SEO is the path to success city in the vast desert of websites. The only problem — mirages that create disillusions and deviations.
People peddle SEO advice that promise great results, but fail to deliver. Then there are obsolete methods that have run out of effectiveness.
Most commonly shared legitimate SEO strategies are tedious and take a very long time to deliver results. You have to wait for months, some times way more, to get the rankings and traffic you want.
What if you want fast search rankings with legit SEO?
Though most popular SEO involves laborious tasks that bring results in a slow fashion, many SEO methods work fast. Instead of months, you get results in weeks.
Here are proven SEO methods when you don’t have months and months to wait for results. Try these methods for quickly see your traffic grow and rankings improve.
1) Google My Business
For business websites and local businesses, SEO must include optimized Google My Business listing. It provides a great SEO signal for ranking your website in the targeted location. Also, it adds credibility to your website.
Don’t know how to optimize your GMB listing? Is your website not ranking in the map pack? Take help from a good digital marketing agency for GMB optimization and management.
2) Authority Directories
Get your website listed in the top quality directories. For local businesses in the US, it could be Yelp and BBB. You should get your website listed and verified on these websites.
Avoid poor quality directory websites that exist for merely selling backlinks. Links from bad directory sites can hurt your website rankings.
3) Social Media
Stay active on social media websites. It helps in reaching prospective customers / audience as well as sends the right signals for better search rankings.
You should update your social media profiles to include your address, phone number and locations.
With consistent NAP (name, address and phone), your website tends to rank better for local search queries. Local SEO is different from general SEO. Don’t ignore local SEO if you are a local business such as locksmiths, home contractors, and lawyers.
4) Videos & YouTube
Don’t write long articles. Instead, try creating videos.
People have started preferring videos for learning and other purposes.
Create videos using screen recorders, video maker tools and more. Make use of free stock videos.
Don’t forget to use YouTube as a tool for increasing your reach. If you create a great video, you could open up a whole new avenue of traffic and audience.
Optimize your YouTube videos with content, tags, and include links to your website.
5) Focus on User Intent
Don’t create content for keywords alone. As part of your keyword research, look for the user intent with search queries. Are people looking for a review? Is the query for an explainer video? Create content based on user intent.
6) Building Authority & Trust
Don’t just try the usual SEO methods. Instead, you need to establish your expertise and authority.
Create highly authoritative content on the topics that support your SEO and business goals. You should also make your qualifications publicly viewable.
If you are an individual, you might want to share your educational qualifications. Getting published on reputed media and websites is also a great way to build trust.
7) Make Interactive Content
Search engines prefer content that their users find useful. Interaction with the webpage is an indicator that the content is useful.
When you are creating content, make it user-friendly and valuable. Add interactive elements such as quizzes and forms to improve user engagements.
8) Customer Testimonials
Product reviews or testimonials are a great way to build trust and improve SEO. Encourage your customers to leave their feedback on platforms such as Google My Business, Yelp and Facebook. Search engines use customer citations as a ranking signal.
9) Design for SEO
Websites can rank better with a good design that helps in SEO. User experience and website usability has been made an important ranking factor by Google.
If your website isn’t ranking, get the design and on-page SEO reviewed. Simple design changes and incorporating elements such as FAQs can help improve rankings.
10) Mobile-First Website
Google has switched to mobile-first indexing for websites. Make sure that your websites are optimized for mobile devices and smartphones. Don’t use a separate mobile website. Instead, use responsive web design.
11) Remove Pop-ups
Remove pop-ups and interstitials from your website. Better user experience must be at the core of your website. Pop-up ads are deemed to be nuisance.
12) Progressive Web Apps
A Progressive Web App (PWA) is an implementation of standard website to feel and function like mobile apps. With PWA, users can have the websites on their mobile phones.
PWAs can help improve your website SEO and customer experience.
13) Switch to HTTPS
If you haven’t already, switch your website to secure HTTPS. With SSL certificates available for FREE and most web hosting companies providing them, you should make the change.
14) Site Speed < 3 Seconds
A website that’s slow to load ranks poorly. Website speed has been a ranking factor for long, and Google has reinforced this signal with focus on Core Web Vitals, which includes website page speed and usability.
If your website doesn’t perform well on user experience and speed, it is likely to suffer in rankings. Check your website speed and usability. Make sure that you have the best scores possible.
15) Optimize Images
Images take the maximum chunk of webpage file sizes. With fast Internet, we tend to ignore the file size of images added to our websites. Don’t.
Heavy image files add to website load time. Also, it can be much slower on mobile devices. Optimize images for page speed and user-friendliness.
JPG used to be the light-weight image format. Today, it’s WebP. You can convert images to WebP format to reduce their size. With WordPress and other content management system, there are plugins to convert all your images into WebP for supporting web browsers.
16) Structured Data
Structured data helps search engines easily find the useful information on a web page. You can use structured data to identify entities such as person and company, content such as products, recipes, reviews, and more.
17) Internal Links
Simply adding links to website header and footer cannot be your sole internal linking strategy. Search engines have started discounting the weight of footer and header links.
Add links between content within the page content body. You don’t need the exact keyword term for your anchor text, but it should be contextual. Random linking isn’t as effective.
18) Quality Links
Don’t build poor quality links to your website. Avoid buying links from marketplaces such as Fiverr. You need your link building to reflect quality.
19) Truly Contextual Links
Don’t send out emails for backlinks via guest posting to all quality sites. Your link building outreach should be niche-specific.
First, it will have a better success rate.
Second, you won’t annoy your recipients.
Third, Google wants contextual links to your website. Having a blog post about lawyer SEO on a gadget blog is not the real contextual link. You need links from websites in your niche.
20) Improve Content Quality
Thin content and poor quality articles don’t add much value to your website. Similarly, duplicate content is a big obstacle in success of any website. Delete or update the articles to improve your website content quality.
Long-form content has proven to get higher search results (though long-content doesn’t always guarantee success).
21) Update Old Content
Old content can lose rankings if not updated. Search engines start to prefer new content with more updated information. Hence, you must update all your article and webpages frequently.
22) Syndicate Content
When you publish a long blog post, you can have it repulished on another websites such as Medium.com. Use a link back to your website original webpage. This kind of content syndication can help with SEO.
23) Repurpose Content
Turn your blog post into a video, a presentation slide, a podcast / audio or a PDF guide book. Repurpose your content into different forma and use it to build links and increase your reach through different platforms.
Content can also be repurposed into social media posts and visual infographics.
24) Eliminate Keyword Cannibalization
Having similar content and targeting different webpages with similar keywords can lead to poor rankings.
If you have multiple webpages competing for similar search keywords, consider turning them into one long-form content to avoid cannibalization.
Don’t add different webpages for related keywords. Instead, you can optimize one content to rank for multiple keywords and search terms.
25) FAQ Pages
Create a FAQs (frequently asked questions) page for your business website. It serves both your customers and your website with SEO. With natural language processing and voice search, FAQs can help reach more people.
Don’t just slap a few questions and answers. Instead, take it as an opportunity to target many long-tail keywords and search queries.