When it comes to balancing your site’s SEO vs UX, newcomers may not be clear on what Google cares more about for site rankings.

On one hand, basic SEO knowledge tells us that prioritizing keywords and gearing content to search engine algorithms is ideal. However, this can easily get in the way of providing a better user experience for your visitors.

Google’s search algorithm continues to evolve significantly with each passing day. The divide between best SEO practices and a high-quality UX is no longer present. To understand why this is the case, let’s look at the components of good SEO vs UX so that we can determine without a doubt what Google cares about for your website.

Why Is SEO Important for a Website?

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality of a website to increase the amount of highly-qualified traffic it receives from organic search results.

A business website serves a number of purposes. It is a business card, a spokesperson, a salesperson, and much more. It is able to educate visitors, funnel new leads through a sales process, and drive your sales by matching your products and services with the right audience. However, it needs a powerful SEO strategy to achieve this.

How SEO Functioned in the Early Days of Digital Advertising?

An SEO specialist’s job is to understand Google’s search algorithm and optimize a website to satisfy key ranking factors for search engine results pages.

In the early days of digital advertising, search algorithms looked for and identified relevant website content by scanning for keywords. As a result, website owners everywhere made it a common practice to stuff one or more keywords as many times as possible on specific website pages. This proved effective as search engine crawlers matched the website’s keyword density to the user search query and rendered it as a top result.

However, the engineers at Google now understand that such a tactic is not an accurate or effective way of analyzing website content. By simply measuring keyword density, search engines ignore the human element behind the search and the true intention behind searching a keyword or phrase. More importantly, it neglected to measure the quality of the user experience.

Image Source

Search Engine Algorithms Evolve Daily

Today, the top-ranking websites integrate the best SEO practices in a more natural manner. Google’s algorithms no longer require keyword-stuffed content to effectively understand the true purpose of the webpage. They’re able to understand the structure and intention of a search query and direct users not only to matching keywords but to content that matches their true needs.

SEO is still important to Google. The same principles still apply, but our approach is now more user-focused. A quality website should still feature high-volume keywords so that your web pages remain highly visible to search engine crawlers. The big change here is that we can now focus on delivering content that serves visitors first in an effort to improve our site’s UX.

Why is Good UX Important?

As Google’s algorithm becomes more intelligent and sophisticated, its list of ranking factors grows. It’s widely understood by SEO professionals that Google potentially evaluates hundreds of factors that involve much more than keyword density. These include:

• Title and header tags
• Site layout and navigation
• Content length
• Primary keywords
• LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords
• Page update frequency
• Mobile-friendliness
• Domain age and history
• Page loading speed
• Internal links, outbound links, backlinks
• Content that adheres to EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness)

These ranking factors simply scratch the surface of what Google’s algorithm is now capable of understanding and scoring for every website on the internet. What stands out here, however, is the fact that the bulk of these ranking signals describe the type of experience your website offers to its users.

Good UX is important as it allows your website to better fulfill the user’s need implied by their original search request. A quality UX not only provides relevant, informative content but makes that content highly accessible to all types of users.

Google’s algorithm no longer feeds on the SEO strategies of the past. Instead, it now places significant value on the user experience you provide to your audience. You can take steps to improve your site’s UX by adhering to the ranking factors listed above. Your team will also be able to test the quality of your website’s UX by analyzing positive or negative user signals.

What Are User Signals and What Do They Tell Us About UX?

User signals are a pattern of behaviors that Google tracks to better understand the quality of a webpage. If your user signals trend in a positive direction, it’s a strong indicator that your page is a strong search result and provides a high-quality user experience.

Here are the user signals you need to look out for when curating a proper website UX:

• Bounce Rate

In SEO, we use the term bounce to refer to any instance in which a user visits a website and leaves without taking any additional actions. A bounce generally occurs whenever the content on the page is unhelpful or does not adequately match the original search intention.

Therefore, your bounce rate refers to the frequency at which a bounce occurs on your website. If your website features a high bounce rate, it is almost certain that there are significant flaws in your UX. You must always be aware of a high bounce rate, as Google will take notice and penalize you for it in search rankings.

Tools for tracking bounce rate: Google Analytics

• Repeat Traffic

Every brand strives to attract new visitors. However, returning visitors act as a vote of confidence in the quality of your user experience. Users are only going to make the effort to return to a website if are able to adequately address all of their needs when interacting with your brand.

Keep an eye on your repeat traffic numbers. If you find this metric trending low, consider how you can improve your UX by looking at key ranking factors and determining how you can improve. We also recommend looking at the websites belonging to high-ranking competitors to see how their UX is superior to your own.

Image Source

Tools for tracking repeat traffic: Google Analytics

SEO vs UX – You Need Both to Conquer Google Search Results

Google’s search algorithm continues to evolve in such a way that it does not minimize the importance of either SEO or UX. Rather, it calls for superior website strategies that effectively incorporate both to satisfy the needs of users. What your visitors want and what Google’s search algorithm wants are now the same.

