Keyword Tools: Another way could be to use Keyword Tools like Google Keyword Planner,SEMrush, Answer The Public, Ahrefs,and others. For example, you are into sales of life insurance policies. You want to promote a term plan that fetches you maximum return. Now, on your website, you will guide the users with keywords like “best term plan” or “best term plan in India”. Let us evaluate which of the two keywords will be appropriate from an SEO point of view.

KW 1: “best term plan”

Out of the two keywords, you can evaluate that using KW 2-best term plan in India is an easy keyword you can use.

Keyword Research is important as:

• It gives you marketing trend insight.
• It can give important information to grow your business online. 
• With proper keywords, you can beat the competition and expand your content business online.
• It gives you traffic growth.
• You can have a focused marketing approach and a higher rate of customer acquisition.

When you focus on keyword research, this is what you can pay attention to:

• Authority
• Relevance
• Volume

Read: How to research keywords to improve SEO?

Consistent monitoring: 

Consistent monitoring refers to monitoring visibility and ranking of your website. It is searching for overall brands and finding out how you can improve the ranking on a search engine. 

With SEO monitoring, you can find:

• Source of organic traffic
• Bounce rate
• Click-through rate
• Page speed
• Conversion rates
• Keyword ranking
• Backlinks

Consistent monitoring help you in:

• Improving SEO rankings.
• Know what is working well for your site.
• Notifying over which areas you need improvement.
• Help you avoid penalties.
• Monitor the competition.

Monitoring a website’s performance consistently is important because it is important to improve the user’s experience.

Next let us read about Chatbots.

Chat bot: 

Chatbot is a software or a conversational tool that is used to conduct chat online. It helps to connect faster and live with the human agent.

It enables the managerial team to focus on their tasks like making strategies and engaging in activities that cannot be replicated by softwares. 

About 2 years ago, chatbots emerged as the major contributing factor to process the sales request faster. Chatbots became the fastest communication channel for many businesses.

With Chatbots, the user’s experience improved as there were automated replies available which satisfied the users. Chatbots give a personal touch to the site and inform the users that you care for the visitors. 

Also, when the communication gets better, the users easily get what they want which ultimately leads increased conversion rate and low bounce rate. 

Some of the benefits of a chatbot include:

• Cost saving otherwise you have to invest money to deploy a man-power for customer care. 
• Enhance customer engagement 
• Automates lead generation.
• Provide support to customers.
• It saves time for the business owners.
• Gives an edge over competition.
• Improves your 24/7 availability.

The benefits of the chatbots are high, hence when you choose a chatbot make sure that it supports your website without affecting the Google experience.

When you offer a great user experience, the visitors on the website will spend more time. It further leads to higher conversion rates and better ROI. Next, you can read about customer experience.

Customer experience: 

Customer experience is the customer’s opinion or feeling caused by interactions with supplier’s employees, products, systems, or services.

Evaluating customer’s experience is of prime importance as customers are the king of the market. And their demand is what drives the market. You can lead in business only if you serve the customers what they ask for. 

Constant improvement in product or services is a must when it comes to enhancing customer’s experience. The two things essential for customer experience are people and product.

A perfect customer experience is when the customer’s needs and expectations are constantly met. 

Maintaining a good customer experience is important as it gives you a chance to gauge:

• Customer’s loyalty
• Higher retention rate
• Increased revenue growth

To build an excellent customer experience, create a vision for you to focus on. Before you start with strategies, you must explore your target customers and establish an emotional connection with them. 

Try this to improve the customer experience:

• Identify the personality of your brand.
• Increase the website load speed. Make it faster.
• Improve the designs of your website.
• Make the navigation easy for the website.
• Offer quality content with high user engagement.
• Simplify the checkout process on the website.

Read: 9 ways to improve customer experience on your website.

Authentic reviews and ratings: 

Customer reviews impact the customer experience!

Reviews are empowering because they help other customers make a decision about their purchase. 

