SEO Tools can help you find the right words to focus on and save you…
Recently, SEO has become a major focus and we have witnessed masses of SEO tips and hacks being published. However, when you start diving into the sources and advice, there are often conflicting views.
As a result, it becomes hard to figure out what information to trust and what to actually do.
I’m going to share some of my best SEO tips to increase organic search traffic.
SEO is a habit, not just a one-off exercise. As an example, you need to check at least weekly which pages bring you the most traffic and then progressively improve them (get more backlinks, improve quality…) to move it further up on Google search results.
Even if you implement just a few of the best SEO tips, you will improve your search results.
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For many industries, the customer journey starts with searching online. As an example, for Retail the majority of searches are organic. Although Retail is an obvious place to search for products, BtoB has also changed and search is a key factor in how buyers start their search for solutions.
However, there are significant challenges for SEO going forward:
Despite this, there are still plenty of opportunities to increase your search traffic. These are some of the best SEO tips to achieve your goals.
The internet is slowly changing and becoming more structured.
If you think of a normal web page of a recipe, it is full of text. However, there is no way of knowing which part of the text is the main description for the recipe, what part of the text has the ingredients and what part has the instructions.
If you now add ‘tags’ or schema to the text you could help point out which parts relate to different parts of the recipe, the title, ingredients, instructions, cooking time…It becomes easier for search engines to identify what the page is about.
This is done through schema. Schema is essentially a standard practice that provides a method for search engines to identify different types of content and their structure
If you go to schema.org you will see a full breakdown of how different types of content can be identified using schema tags.
These tags are often referred to as rich snippets.
Rich Snippets is the term used to describe structured data markup that developers add to their code, to allow search engines to better understand what information is contained on each web page.
Well, when you search for a review, the articles that use structured data rank higher in search engine results.
You can see the results in the search.
However, there is another trend that is changing the landscape of SEO, the Featured Snippet.
From Google:
“When a user asks a question in Google Search, we might show a search result in a special featured snippet block at the top of the search results page. This featured snippet block includes a summary of the answer, extracted from a webpage, plus a link to the page, the page title and URL.”
A Featured Snippet, or Answer Box, is pulled in from a high ranking page and provides a quick answer to the question.
A Featured Snippet appears at the top and displays information that has been pulled from a web page. In the example above, it has been pulled from https://goinswriter.com page.
There are different types of featured snippets:
An Ahrefs study found that search queries with the following words have a better chance of getting featured:
Initially, a lot of SEO experts were worried that featured snippets would reduce the click-through rates to the pages. Fortunately, this is not the case. In fact, the opposite is true. This is one of the best SEO tips to improve organic traffic for existing content.
Having a featured snippet dramatically improves the click-through rate.
Ahrefs analyzed 2 million featured snippets and found that for the SERPs with them, 8.6% of all clicks go to the featured snippet.
HubSpot research has shown that content with a featured snippet gets a 2X higher click-through rate.
If you are answering a question, and are seen as being trusted and the main ‘authority’ article, then it comes as no surprise that you will improve conversions rates. As noted by Kristian Diekhoner in his book The Trust Economy, trust matters when it comes to people buying products or services.
There are lots of different factors that go into Google trusting your site. The more website traffic you get and the longer people spend are two factors that relate to Featured Snippets. A well-written article that answers a question and is a Featured Snippet will result in a better authority ranking.
Inevitably, if you getting your content in front of more people it will result in more brand exposure. Something to consider then is how well you match which questions to focus on when trying to rank for a Featured Snippet.
Now, this may seem counter-intuitive but a lot of sites that rank for a featured snippet aren’t using rich snippets! In fact, Gary Illyes, at Google, has said that structured data has nothing to do with ranking in the Featured Snippet.
Ahrefs found that 99.58% of featured snippet pages already rank in the top 10 SERPs in Google for a particular search query.
However, Getstat highlights that 70% of snippets come from sites that aren’t in the top-ranking organic position. This is also reinforced by Hubspot.
If you already have a page #1 ranking keyword and get turn this into a featured snippet you can get more traffic. Alternatively, if you aren’t ranking on page #1 you still could become a featured snippet.
How do you rank for a featured snippet?
