12 Expert SEO Tips to Boost Your Performance in SERPs

Updating the SEO algorithm is Google’s favorite task. Though Google loves it, many businesses fall into potholes taking them back to the ground. Therefore, SEO seems to be complicated for many. Well, it’s actually a fact. SEO is a bit hard if you aren’t into core SEO. Also, since it keeps on changing, one needs to stay updated with the latest trends in SEO.

You will get several pieces of advice that promise to deliver faster results but most of them don’t. Also, there are many premium techniques that don’t work now.

For your online business, if you are using outdated SEO techniques, you should try something new.

SEO tactics might take a long time to get implemented but that doesn’t mean that your current tactics have stopped working. They are working but you need to boost them up.

What are those SEO tips that you should follow in 2021?

 

1. Invest More Time in SERPs

 

 

  • Check a keyword’s SERP and note the problems people are finding a solution for.
  • Understand the search intent of the users.
  • Offer customer-engaging and informative content.
  • Compared results from SEO tools to the real-time results in SERPs.
  • Check for the content type that is ranking such as listicles, product pages, blogs, etc.
  • Find search features.
  • Verify websites that are ranking almost on the first page such as businesses, media sites, directories, databases, etc.
  • Confirm the position of your brand on the first page.
  • Verify the appearance of your page for the title, meta description, schema tags, etc.
  • But ensure you check all this in the incognito tab. Also, clear your cookies, cache, and history frequently. Check the results both on desktop as well as mobile.

 

2. Get into Featured Snippets

 

 

Featured snippets display an answer for a query directly on SERP so that the user doesn’t need to visit that page for getting an answer for the query.

  • Create posts that will provide answers to specific queries that users have.
  • Ensure the content is relevant to the keyword the user is searching for.
  • Check your blog post’s format and alignment for Google to understand that you have answered a query.
  • Use a paragraph format to rank for a question keywords such as “What is digital marketing?”
  • To rank for prepositions such as to, like, for, etc. you should use a list format.
  • Use headers for making the scanning process easier.
  • Keep content clear and short.
  • Ensure the content is optimized for both desktop and mobile.
  • Keep people engaged on social platforms with the same content.
  • Promote that content on strong external platforms.

 

3. Focus on On-Page SEO but Don’t Force Everything to be Search-Friendly

 

 

  • Optimize the website pages with front and back-end components for boosting your ranking in the search engines. These components are as below:

 

1. Headers

2. Page titles

3. Meta descriptions

4. High-quality page content

5. Structured markup

6. Image alt-text

7. Page URLs

8. Site speed

9. Internal linking

  • Include the target keywords in your content.
  • Answer questions that users are looking for answers to.
  • Be contextually relevant to your target keyword.

 

Just give hint to the search engines that you have answered a query that a user might have.

 

4. Use both Low and High-Volume Keywords

 

 

  • Use low and high-volume keywords that cover the complete journey of the buyer.

  • Target low-volume keywords if there is a high possibility of turning traffic into leads.

  • Get creative with the high-volume keywords that you want to target.

 

5. Merge Website Pages with Canonical Tags and Redirects

 

 

  • Multiple pages with the same content can be merged with redirects and canonical tags.
  • Having multiple pages with the same content can disengage your traffic in SERPs.
  • Redirecting low-performing pages to a page containing related information is better.
  • Adding a canonical tag from the duplicate to the core page informs Google to consider the core page for ranking.

 

6. Boost Page Authority

 

  • Page authority is considered by Google while ranking your website.
  • To build your reputation, you can post regularly in the form of blogs, social media posts, and guest posting on other sites.
  • Write on topics that your customers are interested in.

 

This will help the search engines to understand that you are posting user-intent content and this will improve your page authority.

 

7. Plan Your Link-Building Strategy

 

 

  • Connect with other websites having a higher domain or page authority and request links to your content.
  • Ensure your content is relevant to the website’s content that you requesting a backlink from.
  • Another way is to find the content that is ranking for your target keywords and create content better than that.
  • Check sites linking to your competitor’s content using SEO tools and request highly trustworthy sources to restore your competitor’s link with your links.

 

8. Avoid Changing URLs

 

 

  • Avoid changing URLs as much as possible as it will affect your traffic.
  • If you do change the URL for good reason then ensure that you add a note when you find a change in your website traffic. This will help your audience to know that you have changed the URL for a good reason.

 

9. Multimedia Files should be Compressed and Optimized

 

 

  • Your website’s page load speed is directly affected due to video, image, and gif file size. Page loading speed helps to rank in SERPs.
  • When you compress an image, it combines similar color pixels into single pixels to decrease the image’s resolution and further the file’s size.
  • We can’t detect these changes because they are sensitive to details between light and dark in comparison to colors.
  • Compressing won’t reduce the effect of your images on your audience and will help to load your pages faster.

 

10. Always Use alt=“Image” Tag

 

  • Using alt-text descriptions helps search engine crawlers can understand your images. Therefore, it is important to add descriptions are added to pictures for SEO as bots won’t crawl the image if they don’t understand your site’s page content.
  • It also helps in ranking your site’s pages in image-based SERPs.
  • Using the alt=“Image” tag helps bots to pick up the alt text while they convert screen elements and this ensures that the site visitors get a constant browsing experience.
  • Ensure the alt text is descriptive, related to the page content, and short.

 

11. Use CTAs When Possible

 

 

  • If your page isn’t optimized for conversion, even though you try optimizing your page for ranking it won’t bring you the results.
  • Use call-to-action to increase chances of conversion with content offers that are relevant to page content and various steps of the buyer’s journey.
  • You can get a chance of conversion on every page of your website. Hence, use CTA aligning with the visitor’s search intent on every page.

 

12. Perform Technical SEO Audit

 

 

  • When your site is crawled for indexing by a search engine bot, it needs to understand your website’s niche. It includes both content as well as the setup of your website.
  • It is difficult to index unorganized sites as the content is hard to understand. Therefore, it is important to do technical SEO set-up of your website.
  • The technical aspects that should be considered while setting up SEO are XML sitemap, page speed, URL structure, pagination, and site architecture.

 

The Verdict

 

Hope these SEO tactics will help to boost your performance in SERPs. But remember SEO keeps on changing and new tactics will keep on emerging. We will keep you updated about them. Until then do try these.