7 Smart SEO Tactics Experts Use to Rank Better Than You on Google

One of the main avenues to get traffic to your website is through your blog.

And one of the best sources of traffic to your blog is Google.

Because it’s a source of targeted traffic. And it accounts for over 3.5 billion searches daily and 1.2 trillion annually.

These are people who are more likely to take the actions you want on your website.

However, your website fails to get consistent traffic from Google.

Naturally, you’re frustrated because you want more organic traffic.

From the large share of Google searches, your website only manages to get trickles. Unfortunately, low traffic is insufficient to meet your business targets.

You want to increase organic traffic to your website? You’re not alone.

In fact, every website owner wants more traffic from Google. But how come some people are able to consistently achieve it while others fail?

These are people we call experts. They are called experts because of the actions they take.

As a result of these actions, they’re able to optimize their websites for search engines. They’re able to get the rankings and traffic from Google that everybody else is dreaming of.

These experts are always looking to engage in smart SEO tactics to achieve a better Google rank.

But if you take these actions too, you’ll get these results.

Google First Page

Before we talk about these actions, it is important to discuss how high you should aim to rank on Google.

To get any significant traffic from the search engine, you need to rank on the first page.

The best position to rank is number one and it becomes worse as you go down.

According to a study by Chitika, the number one position on a search term will have 32.5% of the clicks for that search term. The second and third spot will have 17.6% and 11.4% of clicks respectively.

The top 3 search results for a query account for 61.5% of the clicks while the first page results account for a whole 92% of the clicks for that search term.

However, number 11 is far worse than number 10 as there’s an average drop of 140% in traffic. That’s a position you don’t want to be for an important keyword.

So what are some smart tactics that experts employ to rank higher than everyone else on Google?

1. Target Long-tail keywords

If you want to rank on Google’s first page, one of the most important activities you need to do is keyword research.

However, how you go about keyword research could determine how effective it will be.

The basic thing to note here is that all things being equal, short keywords will usually have a large search volume while long keywords will usually have a small search volume.

For instance, a keyword like “shoe” will probably get more search volume than “winter shoes in Boston.”

As a website owner, you want to rank high on Google because of the traffic you get as a result of that rank.

But when you seek traffic, you should also define why you want that traffic.

The truth is that some traffic is more profitable for your business than others. And when you get traffic from Google, you want it to be as targeted as possible for your business.

This is where the issue of long-tail keywords come in. If your business ranks high for “shoe,” will it be more profitable than “winter shoes in Boston” if you sell winter shoes and are located in Boston?

New York-based SEO and SaaS company, Conductor, found that long-tail keywords converted 2.5 times better than head terms. They also found that long-tail keywords impacted rankings more than head keywords for pages with and without on-page optimization.

Someone searching for the word “shoe” may be searching for many reasons. They may just be engaging in research about shoes without any aim to buy.

The term “shoe” shows many user intents that may be different from what you want. If you rank high for a term like “shoe,” you may get many visitors to your website that are not looking to buy.

This is a waste of organic traffic that you want to avoid. However, trying to rank for keywords like “winter shoes in Boston” or “buy winter shoes in Boston” is more likely to bring in traffic that will buy winter shoes from your business.

When you rank for many variations of these long-tail keywords, it usually adds up to a lot of traffic in the end. 

Another reason SEO experts implement long tail keywords is that it’s much less difficult to rank for long-tail keywords than short-tail variations.

Long-tail keywords have lower search volumes and the number of websites trying to rank for those keywords is much lower.

Trying to rank for a short-tail keyword like “shoe” or “car” or “wine” means you’re going up against tough competition.

These are companies that can spend a lot more than you can just to rank for these keywords.

When you aim to rank for long-tail keywords, you’re trying to kill two birds with one stone: you’re more likely to rank higher for these keywords and you’re more likely to get very targeted traffic that will buy your products or subscribe to your services.

How do you target long-tail keywords?

Define the user intent

What do you want customers to do when they come to your website? Is it to buy a product? Is it to gain knowledge on a topic? Is it to gain a client for your service?

Whatever user intent you want will determine the long-tail variation in the keyword.

Specify the location

One portion of searchers you want to attract are those close to your business location. In your long-tail keywords, you should include your business location as this can help you exploit local searches. This could be the city in which you do business or an area in the city if you feel the city is big enough.

Use keyword research tools

You can use tools that will give you different variations of your main keyword. A tool like Ubersuggest will give you different variations of a keyword, its level of competition, and cost-per-click (CPC) if you want to run pay-per-click (PPC) ads for these keywords.

With the use of long-tail keywords, Matt Malone was able to get 61,379 views to one of his posts.