Old-school SEO tactics of mapping your site with keywords and utilizing the correct tags are still the best way for crawlers to discover a page. However, you no longer need to focus on stuffing your content or utilizing phrases in unnatural ways to satisfy some estimated quota. Instead, you can focus on curating high-quality content that answers questions, point users to the right destination, and helps them solve an identifiable problem.

In other words, your website’s SEO will improve as your user experience also improves. You can optimize your UX by focusing on key areas:

• Site navigation
• Content quality and length
• Page speeds
• Mobile-friendliness
• Use of relevant media
• Avoiding intrusive pop-ups or ads

You can learn more strategies on how to improve your SEO with user experience factors here.

While looking for ways to create more organic traffic, you may hear a term called SEO-friendly website design almost every single time. However, this term can seem a little overwhelming, especially to businesses that are just starting out in the digital world.

Let's begin by answering the question - what is an SEO-friendly website? Simply put, an SEO-friendly website is implemented with SEO techniques that are designed to help the search engine crawlers to explore and read pages in an easier manner.

Today, many businesses create a website just for the sake of it. They don't incorporate design and content that attract visitors who are important for their business. Due to this, their potential customers are not even able to find it on the web. If their website is optimized correctly, it can transform into a full-fledged salesperson and help them reach their potential customers. An SEO-friendly website helps businesses achieve exactly this. Such a website helps them consider the needs of their target audience. It also helps them rank high on Google, provide an enhanced user experience, and increase their customer base.

Now, you may wonder what are attributes that make your site SEO-friendly. Don't worry, we can answer that for you, too.

What Makes a Website SEO Friendly?

The approach to making a website SEO-friendly is quite simple. It is carried out so that Google and other search engines can crawl efficiently on each webpage, effectively interpret the content, and finally index it in their database. After this, they provide the most valuable and important web pages to their users according to the topics they are looking for.

Some of the most significant characteristics of an SEO friendly website are:

1. Attention to URLs

A simple thing such as a URL can make a world of difference in making a website SEO friendly. Apart from possessing a clean structure, your webpage URL must adhere to the best SEO practices associated with search engine indexing to make your website SEO-friendly. In the case of permanent links, make sure that they are self-explanatory, in lowercase, and separated using dashes. They can also feature keywords placed organically in order to improve visibility.

2. Unique Content

The content on the web pages of your website should be unique for it to be SEO friendly. Search engines are aware of websites with plagiarism and flag them for the same. Such a thing results in a decrease in the SEO friendliness of your website.

3. The Right Structure

A well-structured website is easier to index. Here's what a general website structure is composed of:

Ø  Header

Ø  Page title or H1 tag

Ø  Breadcrumb menu

Ø  Text separated into several short paragraphs along with subheadings

Ø  Information of the author

Ø  Footer

4. Quick-loading Webpages

Needless to say, neither your potential customers nor search engines are fond of slow-loading websites. So, here's an insider tip - SEO-friendly websites are optimized for speed and fast loading time. A website that loads faster leads to more user interactions.

SEO Friendly Website ā Why Do You Need it?

How would you feel if someone does a Google search regarding a problem that your business can solve but your website isn't even visible to them? This is precisely the reason why SEO should matter to you. You are likely to miss out on your potential customers if your site isn't ranking on the first page of SERPs (when a user submits a search query, SERP is the page that a search engine returns).

For a higher ranking on SERPs, you must start your web design process with your target audience and SEO in mind. The chance of your web page ranking on the first page of SERPs increases if you keep on improving your SEO strategies.

With an SEO-friendly website in place, you will have an edge over the competitors who don't create their website according to their potential customers and search engines.

Let's discuss in detail the reasons why your website should be SEO friendly:

1. Helps Generate Organic Traffic

When you work on your website content taking into account the strategies used by the competitors, you are able to obtain a higher ranking, which increases the chances of selling. High ranking is an excellent source of organic traffic to your website (organic traffic is the traffic that comes from search engines).

How to boost organic traffic?

Some ways in which businesses can generate more organic traffic are:

• By creating insightful, persona-optimized content that is based on their market niche
• By using long-tail keywords (the keywords that are more specific to the service or product by the business)
• By creating quality content and being consistent at it

2. Helps Get Valuable Traffic

If you are getting web traffic, that's great! But you must ensure that you are attracting potential customers as well. As we now already know, an SEO-friendly website helps you achieve exactly that!