With the change of trends and times, customers no longer make decisions based on pricing only. They dive deep to find how good the product is and then make a purchase decision.

Authentic reviews and ratings on your website:

• Give more confidence to the potential customers.
• Reduces doubts.
• Leads to higher conversion rates.
• Give confidence to customers to make informed decisions. 

Ultimately, it helps people compare the same product with other brands. If a customer is satisfied with your services, it is likely to make a positive impact on others also.

Fetching review and rating from different platforms to your site:  

Customer’s satisfaction is the game!

Bill Gates once said, “We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”

Reviews and ratings are a part of feedback which is the best practice for performance management. 

To improve customers’ experience with your content, you can collect customer reviews from different review platforms. Later, you can embed these reviews on your media. 

Once the feedback is collected on the website, you can pull that to use on your own website. Constructive reviews can help companies identify which product they should boast about. 

The makers can also know what they need to improve in their existing products.

Read: Ratings and Reviews impact everything from sales to SEO.

Moderation: 

Moderation in online marketing is moderation of various content (videos, pictures, etc.) on the internet. 

Content moderation is about monitoring and applying a set of rules and guidelines to user-generated submissions. It involves screening inappropriate content that affects the customer’s experience.

Brands or companies need to keep a tab on the content that is posted on their platform. Any content on the company’s platform should not cast bad influence on clients. To verify and check this, nothing is better than content moderation. 

It is the cost-effective method that helps brands provide a safe business environement. 

The content posted on the internet must follow all copyrights. 

The Internet is flooded with different types of content. This is why content moderation became important. With content moderation, you can categorize, moderate, rate content on the internet and verify that the content sticks to international, domestic, and national laws. 

The task of moderation can be done both internally as well as externally. In internal content moderation, the company may appoint someone to review and comment regarding the content. If the response does not abide by the laws and regulations, it will be removed.

On the other hand, in external moderation the company can appoint others to monitor, categorize,and rate the content on the website. Content moderation can happen manually as well as with Google algorithms. Depending on the business capacity, companies choose to use content moderation.

Multi Format Content: 

Multi-format content is an effective strategy to reach new as well as existing audiences. It is a way to engage your audience with your brand for a longer time.  

Multi format content increases the engagement of the users because the same kind of content does not work effectively for all people. 

And also businesses do not run successfully on the basis of one platform, this is why it is essential to post multi-format content and that too everywhere.

Content always holds high relevance in digital marketing. 

It initially started with short-form and long-form content that included copy, blogs and articles. But with the passage of time, the relevance of videos, gifs, and images gained pertinence. Why?

• The minimum attention span of humans is believed to be 8 seconds to 12 seconds. With this short duration of time, it gets difficult for the readers to stick to a blog or an article. And this is why companies changed their mode of offering content and shifted to using images, gifs, and videos.
• From an SEO point of view it is important that you use multi-format content. 
• It increases the possibility of your reach amongst people. 
• Similarly, a multi format content will captivate the user’s attention more keeping the bounce rate low and engagement level high.

Keyword Mapping:  

Keyword mapping is the science of mapping keywords to a specific page. Based on the mapping, you can plan for on-page SEO to increase the ranking through the mapped keywords.

But before keyword mapping, the critical step is to conduct keyword research and the current relevancy check. Let us look at each one by one. For keyword research, you must find proper industry-related keywords, both long-tail and head keywords. But remember, you cannot get stuck up to work for ranking all the keywords. 

The second aspect of the Current Relevance Check is assigning the keywords to the pages we want to rank. For this purpose, often, a business can have similar keywords grouped together, which you can plan to optimize for SEO ranking. 

For keyword mapping, the ideal thing is to prepare a keyword mapping spreadsheet. In the sheet, the row refers to a specific page on the website, and each column is a crucial element for on-page optimization.

After understanding what keyword mapping is, understand that with the process you can enhance the visibility of the keywords you want to give priority to. When you are prepared with the keyword mapping sheet, you can prevent duplication of content.