Out of 262,169 visitors that visited QuickSprout in a month, Neil Patel claimed 238,195 of them came from long-tail terms. That is 91% of the search traffic.

2. Produce quality content

To rank high on Google, there is no way around writing quality articles on your website. Although producing quality content won’t guarantee you of a rank, you need to write detailed posts to even stand a chance.

In a survey of marketing, sales, and business professionals, 72% of them said relevant content creation was their most effective SEO tactic.

Some years ago, website owners could just stuff keywords into their posts and see their content rank on search engines. Not anymore.

Doing that today could see your content banned from Google search results altogether.

That’s because search engines have now grown smarter in recognizing quality content.

What is quality content?

Quality content is an article, image, or video that solves your visitor’s problems by offering them the right product or giving them the right knowledge.

The definition of quality content is different for different industries.

To write an effective article, you have to understand the needs of those who will read it.

If you’re producing content for your website, the major question to ask is: what problem is a visitor to this page trying to solve?

You have produced quality content when you have been able to help your visitor solve that problem. You have to connect with your audience through conversational copywriting. 

Otherwise, it’s bad content. No matter the number of words in the post.

In most cases, there is a correlation between the number of words in a post and its rank on Google. Research by SerpIQ shows that an average result on Google first page is at least 2,000 words long.

This is by no means causation. This correlation, however, exists because it usually takes a high number of words to explain a concept in details when writing a post.

The number of words needed to provide value to readers may differ with the industry. For instance, few words are needed to provide value if your website is about entertainment.

However, if it’s about content marketing, you may need more words to explain the concepts.

When you have quality content on your website, visitors will spend more time on your website and are more likely to read other pages.

This will reduce your website bounce rate. This is one of the factors Google will check to know if your website is providing value.

When visitors stay longer on your website and read other pages, it’s a positive signal to search engines and it leads to even better rankings.

3. Update content regularly

Producing quality content today is not enough. You also have to update your content regularly.

This is because things change fast online. A highly relevant post 2 years ago may be irrelevant today due to the different changes that have occurred in that period of time.

Some statistics or facts you used might have changed during this time. There might have been a new development that is relevant to that topic that visitors need to know.

Therefore, it is important to update your post regularly with new developments that are relevant to it.

An SEO expert that does this regularly is Brian Dean of Backlinko. Even though he doesn’t have hundreds of posts on his blog, he updates them regularly with recent facts and makes them useful for any visitor.

The image above shows one of the first posts on his blog but you can see that he has updated the post to make it relevant for anybody who might be reading in 2018.

In fact, if you go through the Backlinko blog, you’ll find that all the guides have been updated in 2018.

The truth is that writing great content could get you the high rank you want on Google. But you’ll lose that rank quickly if you don’t update these posts.

Many other websites are competing for these keywords and Google want to present search results that are relevant to searchers now.

Therefore, a recent post may have an edge over an old outdated post.

Another reason you may need to update your post is due to its search performance.

When you publish a post, it doesn’t rank automatically. Except you run a big authoritative website.

If your post is good enough, it gains rank gradually. If you find a post on your Google Console that is around 11th and 13th for a keyword, then updating this post could give it a lift to enter the top 10.

Here, you can engage in different tests and track its effects on your search performance. You can test headlines, meta description and some other elements of your page.

Performing these important tests would allow you to improve your content and earn a better rank.

Neil Patel explains this in one of his posts about SEO guides he wrote. You have to watch out for what people want to read and then update your content accordingly. With this, he was able to get more organic traffic from his shorter SEO guide than the longer one.

4. Improve page speed

With the advancement of technology, most visitors want to see what they’re looking for as soon as possible. No visitor wants to wait forever while your website loads its page.

According to a study by KISSmetrics, about half of consumers, 47%, expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less. Likewise, most of your visitors will abandon your website if it takes more than 6 to 10 seconds for your page to load.

SEO experts know that providing value in your content is not only about the words or other forms of content you have on the page.

To have a chance at providing value, visitors have to see your post first of all. If visitors bounce from your page because it loads too slow, then they don’t get to see the post you’ve worked so hard on.

A bounce is usually a bad sign to Google and you’ll lose your rank over time even if your content is good. This is because you’re not providing the best value for readers.

In fact, the need to reduce page load time was one of the reasons Google created Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to deliver pages faster to mobile searchers.

You can increase your web page speed by compressing images, using a faster host, minimizing the number of scripts and widgets, using a faster content delivery network (CDN) and other steps.

By following these and other strategies, Michael Karp was able to increase organic traffic to a page by 12,134.74% in just 18 months.

5. Watch their competitors

For even SEO experts, there are still some things they may not know. Because search engine optimization is a wide field.

To learn some of these things, experts have to watch what their competitors are doing.