There are many ways to get valuable traffic with the help of an SEO-friendly design. One of them is using long-tail keywords in your content. Let us define long-tail keywords for you to understand them better. The search terms that have low competition levels and search volume are called long-tail keywords. They have a longer length (more than 3 words) as compared to other keyword types. Such keywords are specific and derive more valuable traffic to your website. Some examples of long-tail keywords include buy beebalms plant near me.ā

Image Source

Another way you get valuable traffic with the help of an SEO-friendly design is because it integrates a responsive design into your website. Such a design is an essential part of an SEO-friendly website. A responsive design helps your website to adapt to any device the user may be using at the time of the search (such as a tablet, mobile, or website). This helps the users to have a positive experience on your website. They tend to stay longer on your website because the website accurately fits their screens. This, in turn, sends a positive signal to Google. As a result, your site's ranking improves in the search results and you get more valuable traffic.

3. Is Cost-effective

Ā It is important to understand that as opposed to paid advertising or other marketing strategies, you are not required to spend money on achieving a good ranking in search results. Search engine listings are free and easy to attain. A website that is implemented with SEO strategies helps you in this respect.

Consider this scenario for better understanding- when funding is stopped for an ad, it is removed from the internet, and web traffic declines for that specific website. But when it comes to utilizing SEO, your web traffic and ranking remain consistent without the need to spend any money.

4. Increases Your Reputation

If you take a look at one of the statistics of 2020, it may not come as a surprise that 89% of consumers read reviews before purchasing products (as quoted by Trustpilot, which is a leading online review platform). With so many people checking for reviews before purchasing from a business, your website needs to create a great impression on its visitors. An SEO-friendly website helps you achieve this.

A notable characteristic of such a website is that it has a visually pleasing interface along and easy navigation that helps visitors find the information they seek. The website is tailored keeping in mind the needs of your target audience. The aim is to keep the visitors engaged and help them become return users. When people have a good experience on your website, it only works to enhance your reputation in the market.

5. Enhances Customer Experience

As you can now easily interpret, an SEO-friendly design helps in enhancing the customer experience. You gain customer loyalty and get repeat customers when you provide them with such an experience.

A good customer experience is like an endorsement. If search engines become aware that people are clicking onto more pages or spending more time on your website, your ranking will definitely soar high.

Insider tip: Refrain from using too many flash elements as it doesn't add value to the SEO of your website. Moreover, it delays the loading time, which can annoy your customers. Focus on offering a more refined user experience with different SEO practices, such as improving site speed and interlinking for increased content discoverability.

Image Source

6. Is Optimized for Conversions

Getting quality traffic on your website is impressive but you need to analyze if you are able to 'seal the deal.' An SEO-friendly website design is Conversion Rate Optimized (CRO). CRO is defined as the process in which your website and content are tweaked, tested, and improved to increase conversions. With CRO, you get more out of your web traffic. There are many CRO marketing strategies that you can try, some of which include:

• Use live chat software in your high-performing webpages
• Use lead flows (high-converting pop-ups that offer value)
• Re-engage people who left your website by tracking them and showing them online ads when they check other websites on the internet.

7. Is a Long-term Investment

How about having a web design that keeps paying you back? An SEO-friendly website design pays your business back as long as you vow to maintain it. All that you require is minimal monthly maintenance to maintain the position that you have in search results. Doing so also helps you increase traffic and helps your business grow.

8. SEO Holds Even More Importance on Mobile

How many times have you used your mobile to search for information and products? 88% of consumers looking for a local business with the help of a mobile device end up visiting/calling the business. This means, it is crucial to be on top of mobile search results or you may lose your customers to the competition.

As mentioned before, an SEO-friendly website has a responsive design that helps you connect with mobile users. Such a design offers an improved user experience and helps your leads stay longer on your website when they conduct a mobile search. Owing to this fact, Google ranks your website higher in the search results, which in turn, helps you get more customers.

9. Builds Brand Credibility

You must already trust the websites that show up on the first pages of Bing, Yahoo, or Google, right? Other internet users are likely to think the same too. This not only helps in brand awareness but is also good for brand credibility. You may ask why? Well, when you are displayed on the top, it clearly states that you are the best in your field. It makes a statement that your website is as per the needs of your users. A website that finds a frequent mention at the top of the result page is bound to gain exposure and credibility.

10. Helps Increases Engagement

We all know the objective of digital marketing ā create interaction with your customers. This engagement leads to brand exposure or an increase in sales. Thus, it is important to devise an SEO strategy that helps you reach more people, make them stay longer on your website, and urge them to share your content. Remember, your rankings will improve with more engagement and you will get the chance to move towards your desired results.

How to Create an SEO-friendly Website?

You can create an SEO-friendly website by keeping certain factors in mind. For instance, incorporate the most important keyword in the title of a page. Apart from this, you can integrate other essential keywords in smaller headings as well. You must also add content that is light and captivates the reader.

Implementing all these tips is just the start of the journey towards an SEO-friendly website. Here are some more ways to make your website SEO friendly:

• Ā Add new content regularly
• Ā Optimize your meta description to increase clicks
• Ā Use internal as well as external links
• Make sure that the readability of the content is on point

If you wish to create SEO-friendly websites in seconds, DashClicks's InstaSites tool allows you to do exactly this. Just a few clicks and you are done!

