Are You Using These Techniques To Boost Your Google Ranking?

When you are new to content writing, it can be challenging to compete with established blogs and writers. This is even more true in saturated markets like travel, beauty, and fashion. Besides having a distinctive writing style, if you want to increase your Google ranking, you must use various techniques to optimize your content. Whether you're a greenhorn to SEO or a seasoned veteran, here are things you could do to help earn your pages a rankings boost.

Incorporate Comparison Keywords

These types of keywords pit two brands, models, or types of products against each other. Examples of these are "iPhone versus Android" or "DoorDash versus Grubhub." People who search for comparison keywords already know something about your company and your competitors. They are looking for reasons why they should pick either brand. Also, comparison keywords do not have a lot of competition, which means more exposure for a lower CPC. If you make content around "you versus competitor brand" posts, you could also clinch more conversions.

Make The Most Of Every SERP

The holy grail of all search engine results pages is the number one result; it gets about 32 percent of organic clicks. However, if you are still building your reputation, there is no quick fix for you to zoom to the top of SERPs. You can make your way to the top by maximizing the rest of the page. For example, you can take up more SERP real estate; the more pixels you control on a page, the more traffic you get from that keyword. A Featured Snippet, for instance, triples your real estate on a results page. You can take up more space on a page by optimizing content, so they land in rich snippets and Google's Top Stories features. YouTube videos, Medium articles, and guest posts are also more likely to take up a lot of real estate on people's SERPs.

Always Optimize For The Context

In the past, Google figured out a page's topic by looking at the number of keywords they find on the page. If "content marketing" is repeated, the search engine interpreted it as being about content marketing. It is why keyword density was critical. Today, Google uses latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords to figure out the words' context.

For instance, if you are writing about an office chair, Google will go beyond looking for the phrases "chair for work," "office chair," and the like. They will look for LSI keywords like "ergonomics," "support," "productivity," and more. This process enables you to increase your Google ranking and helps you rank for more keywords. The longer and more informative your post, the more LSI keywords you will automatically target. If you want to be sure, you can use Clearscope, Surfer SEO, and similar tools to check if you have all the right LSI keywords for your topic.

Write For People Also Ask Keywords

SEMRush reports that 41 percent of Google search results have a People Also Ask portion. The challenge with PAA keywords is that they take time to mine from SERPs; you have to open the accordion several times to gather all the possible questions related to the original search. You can be more efficient by using free tools like People Also Ask. These scrape keywords from Google's People Also Ask boxes and provide you a list you can refer to for your next posts or content.

Publish Year-Specific Content

Blog posts in the "Topic + Year" format are a staple in any industry. For example, there were numerous "SEO Trends To Watch in 2021" articles that came out last year. This is not unique to 2020; every December, pundits in all fields of expertise create roundup articles for the past year. Together with these articles, they also make ones predicting trends for the year ahead.

Note, though, that making an ordinary list article and placing "2021" on it will not make it automatically about the next year. Your story should truly be about the year you're featuring in the title tag. For instance, if you are writing about up-and-coming restaurants in your neighborhood, you have to ensure that the places you'll feature are in operation. 

You will also want to double-check if the places you want to write about are new (since you're writing about "up-and-coming" restos). Finally, have a concrete reason why you're including each item in your list. Since this is a list meant to alert people to meaningful choices, your selections have to be worthy of a spot in the list. Don't fill your list with places, products, or services for the sake of creating an article.

Try To Get On Google Discover

Google shows you content you might be interested in through Google Discover. This tab acts as the search engine's social media feed, and it is the first screen that shows up when you open your Google app on mobile. To populate each user's Discover, Google pulls from various sources; web pages visited, articles read, and videos watched can all affect what you see on your Google Discover feed.

Understanding user intent will help you figure out how to appear in your audience's Google Discover. Besides knowing what people search for, you should also be familiar with what keeps them reading or viewing content. Find a way to increase people's dwell time on your page. Creating engaging content, using rhetorical questions, and incorporating high-resolution images, graphs, and charts are a few ways to achieve longer dwell times. Twitter engagement, trending topics, and new posts are also more likely to receive more traffic through Discover.

Conclusion

It can be challenging to differentiate yourself in a saturated market. When you're maintaining a blog for a business in a competitive field, you have to go beyond usual practices like incorporating long-tail keywords, using long-form content, and earning backlinks from high-quality websites. You have to use all the tools Google provides so you can set yourself apart and distinguish your brand as a go-to in your field.

Team up with Ranked if you want results that build long-term growth. We provide affordable SEO solutions for local businesses and agencies looking to increase their Google ranking. Book an appointment with our team or activate your account today!