Despite a lot of research, there is no exact science to getting featured. However, there are some clear factors that help you to rank on a featured snippet.
Below are the best ways to start to get started with your featured snippet strategy and tactics.
A quick recap on what we know:
9 BEST SEO TIPS TO HELP YOU RANK AS A FEATURED SNIPPET
First of all, check to see if you have any existing content that is a featured snippet. Use SEMrush (they have a free 7-day trial) and go to Organic Research. Then, just click on the “Featured Snippet” on the bottom right-hand side of the page.
Your first point is to protect and optimise this content. You can also use SEMrsuh to enter your competitors and see what they featured snippets they rank on. The next point is to make a note of where you overlap and then use this to optimise your content and steal this spot.
One of your goals should be to find out what questions your customers are asking. As an example, I typed into Google “what are the best social media tools?”. The featured snippet was from Buffer. However, underneath you had a list of related questions.
You can find out the top question that customers are asking. Not only that, but you also get to understand what content your competitors are using to rank on that question.
Another great tool to find out what questions people ask is to use Answer The Public.
Answer The Public is one of my favourite tools for finding questions. They make it easy and break the questions down into visuals and tables. The visuals show you a wheel of questions broken down by what, who, how…
Ahrefs is one of the best SEO tools on the market. Using their Keyword explorer you can quickly enter some search terms and then find out the difficulty the questions related to that keyword.
Serpstat is an ideal tool to use to find featured snippets. First of all search on a keyword. Then simply filter on ‘Featured Snippet’.
What you can find from this search are the keywords that Google uses with a Featured Snippet.
example: what is an SEO tool, what are the best SEO tools, what are the different types of SEO tools…you get the idea!
What you are doing is helping a reader answer their questions in one place and provide tight relevant content rather than too much padding out of content.
Research shows that the majority of featured snippets use some sort of ordering e.g. Step 1, Step 2, Step 3 or Rule 1, Rule 2, Rule 3.
You can these by using headings. However, your headings need to be in a logical order. As an example, if you have a main topic as a H2 heading, then the sub-headings should be H3 not H4 or H2.
Featured snippets should have no more than 52 words between 40-50 words. If you are aiming for a paragraph remember to place this after your initial headline.
Increasingly websites are using How To sections and some blogs have this as a category.
On most websites, a few pages account for the majority of the traffic. It follows the familiar pareto effect, not necessarily 80/20 but it is likely that a few pages account for the bulk of the leads.
However, when using an SEO tool like Ahrefs, you can quickly analyse content on your site that could be pushed higher up the search engine rankings. Here are the best SEO tips to help boost your existing content.
Ideally, you are looking for content that is on page 2 or three. In Ahrefs this would mean that its shows as being in position 10 – 25, depending on the search term.
Once you have got your results you want to pick the ones with the highest volume opportunity that can be boosted. Initially, choose ten to work and then schedule them for a makeover.
Each post will probably need different treatment to improve the ranking. There can be a host of reasons why your post isn’t on page one so you need to examine each page based on the following:
An ideal way to do this is to have a spreadsheet and then on a weekly basis see if your tactics to improve your posts have improved.
If you have some posts that have high volume potential you should see an overall increase in your website traffic.
Back To Top ↑Every website should have a blend of content. Some content needs to be topical and but also will have a time reference, examples are reports, statistics, trends for…
You will, of course, have noticed the growing trend to add a year into the title. As an example, the best SEO Tools 2025. While this signals that a post is up to date, you do need to update it every year to make it relevant.
The other sort of content you can produce is called evergreen. In other words, this content doesn’t change much, if at all.
Below are some common evergreen formats you may consider creating:
Here are a few of the best SEO tips to help you quickly update your content.
A simple way to do this is if you use WordPress is to go into your posts and add in the ‘YEAR’. This should bring up all the posts where you have used a year in the title.
Check as well for other posts e.g. statistics.
Remove any old or broken links, change any references that define the post a year and then update the content and give the page a refresh if needed. Add extra content and make it more relevant.
Then you can republish your content and bring to the front of your blog and make it more visible. Some blogs use a WordPress plugin which changes the publish date to the last modified date.
Since a Google ranking factor is the age of the post this can improve your traffic to your site.
Back To Top ↑There are two types of site you can buy to help you boost your inbound links and therefore your traffic.