Consistent information in all formats: 

Frequency and high quality content are the keys when it comes to consistent content. Everytime visitors come to your website, they may refer to the content based on their preference. Some may like videos while others may like to read your blogs. This makes it crucial that you share valuable content in a consistent format.

For example, if you are into sales of  digital lock, you will have to tell the readers how it can benefit them. A blog for this purpose can do but at the same time you can also tell them a video that explains both the benefits as well as ways to use the digital lock.

You need to optimize the header, meta tags and content for the same type of information published in different formats.

Multiple formats on one page: 

When displaying information, you can choose to have more than one format of content on the same page. 

Different formats of content work when it comes to sharing information with the visitors. You can plan your content accordingly and break the standard format of blogs. 

Including videos along with the blog may help. This may affect dwell time positively and reduce the bounce rate as the user experience improves. 

When these two are balanced and the content is SEO optimized, you have a higher probability of getting ranked higher in Google search engine.

Length: 

When talking of content, it is not necessary that the readers will surely read the short-form of content (blogs/articles). If the quality of the content is good and it is optimized from the SEO point of view, the chances that readers will get entangled with the long form of content improves. 

Longer content produces higher search rankings, usually they dominate page one of the search rankings. The optimum post length for SEO is believed to be approximately 2200 words to 2500 words.

Longer posts are likely to get more backlinks which is another SEO factor that affects ranking. If you are writing a content for the website, a content of length 200 words to 1000 words is considered good.

Apart from this, make sure that the keywords density is optimal and the content is bifurcated with proper heading and details. Try to add images and videos for SEO purposes.

Originality: 

“The most successful people are so original.”-Idina Menzel. 

In content creation strategy, originality plays a vital role.The first step towards aiming to get a higher rank in Google is placing the original content online. It is the content that sets your website apart from other sites. If you copy the content, you may lose the traffic which you may otherwise get with the original content.

With original content, you can show that you are a genuine brand especially when you want to attract customers and get more engagement. Be original and in the end you will have loyal customers with you.

Authoritative content: 

Bring out the best of the brand with authoritative content. You can inform your visitors that you have expertise in the subject and will provide the right level of information for the readers. You can beat the competition and capture the market for your products/services with authoritative content.

Authoritative content helps the readers with the content they are looking for. You can write 

• Tutorials
• Long-form articles and blogs posts
• Videos about the products
• Guide to help visitors buy products/services.

Authoritative content revolves around serving content based on the user’s search intent. A search intent could be informational, transactional, navigational, or local. Create high-quality, authoritative content helping your visitors stay longer on the website.

Expert Content: 

Getting content from the experts and offering uncompromised information can help customers build trust in you. 

Expert content will end the reader’s search at your website giving them a solution for what they were looking for. Give a masterpiece when it comes to the context of the content. For sure you will have to make it SEO friendly. 

You can create an expert content including these 5 characteristics:

1. The content should offer insights.
2. The content should provide in-depth knowledge.
3. The content piece should be relevant to the readers.
4. It should be easy to understand.
5. The content should exhibit knowledge in all width and depth.

Trustworthy Content: 

Google uses E-A-T to determine the web page ranking. E is for Expertise, A is for Authoritativeness, and T is for Trustworthiness. 

Google raters look for the content as well as the source of origin of the content. Don’t you want the readers to stay on your website? Of course, you will! Prefer to build trustworthy content and support it with facts and figures. When the content is backed by data and research, it becomes trustworthy for the customers. And then they become loyal visitors to your website.

Make sure that the content you share is verifiable because if it cannot be verified from the external links, it loses credibility.

Shareable: 

Websites can have a limited number of visitors and blogs can have a few thousands of readers. But isn’t that lesser than what you can have? Won’t you want your content to spread in leaps and bounds? If yes, then make the content on your website shareable. 