Bottomline

An SEO-friendly web design is extremely important for your business to find potential customers. We all know that building an SEO-friendly, professional niche-based website can take many days. However, if you use DashClicks' agency website tool, you can make an SEO-friendly, custom branded agency website in a matter of seconds. An excellent way of impressing your prospects, isn't it?

All in all, now that you know the importance of an SEO-friendly website design, you are in a better position to put in the required work and take your business to greater heights.

The traffic that a website attracts is crucial; it can be both the cause and the effect of a thriving business. Impressive website traffic helps entrepreneurs achieve their ultimate objectiveābusiness expansion and an ever-increasing customer base.

Optimizing SEO is an effective way to boost website traffic and rankings. However, it is not the only way. As a business owner, you should know how to diversify the incoming traffic. Relying on SEO alone is akin to putting all your eggs in one basket. So, if something goes wrong or Google rolls out an unpredicted algorithm update, your primary source of traffic, which is a search engine, in this case, may ditch you. It could also spell doom for your business.

Therefore, in this blog, we discuss various ways and practices that you can use to improve your website traffic without relying too heavily on SEO. Here we share 15 useful and mostly free tactics to boost your website traffic.

1. Use Schema Markup to Highlight Information on SERPs

Schema Markup is a code that you insert into your website to help the search engines return explanatory results for searchers. Adding it doesn't directly increase traffic to your website, but it makes search engine crawlers find and index your web pages. As a result, you get better search engine visibility and traffic. It also creates rich site snippets to bolster your click-through rate.

Here's an example of a website, Cute Calendar, that used Schema Markup on its events calendar page. The search result on Google looks like this:

Here is how you can use Schema Markup for SEO:

Go to Google's Structured Data Markup Helper to mark up elements on your page so Google can understand the data on the page.

1. Select the type of data: Choose one of the content formats such as articles, book reviews, and events from the several listed options.

 
• Select Content Format
• Paste the URL to markup
• Select the elements
   

2. Continue adding markup items: Highlight the other things on your page to populate your markup list.  ‍

3. Create the HTML: Click on Create HTMLā once you're done.  ‍

4. Add Schema Markup to your site: Open your CMS or the source code and add the highlighted snippets at the right places.    ‍

5. Test your schema: Use the Structured Data Testing Tool to see how the result will look on the SERPs.  

2. Add Internal Links

Adding internal links is a healthy SEO practice; they are as important as backlinks or external links. You must interlink your website's pillar content for the best user experience. It will make navigation easier and improve metrics such as "time spent on page" and "time spent on the website."

Image courtesy:  Media Search Group

3. Interview Experts, Industry Influencers, and Thought Leaders

The objective of content marketing is to bring fresh content that offers value. You should invite people who can offer useful and fascinating inputs. Interesting interviews work across all major content formatsāblogs, YouTube channels, and podcasts.

It's even better if you can call over experts, industry influencers, and thought leaders for interviews. Popular names establish an instant connection, add to your credibility, and increase traffic. Celebs also share such interviews on their social handles, further enhancing your content's reach. It is an excellent exercise in giving a boost to personal branding and mutual promotion.

4. Use Email Marketing

Most businesses overly rely on content marketing and SEO these days. However, many other streams, such as paid social and email marketing, are equally effective, and you should not ignore them.

When done right, they can have a great reach and impact. Even a moderately successful email campaign can result in an instant spike in traffic. But make sure that you don't bombard your audience with frequent and unimportant messages. Instead, use emails to give them gentle reminders about your latest products and services.

5. Make Sure Your Site is Responsive

80% of netizens used a mobile device to search the internet in 2019. Therefore, it's crucial that you optimize your website for mobile devices and tablets for a smooth user experience. An unresponsive website can result in a massive spike in the bounce rate. You don't want visitors to leave your website in no time; it will nullify all your marketing efforts.

6. Work on Your Site's Loading Speed

Poor site loading speed hurts user experience and may lead to many other severe consequences such as:

A. Google can penalize your website

B. Your rankings may drop overnight

C. Bounce rate may increase

D. Disappointed visitors may never return and even share their bad experience on social media  

To resolve these issues, you should:

A. Technically optimize all your website pages

B. Optimize image file size

C. Improve your page structure

D. Control the functionality of third-party plugins for optimal user experience

7. Be Active on Social Media

No user can spam any group or account for self-promotion on social media. However, even if your end goal is self-promotion, you need to participate with the online community and use relevant hashtags to provide context to your posts and conversations.

If your followers leave comments on your Facebook or Instagram business page, you should respond proactively and answer their queries. Don't use social media as your broadcast channel. It is meant for interaction, so engage with your audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms.