An expired domain is where the website was previously registered by a person or business, however, they have not renewed the domain and so it can be purchased by other people.
You can buy expired domains from the following places:
Expired domains already have a backlink profile and domain authority that you can leverage for your own site.
Use the expired domain you purchased and 301 redirect it to your main site.
This will pass some of the link benefits and authority of the expired domain to your site immediately.
Another way to use an expired site is simply as your start point. In other words, it becomes your main site and you build your content using the domain. The months it takes to create any authority disappears and you have an immediate higher base point to start.
You can buy an existing website that has an established set of content and links associated with it. These sites are more expensive than expired sites because they have existing traffic and content that you can import.
A good site that has relevant content will cost between $5k – $10k. What you can expect from this price is a site with 200 plus linking domains and 10k plus traffic a month.
The largest place to buy existing websites is FE International. To find out more buying websites you can listen to this interview Thomas Smale of FE International.
For many businesses and in fact bloggers buying an existing blog that is no longer maintained is an ideal solution to get more traffic and grow quickly.
Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush and Similarweb can help you to search the websites and see the main figures – domain ranking and traffic.
Back To Top ↑Topic clusters are a way to demonstrate your knowledge and authority on a subject. They also are an ideal way to accelerate your ranking.
The goal is to create a pillar content, otherwise known as cornerstone content. This is a high volume, and probably, a competitive word you want to rank for.
As an example, one of my clients, Gravy For The Brain, needed to rank on page one for “how do I become a voiceover”. I used this strategy to get them on to page 1 for a lot of keywords as well as “how do I become a voiceover” – check it out and the structure of the pages (not posts) that I put together. Out of all the best SEO tips I discuss this is the one that to focus on.
There probably are lots of words you want to rank. However, this is about focus and building a cluster. In other words, staying on one topic.
Research and choose a competitive word. You now need to write a very high-quality article on this subject. You need it to wow people so that it is link-worthy.
Identify ten to fifteen problems that your buyer persona has. Use surveys, run interviews, and do some secondary research within online communities as needed to gather the data.
Match your problems to keywords. Then pick the top research-related questions and keywords by volume. No narrow down to 15+ that have a high volume and relate to each other.
Structure them and link them together so that they form a series or guide or way to follow each other.
A good way to structure the articles is this:
your-company.com/main-page
your-company.com/main-page/supporting-article-1
your-company.com/main-page/supporting-article-2
your-company.com/main-page/supporting-article-3
The final step is to link your main page to its supporting articles and to link the supporting articles to your main page. (It’s worth linking the supporting articles to one another if they are relevant.)
Back To Top ↑There is nothing new about doing a competitive analysis. The problem is that people don’t do it much or do it badly.
The following steps will help you to create a competitive analysis and then maintain it so that you can track your competitors.
Many of the best SEO tools do have competitive tracking tools. However, for the sake of this guide, I will explain how to do it from scratch.
How many competitors? This varies by industry and how big a team you have in marketing. Ideally, you want around 10 competitors as a start point, but I’ve known bloggers do well just by using 3-4 competitors and then cycling through different ones as they scaled their blog.
Choose one competitor and then enter their details into an SEO link analysis tool like Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer.
In the image below I’m analyzing a competitor site for one of my clients.
By looking at the pages and domains linking to sailingtoday.com I can identify sites for outreach and guest posts.
As an example:
Things change. Regularly review who your competitors are. Set a schedule to do a competitor analysis once a month. My advice would be to relate your competitor search to the clusters you have identified as important to your business. That way they will reinforce your workflow and activity to achieve the same goal.
Back To Top ↑Having identified your clusters you want to create high-quality content that can be used to gain links.
In a study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, they list the types of content that attract the most links.
As well as the listed types of content from the graph above, here are some more ideas.
If you look at ‘top content’ for a site you can see this holds true.
In fact, the image below shows that some of the top pages for the Content Marketing Institute are stats and research.
The key to getting high-links isn’t though by creating a random set of infographics or reports.
Let’s revisit the idea behind a cluster. You want to develop a high level of links across all of the cluster.
The first step is to focus on WHO you want to link to you. so the formula is Cluster + High-Value Content + Type of Content + Target Audience = Links. I know this isn’t science but it helps to focus the attention.
