Strategy

5 Counter-Intuitive Ways to Upgrade Search Engine Rankings

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For many of us who manage a company website, SEO tactics are ingrained in our every keystroke. Use keywords, content is king, link often, add metadata. It’s like an inane checklist each time I post. But you may be missing out on things that are unexpectedly simple and waiting in the wings to improve your website. Don’t get fooled by your intuition. Try out a new SEO strategy.

Remove Low-Traffic Pages

Remove content? Yes! Low value pages have the potential to drag down your site’s value overall, as the value of each page on a site factors into any given page’s ability to rank. For this reason, it’s more important to formulate a content library strategy instead of a continuous stream of low-level publications without readership and engagement. Even if you have a thoughtful idea for a blog, it may not serve you if there is no audience for it. But an annual audit of your pages analytics will help keep a lean machine.

Secure Your Website

My site is plenty safe! Sure, it’s likely that a small to mid-size business website has never seen a security breach. But by doing everything you can to assure a user that their information is safe with a secure, encrypted connection by an HTTPS, the longer they are likely to spend on your website. If a user sees a “Not Secure” warning appear on their browser, it’s likely they’ll never even make it to the first page.

Ditch Duplicates

Aren’t more uses of my strategic keywords better? Kind of. Using canonical linking to let Google know which page centered around similar topics is the main one helps, but the reality is that duplicate content looks like spam to a search engine’s algorithm. If you really feel it is necessary to use the same information twice, try to reframe it from a new point of view instead.

Optimize Your Site Speed

But Google doesn’t crawl my site! You’re right. It doesn’t, but human users do, and the amount of time they spend on your site adds up to what search engines think other users should be spending their time on. As visitors often bail on slow-loading pages, a reduction in website load time to 3 seconds or less can increase your rankings over time.

Draw it Out

Aren’t people too busy for long posts? People are too busy for long posts that don’t add any value to their lives, but users actually prefer to get all the information they need from a single, reliable source. So an article of 2,000 words or more may get more readership with long hang time so long as the content is also rich enough to warrant the time necessary to read it. By giving your users everything they need to get started all in one place, you become a more reputable source.

Though these may be new approaches to improve your SEO rankings, they provide a realistic and simple option to improve your website design. Try one on for size, and make your website more user and search engine friendly.

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