Tip: It will do well to remember Megan O'Neill's wise words when using social media for business: Before you sell on social media, interact, inspire, educate, entertain, and engage.

8. Use Videos

Videos are much more effective and entertaining than text-based content. Also, it is far easier to retain the information you consume via video. If you want to make your website engaging and attract new visitors, you should create high-quality videos that inform, educate, and entertain.

9. Host Webinars

A webinar is an effective way to share your experience and knowledge with an interested audience. Webinars should be an integral part of your digital marketing and social promotion campaigns. They will generate traffic and lucrative leads that you can nurture carefully through content marketing and personal interaction.

To make your webinar successful, send out a reminder email before the scheduled time to your subscribers and website visitors and use paid advertising to promote it. You should also send reminders and alerts with messages such as "last chance to register" 24 hours before the webinar.

It's a good practice to make your webinar content available after it's over through downloadable audio files and promote it on social media. To learn more on how to conduct a webinar, click here.

10. Advertise

Paid advertising is a great way to promote your website among untapped audiences. You can tweak paid strategies according to your business objectives. But study an advertising platform's pros and cons carefully before selecting it.

If you want your website traffic to translate into more sales, you should target keywords with "high purchase intent" when creating paid campaigns. These keywords and search terms may be costly, but the rewards will outweigh your spending.

11. Experiment with Your Content

To succeed at content marketing, you should experiment with different content formats and sizes. Content repurposing is a great option if you have a team working on your blogs. You can break your content into small chunks and convert it into picture messages, infographics, and videos for maximum impact.

Famous entrepreneur and internet personality GaryVee, for example, experiments with different content formats, especially "micro-content," which he creates from his event videos and long-form posts. He says he constantly creates and posts as much content as possible. However, he makes sure that each piece is specific to the platform he's posting it on.

GaryVee publishes a new episode of his popular GaryVee Video Experience every day and distributes it on his YouTube channel, Facebook Watch Page, and IGTV. Apart from that, he continually creates "micro-content" and shares it on his Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Quora, and other social handles.

To know how Gary Vaynerchuk makes 30+ pieces of content from a single keynote or event, visit the GaryVee Content Model.

12. Write Compelling Headlines

The writers at Buzzfeed experiment with more than 20 different headlines before arriving at the one they publish. Headlines are crucial to attracting traffic. If you have a dull headline, most readers will bounce off and go elsewhere. Writing a compelling headline is an art that you need to master for successful marketing. You can try the blog topic headline generator to see what works. You can also read this post to learn how to write attractive headlines. Here's more about how Buzzfeed headlines work.

13. Make Use of On-Page SEO

Search engines rank optimized content on top, and SEO is still as relevant as ever. Make sure to add alt text to your images and create internal links in every post you publish. Don't ignore meta descriptions and meta tags. Optimizing your website for on-page SEO is a proven method to increase organic traffic and website visibility and rank on various keywords.

14. Target Long-Tail Keywords

Once you are done researching high-intent keywords and popular keywords in your niche, you need to experiment with long-tail keywords. It is the secret formula to attract enormous traffic to a website.

Once a website starts ranking on long-tail keywords, it becomes visible on search engines and starts ranking on other keywords too. Long-tail keywords are used the most in web searches; if you are not targeting them, you're missing out on traffic and opportunities to rank on top of SERPs.

15. Start Guest Blogging

Guest blogging for a high-domain authority site is a surefire way to increase traffic to your site. It also helps build your brand.

Google doesn't like users manipulating its results by overusing/misusing guest posting. Therefore, you need to stay away from spammy tactics and approach guest posting with caution.

Conclusion

This is an exhaustive list of the tactics you can try to ensure a consistent increase in your website traffic. Most of these strategies don't require any investment and can be implemented easily. If you've also got a list of proven tips that helped increase traffic to your website, please feel free to share them in the comments.

YouTube is the world's second-largest search engine after Google; optimizing your videos for it can produce rich rewards when done right.

Although Google lists videos in its search results, search engine optimization for YouTube takes a customized approach and a unique set of skills.

Here are 15 hacks to help you rank your videos high on Google and YouTube search results:

1. Find the Right Keywords

Video marketing on YouTube is not only for professionals. YouTube is the world's second most visited site after Google, with 500 hours of video uploaded on it every minute.

Like Google search, the best way to get started with YouTube SEO is to find the right keywords. It is a crucial step in your bid to attract the right traffic to your channel. As YouTube videos also appear on Google search pages, you can target keywords for both.

Keyword research is crucial because it allows you to match your content with user queries and helps the audience understand the video's context and scope. It also enables you to find the exact phrases that generate traffic and separate them from other search terms.

