Give Your SEO Strategy A Shot in the Arm
There’s a lot that goes into an effective SEO strategy: from quality to consistency, relevance to speed. For many people, the latter comes as a surprise. It often feels like a waiting game once you’ve uploaded your content, sitting patiently as your ranking slowly increases for weeks on end. That’s frustrating – after all, having your content earn top rankings shouldn’t feel like a marathon.
Two’s a Party: Indexing and Ranking
According to Cyrus Shepard of Moz, “In SEO, speed is a competitive advantage.” The SEO specialist argues that there are some simple, but key things we can do as marketers to help influence Google and its algorithms to move a little faster.
There are basic steps and advanced steps that you can take to improve your strategy. In his Whiteboard Friday session, Shepard talks about his “10 Basic SEO Tips to Index and Rank New Content Faster.”1 In the world of SEO, it’s important to understand these two terms. Indexing means adding new pages to Google’s search index. Your ranking is the position of your content on the search engine’s results page.
Indexing Made Interesting
Indexing content properly is the first step towards a successful SEO strategy. Luckily, the process isn’t as complicated as it might seem. Here are a few tools and tricks that can make indexing as easy as email.
- URL Inspection: It’s one of the many inspection tools that Google offers. Submitting a URL to the tool will nudge Google to put it in its priority crawl queue and index it faster.
- Sitemaps: A sitemap is one of the quickest ways to get your site indexed. A cool and simple way of informing Google about your sitemap is to ping them! By typing in google.com/ping, followed by your sitemap and URL, you inform Google in an instant.
- Link Back: Linking your new content to your important pages is a must for marketers. Not only does it remind Google to crawl your site, it also offers quality signals to Google about ranking the site on its platform.
Content Visibility – Ranking the Right Way
Once you’ve conquered indexing, it’s time to focus on your page rank. Similar to its counterpart, ranking can seem more challenging than it actually is. SEO specialist Shepard offers a few more tips to help you speed up your ranking process:
- Create Clicks: Generate search clicks by sharing a Google search result that leads to your content. The switch is simple: instead of sharing your direct URL, share the link you’d see if you searched for your exact content in Google. This shows Google that people are searching for your content through their engine.
- Think Fresh: Certain questions are deemed fresh and relevant to Google. A perfect example is “coffee shops open this long weekend May 2019.” By targeting fresh queries in your content, you increase the hierarchy of its ranking. Relevancy rules!
- Stay Inside the Lines: When it comes to your URL, your best bet is to adapt a consistent structure. Add similar content, like blog posts or visuals, under the same ranked URL. It allows for less decision making on Google’s part when identifying where to place this new content.
While these are a few useful suggestions, there are several more that can help you leverage SEO successfully. Through best practices and tried techniques, your SEO journey can be simple and results-driven, allowing you to focus on what you do best: your area of expertise and serving your customers.
When it comes to content marketing, there’s no shame in asking for a little help. At MintCopy, we’re trained to use best practices to produce quality content on a consistent basis. Our team of writers specialize in SEO content and digital marketing.
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Sheetal Pinto is the founder of MintCopy, a content agency that has been helping businesses communicate effectively since 2008. With a passion for words and a knack for SEO, she’s worked with companies around the world to craft copy that not only engages but ranks. Whether it’s blog posts, website content, or social media updates, Sheetal has a talent for turning complex ideas into compelling stories. When she’s not optimizing content or editing for clarity, she’s probably daydreaming about the perfect headline or debating the Oxford comma. With over 16 years in the business, she’s seen the digital marketing and SEO content landscape evolve and grow. Sheetal’s mantra? Fresh copy, refreshing results!