• Share the content on different social media platforms so that you can expect an exponential growth in the visitors. And when the number of visitors grows, the possibility of higher sales/conversion increases.
• Do the competitor’s research before creating the content. It helps you carve out a clean content piece that is enriched with information,videos,keywords, infographics, etc.
• Use storytelling to spread your message.
• Validate your audience’s choice and opinions.
• Content you offer should add some value to your audience.
• Place sharing button without which the content would not be shared further.

Plagiarism: 

You copy a part of the content, you lose readers because they lose trust. 

You repeat copying, your reputation is damaged. After all that work for your business growth, why compromise on content? 

Plagiarism in content leads to violation of Search Engine Optimization Rules further leading to degradation of ranking. It can affect your ranking and in extreme cases, Google can remove your website from the list.

How to save yourself or avert the path of plagiarism?

Use an anti-plagiarism tool to check the quality of the content. Because if you fail to do so, Google can impose plagiarism penalty which will again impact your ranking.

Content Partnership

A content partnership is establishing conjoint between brands, broadcasters, creative producers, and publishers to create audio visual programming across any media platform. 

Content partnership helps you gain publicity through content marketing.

It is a cost-effective way to bring two brands together that can benefit most businesses. With content, you can promote your brand amongst target audiences through different channels.

Why content partnership?

Content partnership help people to:

→ expand their reach

→ receive SEO benefits

With content partnership, 

• You get links from other websites, your possibility to rank higher increases. You gradually get more links that direct to your website and with each link you get ‘link juices’. Content partnership can increase the probability of getting more link juices. After partnership you can make sure that you get link backs to your website.
• Reach the audience faster and connect with them better.
• You can get more creative to tell people about your brand.
• Content partnerships help companies get a better picture of their audience.
• Partnership for content can increase the probability of greater ROI.

Outreach: 

When you have something shareable, it is wise to let the world know that you own valuable things. 

Content outreach is the process of sharing, spreading and promoting the content to the contacts or target audience. If with the content you are able to influence your potential customers, think half the battle is won.

An example of content outreach will be to approach the popular profiles, blogs, or sites that can promote your content. In addition, it can give a link back to your website. 

There are some SEO benefits from content marketing partnerships. For a content partnership, there are two cases:

• Each link that you get to your page brings ‘link juice’, if you bring back a link from the partners site.
• If a content is hosted on your partner’s site, you will have to bring the link back to yours. 

Few things that you need to take care of before content partnership:

• Dofollow and Nofollow Links: A partner can mark a ‘Dofollow’ link if they want to endorse your content. It will bring link juices to your site. Monitor all backlinks and ones that do not improve link juice, mark them rel= “nofollow”.
• Check what kind of links the affiliate is using.  There are 3 kinds of links: Network Links, Direct Links with parameters, and direct link with no parameters.
• Don’t look for Sponsored content. It can get you Page Rank but that will be a violation of Google’s guidelines.
• Avoid PageRank from a site that has a bad reputation, it is not going to get any “link juice”.

Selection of publishers: 

To spread your word to target audiences, you have to distribute content.

To spread the word, you need to conveniently select the publishers that can help you cast an impression on the masses. 

But why publishers when you have your website?

• Though to avoid competition, brands can themselves publish the content online, it may lack a strategy that the content publishers may know.
• Publishers already have a vast, ready-to-sell, and quality audience in every niche. 
• If content marketing is done right, it can bring the right results for brands or companies.

These are the six types of content publishers you can select from:

• Magazine editorial sites.
• Commerce content
• Influencers
• Individual bloggers
• Emerging talent like individual blogger trying to grow their audience
• Niche Sites

Next, let us read about how to pitch when it comes to looking for content partnership.

Pitch: 

There are millions of content pieces available in different forms on the internet.

And yours may be as valuable as that of others. 

If You have the right content pitch, your content will get more exposure.

After you have the content and the pitch ready, the challenge is to get noticed by the publisher, who can take your content to several readers. 