You can use these two approaches to find the right keywords for your channel or video:

• Generate a list of keyword ideas: Look for keywords using YouTube's Search Suggestā  feature for the first bunch of YouTube SEO keyword ideas.
• Target low competition keywords: If you have recently created a YouTube channel and have few subscribers, you should focus on low competition keywords. Pursuing competitive keywords at this stage can often be counter-productive. To gain insight into your competition, click on the About Resultā  section on their channel. It usually contains keywords that aren't very competitive. Google Keyword Planner can be immensely helpful, especially in finding keywords around your particular niche.

2. Optimize the Video Title

Your job as a creator is not over after uploading the video. Even if your videos offer users value, they will not rank unless you optimize them.

Include the correct information and relevant keywords in your video title to attract the desired audiences. Use easy-to-remember, attention-grabbing titles and fill them with popular keywords. A video's title is crucial for search engine ranking and visitor traffic as it's the first thing that users and search engines look at.

The title shouldn't be misleading; it should be relevant to the search query and the video content. Keep it jargon-free and straightforward. Make sure it is brief and helps the users find answers to their questions.

3. Optimize Tags

It is an integral part of a robust SEO strategy; however, different tags play various roles. Therefore, you must optimize your tags for better SEO results.

Each page on YouTube must have a unique meta description. You need to include relevant keywords to attract traffic but be careful not to over-use them, as it can prompt the search engine to divert traffic away from your videos.

For inspiration and insights, you can study the tags your competitors use by downloading YouTube Tags, a Chrome extension.Ā  Here is a screenshot from the tool, in which you can see the tags used in a video.

To increase your YT video's visibility and boost organic rankings, you should work on writing effective YouTube tags.

4. Have a Comment Section

YouTube algorithms rank videos that have lots of views and active audience engagement higher than others. To boost comment-based engagement for your videos:

1. Keep them interactive
2. Ask a question at the end to trigger a conversation
3. Encourage viewers to comment

5. Encourage Viewers to Subscribe

Channel subscription is a crucial factor that drives viewer engagement. Ask your visitors to subscribe to your channel in your opening statement or towards the video's end. The more subscribers you have, the more traffic you will receive whenever you upload a video.

6. Make an Attractive Thumbnail

You may call it the Instagram effect, but visual graphics and images go a long way in enhancing your visibility on any social media site, including YouTube. A unique and exciting thumbnail can quickly grab viewers' attention. Meanwhile, lousy typography, improper messaging, and poor graphics can instantly turn off visitors. Therefore, avoid creating irrelevant thumbnails that are misaligned with your video's theme and content. Resist the temptation of petty clickbait tactics.

7. Use Closed Captioning

Closed captions boost your video's SEO as search engines can read closed captions. They index them and consider them in search results. In contrast, search engines can't read open captions, so open captions don't offer any SEO value. YouTube does not support automatic captioning. Therefore, you can either edit the auto-generated captions or choose to create your own.

8. Build Links to Your Channel

Your YouTube SEO should promote your videos and your channel. Link-building can help your SEO in multiple ways. It drives referral traffic and increases your website's authority. There is no magic formula to explain how Google's algorithms work as they are complex and constantly evolving. But Google gives considerable weightage to backlinks when ranking a site for different keywords.

Link building is a popular SEO tactic because links send a signal to search engines that your site deserves attention, offers value, and is worthy of citation. Therefore, you'll find that most top-ranking sites have numerous backlinks. Building links can be difficult and tedious, but with more outreach, you can engineer better links.

Reach out to users who share your interests, and introduce them to your content. You can find potential subscribers on social media and third-party blogs. When your video content offers value to the viewers, they are more likely to subscribe to your channel.

9. Share on Social Media

You should not ignore the power of social media when framing your YouTube SEO strategy. With billions of active users worldwide, social media platforms have emerged as potent marketing tools. There are 3.5 billion daily active social media users worldwide, which makes up around 45% of the world population. According to an Emarketer report in 2019, around 90% of millennials, 78% of Gen X, and 48% of baby boomers use social media. So, sharing on social media is the best way to promote your content. You can promote your YouTube content to audiences from different generations using major social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

10. Embed Your YouTube Videos

Embedding your video is an effective way of directing attention to your YouTube videos, especially when you feature your content on news pages, blogs and e-commerce websites. Here's how you can embed your YouTube videos and playlists:

1. Open the YouTube video you want to embed
2. On the bottom right, click on Share
3. Click on Embed
4. Copy the HTML code from the pop-up box
5. Paste the code into your blog or website HTML.

11. Increase Your Video Watch Time

Video watch-time is an essential metric from an SEO perspective. Analytics like watch-time and audience retention report reports provide valuable insights into how audiences are consuming your content. Use them to identify red flags early and adapt for better results.