As an example, if you produce an infographic here is a top-level list of links you want:
I think the best and top quality content these days comes from your own research. Be creative and spend some time mapping out your ideas and what type of content you can produce that will wow people.
Putting a small budget against your link magnet at the same time as outreaching and guest blogging will increase the shares and awareness for the content as well as encourage links. Use Facebook ads to target your ideal audience.
Back To Top ↑What are persona questions? For more information about what is a marketing persona see the marketing persona canvas.
Some of the benefits to understanding questions your audience are asking:
A good source used to be Linkedin Questions but that service was closed. Two excellent sources for questions are:
#1. QUORA
FollIf we use supplements we can see what the top questions are.
There are lots more questions. But it is easy to understand the top question and there is a heap of great information in the answers.
You can produce content around this, use the information in the answers plus conduct some of your own research.
In the sidebar you can also see sub-topics – this relates nicely to the principle I mentioned earlier of creating clusters based on sub-topics.
#2. ANSWER THE PUBLIC
One of my favourite tools is to answer the public.
Enter any keyword and it maps out visually all the questions.
You can output the questions as an image and as a spreadsheet (csv format).
Another way to get more questions is to take a question and add it to Google. You are then given a list of related searches.
The next stage is to look at the search volumes for the questions we have found.
Create a list of questions and then either import them into Ahrefs or use Google Adwords.
Step 3. Create your content
Some questions naturally relate to different styles of content.
As an example, how question relate to guides, what questions often relate to checklists…
Back To Top ↑Journalists are short on time. They have to rely on sources of knowledge as well to validate information or get an expert opinion.
The critical part of this is timing. Normally, journalists need a quick turnaround.
As an example, if you are already an expert in your field then you can be called upon to provide further information, facts/statistics and/or an opinion.
The benefits of doing this is that will be rewarded with a high-value backlink Other benefits include a substantial increase in traffic and exposure. This is one of the hottest and best SEO tips for 2020.
Here are a few places where you can sign up for some journalist alerts.
If you use either Gmail or Outlook you can set up filters to direct your email so that you stay organized from the start.
Here is an article on how to set up filters and folders on Gmail.
Because you need to respond VERY quickly it is wise to set up SMS alerts using Zapier or IFTT.
A quick way to respond is to have some ready-made templates to go.
Here is how to set up an email template on Gmail.
A typical template will look something like this. Remember the following three rules.
[Hi *name*]
[My name is **** and I’m responding to *THE ORIGINAL REQUEST FOR RESPONSE HEADING*]
Here are the best answers and at the bottom, I’ve included some references and further information should you need it
Further information is available if you need it.
Signature
Back To Top ↑The other side of PR is to reach out to journalists based on your own research or to request they publish an article. These are some of the best SEO tips to create a successful PR campaign.
The big mistake most people make is that they initially write to journalists with little understanding of how the journalist will benefit. Typically, people get refused or ignored, because they don’t do their homework or research.
There are five PR specialists for every one journalist. So any journalist you are aiming to target is already snowed under with emails.
First of all, recognise that journalists are busy. Ideally, they want content that is ready to go. If they spot that an article needs to be corrected or rewritten then they are not going to publish it. Unless it is, of course, some seismic news story.
Second, the content has to be newsworthy. Writing to tell a journalist you have a new product is a bit ‘blah’. Instead, think of how many people will benefit from your product, scale it up, think of what value it delivers and do some research. What does this mean, how does this relate to other trends in the industry, what sources do you use?
Thre is no shortage of ways to conduct your own research. Yes, there are plenty of people that dismiss surveys, but they still can be a powerful way to collect data. The art is to spend time on your questions, focus on the right audience and make a decent enough sample.
Other ways to conduct research are:
Data presented badly is hard to understand and digest.
Present data in a way that can easily be placed straight into a publication.
Two great books on data visualization.
Summarize conclusions.
I’m not going to discuss this too much. There are loads of existing articles on how to outreach to journalists. I’ve listed a few here for you to read that go into more detail.
Back To Top ↑YouTube is the world’s 2nd largest search engine, with over one billion hours of video watched daily.
By 2021, video traffic will account for 82% of all consumer Internet traffic.