Make sure that the pitch you make is personalized. Better is to reach the publishers who cover the range around your subject or industry. 

Content Co-creation: 

To gain quick publicity, content co-creation can be a quick idea. It can be with another party, influencer, or a partner. 

For a content creation, everyone can have a unique idea but they lack the strategy to reach the masses. This is where you can look for co-creation of content. 

Content co-creation is creating content with another party called an influencer. This stream of generating business is gaining relevance as it saves time and turns out cost-effective.

With content co-creation:

• You get faster access to the partner’s audience, which can otherwise be a difficult spot. 
• In addition, if the trick is fruitful for both, you solidify a partnership for always.
• Apart from these two benefits, you get to learn new techniques which might be helpful for you for more significant partnerships.

Curation:  

Content Curation is about finding, putting it together, and sharing all the relevant information that adds value for your audiences. As a result, curation brings out the best chances to connect more with your audience, giving them valuable information.

Curation gives a relevant perspective to each of your blogs. When you create value for your audience, you increase their chances of staying longer on your page. 

It is the simplest way to provide extra information to your audience.

↑ Value= ↑  Likes =↑  Share = ↑Rankings

For successful content curation, you will have to 

• Choose what worked best in the past.
• Know what your audience wants.
• Add value to what people are looking for in the content.
• Test your content across different platforms.

Read: How to do Content Curation for SEO: Your Starter Guide.

Long term deals: 

Content partnerships are long-term deals to make it a win-win for both. Marketing is an ongoing process that never ends if you want to be in the game for long. 

Establish your long-term deal with content partnership blogs, sites, and influencers that can enhance the scope of your business growth. 

For long term content partnership deals, these are the things that you must take care:

• Ensure that all the stakeholders and the partners are on the same  page.
• Offer something in return to the influencers, bloggers, etc.
• Prepare a strategy that works for your long term deals.
• Prepare a content plan in advance and then approach the content partners.

There are different aspects of working on a content partnership. Next, let us look at negotiations.

Negotiation: 

Do not take anything personally when you are in negotiations!

Content partnership will work for you when you find benefit for a long term. You cannot leave things in the dark because that is about your brand’s image. Think this when you are up for negotiations:

• Find the standard rate structure for the work. Find out for the amount of money you will be paying for the branded content, how much guaranteed number of views will you get. 
• Look for publishers whose pages will bring you an audience that will be interested in your brand.
• Don’t make a choice of the publishers where there are too many advertisements.

Measurement- Tracking parameters: 

Tracking the performance of content partnership is equally important than establishing a long lasting partnership.

Now that you are in a partnership to give a push to your business, you must watch how the partnership is moving. Isn’t it. 

• Measure how many partners are active in your case. 
• Check what is the year-on-year growth in your followers, business, and revenue.
• There is no significant rule to decode in it. Check cost per acquisition, cost per click, cost per lead, attributed ROI, earnings per click, and lifetime value. It will help you evaluate how the partnership is moving forward.

Optimize the resources to head towards success through long-term content partnership.

Relevance: 

A content partnership has relevance for a brand to promote its product or services. It is a cost-effective way to bring two brands together. 

Without content partners, there can be limitations to spreading the information about your brand to your customers. Hence, partnerships can be advantageous.

Content partnership is the right approach for brand marketing. But before that you have to check whether the content partners align with your brand values or not. 

Set guidelines and then see how the marketing through content partnership pays you in terms of return of investment. 

This mode of marketing can be cost-effective. With less investment, you can have higher exposure to your brand and better returns.

Profiling of targeted site: 

Profiling targeted sites understand the exact relationship between the customers and the areas that the customers visit often. 

Profiling of targeted sites helps to identify potential customers and market more effectively. It helps the content creators to improve profitability after selecting the right content partners.

Website profiling is based on determining the exact demographics and identifying the customer’s buying habits. When you know the exact place where you will get your customers, marketing becomes convenient. 