12. Develop Playlists

Most YouTube viewers often visit playlists for similar content by the same creator. If you follow digital marketing influencers like Rand Fishkin, Larry Kim, and Neil Patel and want to know the latest trends in paid advertising, the playlists on their channels are a great place to start. For example, in Moz's channel, you'll find many playlists such as Technical Tips, Daily SEO Fix, and SEO Strategy. They hook the viewers' attention, make navigation more manageable, and open them to newer content. Playlists also substantially shorten the search time.

13. Find the Optimal Length for Your Videos

It is difficult to determine the perfect video length, but the average duration of a popular video on YouTube is 4 minutes and 20 seconds. However, a video's size will depend on the type of content you are showcasing.

14. Upload a Transcript

A video transcript boosts your content's SEO value because it includes keywords that may lead viewers to your video. It also increases the video visibility and viewer focus.

15. Improve Your Content

Although SEO can help with your content's search engine rankings, your focus should be on giving your customers high-quality content through your videos. Here we give you a low-down on the three critical elements of quality content and a few tips on how to create it:

1. Quality: Learn to write well and make it visually appealing, so the readers or viewers wait for your content, be it text or videos.
2. Uniqueness: Make sure the content you create has a fresh, singular voice. So, even if it's curated, it should stand out. You can also offer more context and explore a different angle to make it unique.
3. Authority: Adopt a journalist's approach to add credibility to a story. Cite verifiable sources to support your points.

Get Ready to Boost the YouTube SEO

YouTube SEO helps you increase your videos' rankings, watch-time, and views. It also attracts new subscribers to your channel. Therefore, you must invest substantial time, effort, and resources on it using the tips and techniques discussed here.

High search engine rankings add immense value to a business as they can generate increased traffic, visibility, and revenue. Appearing on top of organic search results also boosts your brand awareness. However, it requires consistent efforts and continued investment of time and money.

Most digital marketing agencies pay hundreds of dollars every month as subscription fees for expensive SEO tools. But many startups and small businesses can't afford that. To boost your sales and outsmart your competition, you need an SEO tool that is affordable yet robust and effective.

Here are nine affordable and result-driven SEO tools that you can use to achieve higher search rankings.Ā

1. Ubersuggest

Popular serial entrepreneur Neil Patel's Ubersuggest has almost similar features as BuzzSumo, but since the outbreak of COVID-19, Ubersuggest has been made available for agencies and marketers free of cost.

Just enter the keyword or phrase you are targeting, and it will return the most popular articles and blog posts containing those words. It uses various metrics to curate a list of blog posts with the highest number of backlinks, social shares, and traffic. It will tell you what's trending and give you an idea about the content that resonates with users. You can use this tool to generate topics for your content marketing campaigns.

Ubersuggest also allows you to reverse-engineer your competitors' SEO and digital marketing strategies. It provides you research-backed insights into the SEO strategies that other companies have successfully implemented and how you can also adapt them for better results.

It is also a great tool to get keyword ideas. It provides hundreds of suggestions, including short-tail and long-tail keywords and other useful metrics like competition data, volume, and even seasonal trends.

Ubersuggest can also generate a list of keywords that your competitors use based on Google's user queries. It provides you comprehensive backlink data and niche-based content that people are linking to. You can contact these sites and ask for the relevant backlinks to save your time. The tool also offers an action plan to improve your link profile and a list of the best backlinks that will have the maximum positive impact on your rankings.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics utilizes comprehensive website data to help you make smart decisions. It tracks your every action and measures its impact on traffic and conversion. It also gathers user data about email sign-ups, downloads, clicks, conversions, and keywords. If you want your pages to rank for specific keywords, no other tool can provide better insights than Google Analytics.

It also helps you understand user behavior on your website so you can tweak your marketing strategy, content, and products accordingly. Furthermore, it utilizes Google's machine learning capabilities, which generates reliable data that you can use to convert insights to tangible results.Ā

3. Google Page Speed

Webpage speed is a crucial and direct ranking factor. It applies to both mobile and desktop sites. Google Page Speed calculates your website's loading speed and provides suggestions to improve it based on Google's guidelines.Ā

4. Google Keyword Planner

The best things in life are for free, and the same is true for Google Keyword Planner. Google offers this tool free of cost when you sign up for a Google Ads account. It helps you explore popular search terms and also the ones that are easy to rank. It can be a handy resource for marketers and businesses, especially if they are relatively inexperienced. The tool uses Google's artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to offer suggestions based on the keywords you enter. The suggested keywords include the necessary metrics and data.

5. Google Search Console

A few years ago, website owners used Google Webmaster Tools to gain crucial performance-related insights and fix SERP issues. But on 28 May 2015, it was rebranded as Google Search Analytics, and in 2018, it was rechristened Google Search Console when Google made significant changes to the platform.

Google Search Console can quickly identify undesirable crawl errors and broken URLs. The platform also gives your backlink profile's complete picture. It helps you gain deep insights into the website's performance on search engines using vital metrics like a number of unique impressions, click-through rate, and average ranking position. Since it is Google's proprietary tool, it uses the data stored on the Google servers to reveal information about your webpage's average ranking in any country.

