1. Find Your Competitors’ Best Performing Pages
The more you know about your competitors’ SEO strategy, the better your own site can perform.
When you take the time to figure out what’s working for the websites you compete against on the SERPs, you can take your analysis to the next level and understand why this approach is working before using this insight to inform your own approach.
One effective starting point is to find your competitors’ best-performing pages so that you can develop a picture of where their organic traffic is coming from, and what it’s being driven by.
2. Inform Your Content Strategy Using a Keyword Gap Analysis
When it comes to creating a content strategy, you will typically have two main focus areas:
- Optimizing existing content
- Creating new content
While optimizing existing content is often the most effective starting point, using a local rank tracker is often an effective starting point, most websites will get to a stage where they’ve optimized all of their existing pieces.
At this point, your efforts should turn to the creation of new content. But one of the biggest mistakes that SEOs make when creating content is doing so blindly.
You need to be creating content with a purpose and need to be able to justify why every single piece that you create exists. This means taking the time to carefully plan out a strategy for the creation of new content.
3. Improve Your Organic CTR Using PPC Testing
CTR is used as a ranking factor and it’s something that you should be optimizing for. But let’s break down the elements that can impact your site’s click-through rate. Typically, these are:
- Title tag
- Meta description
At least, these are the ones that you have a fair amount of control over (bearing in mind that additional ad space, image blocks, and the like can all push down organic listings and result in a lower CTR).
While you could do this over a longer period of time by making changes and measuring the results, other variables could come into play. If you don’t want to wait too long for results, you can leverage PPC to test these title tags and meta descriptions.
Even if you’re not running a PPC campaign as a business, it’s worth loading in a budget and setting up ads for a set of pages to test different titles and descriptions.
4. Optimize for ‘People Also Ask’
The SERPs in 2022 go way beyond the ‘10 blue links’ that once occupied Google’s first page, and smart SEOs need to be tweaking their techniques and strategies to take advantage of as many SERP features as possible. One of these features that SEOs need to utilize is ‘People Also Ask’ (PAA).
There are a whole host of reasons why you should be paying attention to PAA, including:
- They can help you to rank twice on page 1, with it being possible to hold a PAA result and first page ranking, unlike with featured snippets.
- They can help you to appear prominently at the top of the SERPs as an answer to the questions your customers are asking, with over 75% of PAA results showing in the top three results.
- They can be triggered as query refinements for the kinds of questions that Google might struggle to interpret.
5. Optimize for Core Web Vitals
In 2021, Google began placing more emphasis on page and user experience as ranking factors. As a result, the focus has shifted on several on-page UX elements, such as:
- Mobile-friendliness
- Safe-browsing
- HTTPS
- Intrusive interstitials
Perhaps the biggest change, though, has been the introduction of Core Web Vitals, which became a ranking signal in August 2021.
Core Web Vitals are a collection of metrics around speed, responsiveness, and visual stability, defined as:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The time that it takes for the main content of a page to load. Ideally, this will be 2.5 seconds or faster.
- First Input Delay (FID): The time it takes for a page to become interactive, ideally being less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): The amount of layout shift of visual page content that is unexpected, with this ideally being less than 0.1.