Also, it saves time to place your content and other information because you know your target audience will visit the site. In simple words, you can focus on marketing campaigns.

Authority building: 

Brand’s authority is how likely customers are ready to trust a company for information or products. 

Building authority is increasing credibility for the consumers who read your content. Authority building is a long-term game that can help you increase your brand’s awareness through consistent and strategic content and SEO.

Few ways in which you can think of authority building include:

• Post original content that buzzes the SEO for you. Authority building is not a piece of cake because establishing one for your brand takes years of hard work. 
• Use on-site content to increase brand credibility.
• Make best use of social media platforms to promote your brand and content.
• Use testimonials to highlight the brand’s credibility. 
• Communicate with your customers as much as possible. Answer what the audience is looking for. 
• Associate with other authoritative brands.

Building trust for customers is important if you want to stay in the market for a very long time. It increases your trust in the market, ultimately leading to a higher number of people referring to your brand and increase in ranking.

Content distribution: 

Content distribution refers to spreading the content by different means. 

The content distributed is absorbed and used by the large target audience that can lead to conversion of sales. Promoting content can be any one of the following ways:

• Owned Content Distribution: This content distribution can be on platforms that you own like your blog, newsletter, etc.
• Paid Content Distribution: This type of content is distributed through paid channels and works on pay-per-click-advertising. 
• Earned Content Distribution: This is when third parties share your content through guest posts, media coverage,etc. 

Content distribution is important to improve ranking of your content in SERP. For content distribution you can try:

1. Relevant segment influencers who have high authority.
2. Social media shares.
3. Use co-citation when you mention a brand and it is also done by other brands.

An example of content distribution would be spreading the content in the form of the latest blog or video. Sharing different forms of content through different channels is referred to as distribution. If the channels and the type of content is chosen wisely, it will affect the sales positively to increase the brand awareness. 

Off-page SEO: 

Off-page SEO helps you to improve domain authority for your website. Without off page activities there are higher chances that your website will rank lower.

Off-page SEO activities help :

• Website’s recognition and domain authority. 
• To improve the ranking in the search engine results. 
• The activities to enhance the ranking which are done outside the website and not on the page are categorized as off-page SEO.

Off-page SEO is the most important activity of linking other websites and direct traffic to yours, which is unavoidable when increasing website traffic.

While considering the off-page SEO, you can consider these things:

• Domain Authority: DA represents the quality of website links. A quality link from a higher domain authority website will help improve the ranking for the website with lower DA.
• Relevance: Relevance of the site you want to get a link from back to your website.
• Site Traffic: Site Traffic understands how much the website will bring traffic to your website. Higher traffic indicates higher engagement of people that can lead to higher business probability.
• Link Type: Whether it is a dofollow or no-follow link, find out because it shows how the link will help improve the website traffic.  

Diverse Content: 

Your content may be helping a large audience but not all. This is why you must diversify your content. 

Content plays an important role in SEO success hence if you diversify it, you can win the game.

Content diversification is important to reach all your audience. Targeting an audience that is already making a purchase from you, will be missing a significant portion of the audience.

Apart from this, diverse content should serve all stages of the marketing funnel.

Some of the different type of content that can address entire funnel include:

• Top of the funnel: Infographics, Podcasts, Blog Posts, and Webinars.
• Middle of the funnel: Whitepapers, checklists, Ebooks, and in-depth guides.
• Bottom of the funnel: Product demos, FAQs, Testimonials, and Case Studies.

Diversifying content based on genders, ages, and religions is mindful. But including a touch of cultural and social difference, cultural references, and language difference is a must.

More than using videos to graphics to texts and other things to post your content, you may include:

• Content in different languages, 
• Facts of cultural and social differences. 
• Videos in your content can be explained like one from testimonials. 
• “How to Guides” blog posts that can educate people. 
• Graphics to support the posts with visual content. 
• Podcasts, either solo or by involving the guests. There are millions who connect well with podcasts.