In many cases, experts watch their competitors to improve on the good steps they’re taking and to avoid the bad steps.

One way to watch your competitor is to search for the important keywords you’re trying to rank for. Which websites are ranking for these keywords presently?

What’s present in their posts? How can you improve upon those posts to provide better value for your visitors?

This is one strategy that Neil Patel claims he used when he started out trying to rank for important keywords in content marketing.

He said he would look for the posts that ranked at the time and wrote posts that provided more details and value than the ranking post.

Over time, his blog was able to get better search rankings and traffic for these keywords.

This is also one of the major foundations of the Skyscraper technique by Brian Dean. With this technique, he got a 110% rise in organic traffic in 2 weeks.

You have to find content similar to what you want to post.

This content is a piece of content that has gained backlinks and other results you want. Then you write something better and promote it.

6. Use Schema markup

Over time, Google has become smarter. It is now able to get important details like title, author, etc. from a post.

But it is not yet perfect. The schema markup is an initiative by four search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex) to get more details about a post.

What is schema markup?

Schema markup is a code that provides more details about your posts or webpage to Google or other search engines. In some cases, these details are shown below a search result.

For instance, you can use schema markup to tell the search engine the address and telephone number of your business.

If details like these show up when searchers are conducting local searches, it would make it easier to contact you.

Below is an example of the effects of schema markup. You can see the next events for a team on ticket master.

This is an opportunity to gain more customers. However, many website owners are not utilizing this opportunity.

According to a survey by Bing and Catalyst, only 17% of marketers use Schema markup.

One of the reasons many avoid schema markup is because of the coding involved.

However, with the *Google Markup Helper tool, your can perform schema markup with little coding required.

How do you go about this?

Open the Google Structured Data Markup Helper page.

On this page, you’ll select the category that your page falls into. After doing this, you can enter the URL of this page or its HTML code.

After doing this, click on the “Start Tagging” button. This takes you to the next page where you’re shown the page of the URL you entered.

After this, you can mark any part of your post and label it with the appropriate data. These include name which is the title of your article, the date published, the author of the article, article section, and other details.

When you’re through with this, click on the “Create Html” button. When you do this, you see a code displayed that you’ll add to the head section of your source code.

The code above is the JSON-LD but you can also view the Microdata which will show you the markup data in the source code.

You can either add the marked part of the code into your page source code or copy the whole HTML code and use it as a replacement for your page code.

Using a WordPress Plugin

Another way you can add schema markup to your page is through the “All In One Schema Rich Snippets” plugin on WordPress.

After installing the plugin, activate it. Then go to the post you want to markup. You’ll see a “Configure Rich Snippet” box under your WordPress editor.

Then, you can select what your post is about.

After doing that, you’ll see a form where you can enter all the details you want to mark up.

After filling this form with the necessary details, update the post. To check if schema markup has been added to your post, you can use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool to check the page.

Enter your page URL and click on “Run Test.” This will show you the source code of the page, the details that have been added and those that are yet to be added.

After confirming this, you are done with the schema markup of your page.

7. They promote their content

Producing good content is the beginning of getting a good rank on Google. And good content goes viral overnight right? Wrong.

In fact, many good posts fade into oblivion. In most cases, your good content will only get the exposure it deserves if you promote it.

Through promotion, more people will read your post and you gain more backlinks to these posts which can only increase your Google rank for your targeted keywords.

Promotion is so important that some SEOs have advised that you should spend 20% of your website time producing content and 80% to promote it. Even if you don’t follow that rule strictly, it shows the importance of promotion.

One way experts promote their content is through outreach. You have to contact influencers who already have a wider reach than you.

Paddy Moogan of Moz advises that you contact influencers who are in the same industry as you or who would be interested in the type of article you have written.

There are many channels to contact influencers. Some of them are:

• Email
• Social media
• Their website

The thing to note is that not everybody you contact will reply. In fact, most will not reply.

If you’re doing outreach you have to personalize the messages as much as possible and develop a thick skin. Many times, it is better to develop a relationship with influencers before asking them for a favor.

If you have a good relationship with an influencer, it is easier to make a request. When Venchito Tampon was performing a blogger outreach, he decided to personalize his messages to the recipients rather than send generic messages.

Conclusion

Getting your content to rank on Google first page takes time and a lot of work.

But no amount of time will get you that rank if you’re taking the wrong steps. If you’re not optimizing your website for Google and searches, no magic is going to happen.

Follow these tactics that SEO experts have used to rank for years and that will continue to work regardless of any Google updates.

Because these are all white hat SEO tactics.

What are the steps you’ve taken to optimize your website for Google? Which steps are you planning to execute? See you in the comments!