Furthermore, video content increases purchase intent by 97% and brand association by 139%.
Did you know that YouTube ranks videos based on their performance within the first 24 hours of it being live? Unlike SEO on Google, you can rank at the top of YouTube within days instead of months.
There are two parts to using YouTube effectively for SEO.
First, focus on your audience and find out what they are searching for.
Here are some useful tools to do keyword research on YouTube.
TubeBuddy is a freemium browser extension for Chrome. It adds a sidebar to the YouTube UI with additional keyword data.
Second, transcribe your videos. Use a tool like Rev.
Now you edit and add value. If you simply paste your transcription into YouTube it might not read well and certainly won’t deliver a great customer experience.
Tidy it up and take out bad sentences and things that don’t flow well.
Break it into easy sections to understand.
Intersperse your transcription with links to relevant content on your site and add some images.
Bingo, you now have a transcription that will add value and encourage clicks to your site.
Back To Top ↑After you invest a lot of time into creating content, you need to promote it.
According to Copyblogger, 80% of readers never make it past an article’s headline. The same rule applies on Facebook: If your headline fails to catch people’s attention, they won’t click on your ad.
As I mentioned before, now is the time to optimize that headline (see earlier for tools to help you create clickable headlines).
Ideally, you want to have a strong network of people who can help promote your blog.
Your goal when guest blogging is to increase referral traffic back to your site.
Also, you want to improve your position in organic search results by building a natural link profile.
Guest blogging is also a powerful way for you to get in front of a whole new audience!
As well as links, one of your primary goals should be to acquire more email subscribers.
You want to find blogs that have a medium to high domain ranking and high volumes of traffic. That’s great, but if that blog doesn’t overlap with your audience, then you are unlikely to get many shares and/or email sign-ups.
Find blogs with an engaging audience as well. This will help with getting more social shares of your content.
Rule #1. Focus on your cluster topics – use these as a guide when searching for a guest blogging opportunity.
There are lots of different ways to find guest blogging opportunities.
#1. Search on Google
Use terms like the following:
#2. Use Twitter
Here is an example. A search for guest posts about web design:
There are also lots of lists on the internet that people have curated around guest posting. Don’t forget though that this only makes it easier to get to these blogs and therefore harder to get accepted. It’s competitive.
One of the quickest free ways to check domain authority is to use Moz’s Open Site Explorer tool.
What I do before I put together a request for a guest post is to identify what content has done really well for them in the past.
I then check to see what gaps there are in there content that might appeal to them.
In other words, you don’t want to send over a suggestion for a post only to find out they have one or more already on exactly that topic.
The more value you can add to them the better.
Use Buzzsumo to write to the guest post or submit it directly. Always follow up and if accepted and published thank people and show them how it helped you.
Back To Top ↑I appreciate that this isn’t a new tactic, but it is one of the best SEO tips to get brand exposure. Experts will often share the article you produce with their own audience.
Another benefit is that after you have built the relationship you can always ask for a guest post later.
Expert interviews needn’t be full-blown interviews. You can also simply ask for an opinion or soundbite from leading experts.
The main focus should be to pick people that are real experts, not just influencers. Believe me, there is a difference.
I like to pick people who:
By now you are probably tired of me reinforcing the point about relationships. However, the truth is that sitting in a room writing heaps of content on your own with no relationship building is a recipe for disaster. Moreover, it is a sad waste of your time.
A good approach is to build out your reach progressively.
The typical process that I use with clients is as follows.
First, create a spreadsheet so that you have a record for future use and to make notes. Use the spreadsheet to create a list of influencers relevant to your content/cluster topic.
For each influencer make a note of their social media profiles and find their email.
Each time you link to an influencer’s website or reference any of their resources, make a note in the spreadsheet and the post you created.
Let each influencer know that you have referenced them and praise them for the quality of their content.
Also, mention them in a social media post with a reference to the content or tag them in an image within the tweet.
Back To Top ↑The diagram above gives you a step by step high-level view of how to develop an influencer marketing campaign.
If you are launching new products or services you will want to harness the power of influencers and their audiences.
There are lots of influencer marketing platforms to choose from.
I’ve created a simple infographic to help guide you as well – influencer marketing infographic.
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