The ultimate idea is to inform the customers and engage all segments of your target audience to encourage them to explore your brand.

Social signaling: 

Social signaling indicates the webpage’s collective share, likes, and social media visibility. 

The page’s popularity can also be identified by its social media presence. A brand’s activities to promote awareness followed by conversion in sales can contribute to social media engagements. All of these activities increase the organic search and hence the ranking.

Deciding whether or not social signaling helps in SEO is debatable. It takes into account:

• Some people like your brand on Facebook.
• The number of individuals who follow Twitter.
• Number of Tweets that mention your name of the brand.
• Counts of total Facebook shares.
• Some circles your brand is a part of.

Social media can be a voice of brands as it can help you share the positive reviews received by the company. The number of internet users is on the rise with the primary motive of using social media. Companies with social media handles and websites are trusted more than ever. Hence, you can say that social signaling is beneficial. 

Some of the metrics that you can use to evaluate include:

• Reach
• Audience Growth Rate
• Engagement Rate
• Video Views
• Customer Satisfaction Score
• Click-Through Rate
• Cost-Per-Click
• Conversion Rate

Read: Your Guide to Social Signals for SEO.

Sharable content: 

Content that is worthy of sharing and is of high quality often spreads faster than a simple post. 

So you know what you are supposed to do! 

Share valuable content that helps the reader find solutions to their queries. Keep in mind your target audience and the keywords you plan to rank, then create content for the web pages. 

Shareable content should be enriched with these characteristics:

• Shareable content comes with a reward.
• Shareable content confirms beliefs.
• Shareable content is actionable.

Shareable content should be:

• Shareable content entertains readers.
• Shareable content speaks about people’s interest.
• Shareable content is practical and it confirms beliefs.
• The content gives visual appeal.

     Read: 7 main characteristics of shareable content.

Navigation URL

Navigation with URL enables the users to launch a portal desktop in a specific navigation node context.

How would the world know that you exist somewhere? With the rising competition it is important that you post your navigation URL on social media channels. 

This is the screenshot of the navigational url that lifestyle stores have posted on their Instagram profile.

Why use a navigation url?

A navigation url helps you in the following ways:

• Reduces bounce rate if the url is correct.
• Higher responses for call-to-action.
• Improve conversion rate.
• Higher visit duration on your website.

It is important to share or submit your website’s URL so that it is easy to search your company on a search engine. 

When the website URL is easy to spot, it gives you higher chances of ranking and enhances credibility.

WhatsApp 

The latest means of connecting with people faster than any other network is WhatsApp. Include the URL link to WhatsApp by using https://wa.me/<number>. 

Mention your correct details and omit brackets, plus signs, or special characters. The customers will be able to connect with you only when you give them the right information. Adding a whatsapp link will open a chat window to allow the person to communicate automatically.

PR and News: 

PR and news are the best media to offer the latest information to the readers and engage them more on your website. 

Doing all the publicity yourself can become a task when you already have multiple things in your hand. 

Why PR?

• PR brings you links that are still rated important factors of ranking in Google Search Engine. 
• PR activities bring leads to some of the most influential websites. 
• PR brings you brand recognition. 
• PR activities help in reputation management.
• Bring social proof as it triggers feelings of trust from people.

What to do for PR?

• Create unique content that can be further shared by popular sites, publications, journalists and bloggers. Remember, people will read only what is relevant to them. 
• Think who you want to reach. Define target audience.
• Reach smaller groups of audience. It is easier to influence their decision. 
• Do some research on the topics you want to write about. 
• Decide the publication you want to get published.

Read: Why PR is crucial to SEO & 11 Ways to Get Coverage.

Company Name-As It Is: 

Keep the identity the same and avoid changing or pitching the client giving them different ideas. Tell the world your  brand’s name and keep it same across all the platforms as well as websites.

Feature on the website: 

How about getting some testimonials and reviews featured on your website? 

Testimonials are social proof to build trust amongst the audiences.

It tells others that there are credible users of the products or services. Adding testimonials help you to win the trust of the prospective customers.

Do it and see how credible it makes your presence in the search engine. Ultimately affecting your ranking in the SERP.

Consistency greater than volume: 

Be consistent in sharing the information and that is the rule. 

Consistency brings higher credibility, builds your reputation, and strengthens trust for your brand.

You can’t burden the reader with voluminous information and then expect them to be entangled with it. Rather be specific and give the content in different formats that too consistently. 

• Consistency keeps them engaged and informed about you. 
• It improves audience retention.
• Raises brand awareness.
• Lead generation and better conversions.
• Higher SERP ranking.
• Create some loyal audience for the brand.

Read: 10 benefits of consistent, high quality content marketing.

Multiple mention of brand: 

All through the content (any form) keep reminding the readers or viewers about your brand. 

How can you do that?

• Harp on your USP that differentiates you from your competitors. They should know they are talking to you for your exclusive service and products.
• Multiple mentions of your brand help you stand out of the business when compared to other businesses.
• You can tell the audience how you can help them and what problems can you solve for them?
• Make sure that when you communicate your USP, it should be assertive, focused on customer value rather than just impressive words. 

Local Business: 

“You can spend your whole life traveling around the world searching for the Garden of Eden, or you can create it in your backyard.”-Khang Kijarro Nguyen.

Before you think of capturing the market across the country, it is important that you capture the local first. 

Local SEO boosts your ranking giving you much needed business push. You have better ranking in the local search history.

First serve the locals in the nearby geographical location and then see how it impacts your business positively.

GMB- visibility on Google: 

Google My Business (GMB) is an easy-to-use tool for businesses and organizations to show business presence online.

But why? Isn’t Local SEO sufficient? No. Read further.

Google My Business helps you in following ways:

• GMB is a free tool which can be used to promote the business.
• Allowing you to appear in maps and google local pack listings.
• Makes your brand highly visible.
• Allowing people to leave their feedback and reviews.
• Providing insights like views, search queries, engagements enabling brands  to create marketing strategies.

Read: 10 Google My Business Benefits

Local pages: 

Get local pages that are web pages for every business location. It helps attract customers using location specific SEO strategies.

How do local pages help?

• Local pages are important for service-based businesses. 
• Local pages enable you to publish unique content. 
• Apart from local SEO, local pages help in lead generation. 
• Display specific reviews of particular areas.
• Highlight specific staff members.

Dealer/Store locator: 

Adding a store locator will help your target customers find your nearest store and get the services as they want. 

It is a function that adds credibility to your business and website. Your store locator will help users know how they can find products. 

It improves their user experiences giving you a leverage in Google rankings.

Read: Why does your business need a store locator?

Directions: 

Share your maps or directions helping customers to find your location. 

Adding direction maps to your website keeps them on your website only preventing them from leaving the page and finding your store location in some other window.

Reviews and Ratings:  

Add reviews and ratings for each location on the website, Google, and other platforms. 

Why?

• It improves your SEO and pushes your ranking in search engines. 
• Reviews assist audiences to have trust in your brand.
• It motivates others to leave reviews for your brands.
• Reviews motivate people to trust your brand.
• It increases social confidence in the target audience and others.

Consistent updates: 

Keep your visitors updated consistently on GMB. 

Your updates can elevate your brand’s presence gradually leading to a rise in the number of visitors. It is important that you update your GMB at least once a week. In common, GMB posts will expire after 7 days hence consistent updates are important. 

Updating GMB, you can make a positive impact on local SEO.

Final Thoughts:

By now you have read about different factors that affect ranking in Google and why is it even relevant?

Matching up with Google’s changing algorithm for SEO and adopting the new practices can be a challenge for businesses. 

Still, search engine optimization remains essential as it is a rich source for a website to receive high-quality traffic. 

Work on the user experience, SEO optimization and content (all types) to gradually climb to page one on the search engine.