The tool also allows you to track how your rankings have changed over time. Google Search Console may not strictly be an SEO tool, but the data it provides can help you rank high on SERPs.Ā

6. SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is a multi-purpose SEO tool that can help you with all the aspects of yourĀ  SEO campaign. Although it is a paid software, the free version is as good as some other best SEO tools.

SEO Powersuite's free version helps you do the following:

• Find ways to divert traffic from competitor websites.
• Improve your search engine rankings.
• Identify the right keywords based on online searches.
• Perform a detailed SEO audit on your site.
• Optimize your site with the most popular and low competition keywords.
• Gain insights into your competitors’ backlinks and formulate a link-building strategy.
• Build new partnerships and discover guest posting opportunities.

7. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a comprehensive SEO analytics tool that also acts as a website crawler. It analyzes the site-wide SEO for your and your competitors' websites. It will also provide you vital information about the various errors on your webpages, such as broken links, faulty redirects, and duplicate pages.

The tool helps generate an XML sitemap, review meta robots and directives, and analyze page titles and metadata. Screaming Frog has both paid and free versions; the free version analyses up to 500 URLs. It extracts crucial data about your competition and fixes common SEO issues to improve your website.

8. Check My Links

Google does not like broken links as they hinder user experience on your website. Since manually checking broken links is time-consuming, Check My Links allows you to perform an audit on your site to locate broken links within minutes. It will help you to quickly repair broken links and improve your SEO across the website. Check My Links highlights the valid links in green and broken links in red. It also highlights links in yellow to indicate potentially problematic links.

9. Open Link Profiler

Link building is a tedious task, but Open Link Profiler simplifies it by providing comprehensive data about your backlink profile. Engineering high-quality links can significantly boost your website's SEO. Visit their website, enter your URL, and it will give you access to a list of all the links that point to your site.

Open Link Profiler also gives you information about the quality and origin of backlinks. It helps you get rid of toxic links and adds higher-quality links. The free version allows you to export up to 1000 links.

Conclusion

You don't always need expensive tools to get high search engine rankings. Many SEO tools offer incredible value at a relatively low cost. The user-friendly tools discussed above will help you enhance your website's SEO profile, increase loading speed, fix broken links, perform website audits, and efficiently handle other digital marketing tasks.

If you are among the SEO professionals who feel that SEO tactics and their effectiveness are changing rapidly, you are not alone.

Remember the days when webmasters used to lose their sleep whenever Google announced an algorithm update? There were obvious reasons for such panic attacks as even the most successful websites, when hit by a Google algorithm update, lost all their rankings and traffic overnight. Ezinearticles.com is a prime example.

Google is investing a lot to keep its users within its framework and improve user experience. It's also spending on research and development to identify, analyze and understand web pages in a better way thwarting the attempts by the SEO community to manipulate its algorithms.

Show up on Google's First Result Page or Get Doomed

Google saves your time when it answers queries within the SERPs (search engine results pages) as 75% of searchers never go past the first page of search results. That's why it's crucial to rank or "get featured" (through elements like featured snippets) on the first page of search results, and if you are not ranking in the top 10 results for popular keywords, your website will almost be invisible on the web. So if your business is heavily dependent on Google's organic search traffic, you can be in trouble.

Growth of Expanded SERP Features

Google is changing its SERPs in many ways, and it may not be good news for many businesses. Knowledge cards, top stories, featured snippets, ads, Q&A on Google, and reviews are some of the features introduced in Google search results recently.

With the increased visibility of knowledge panels and disguised ads along with image display and videos, organic rankings have gone down further and retailers have no option but to spend money on paid listings, which favors Google.

So, if you want to rank on top, you need to work harder. Better pages, an excellent user interface, and faster mobile-friendly websites are the features you should focus on.

SEO Best Practices in 2021

Here are some of the best SEO practices to rank your website on top in the SERPs in 2021.

1. Optimize Your Website Based on Topic Clusters Instead of Keywords

From search keywords to user intent, Google has evolved in recent years. Google has introduced various features such as a snippet box to answer the user query within the SERPs. Earlier, the focus was on the keywords, but now it has shifted to the context and the user intent. You can't rank your web page just by optimizing it with the relevant keywords; you will have to create content on different topics that your users can be interested in.

A. Identify Your Target Audience

You need to identify your "target audience" to succeed in any digital marketing stream. Don't attempt to define it just by the keywords they use. For example, if someone is searching for "Aspirin," they could fall into different categories:

1. People looking to buy Aspirin
2. People associated with the pharmaceutical industry locating stores
3. Medical practitioners or bloggers looking into its side effects
4. Students looking for information on Aspirin to write an essay or article

If you don't understand your target audience, you would likely create content around the general topics related to the product. But you can't attain any rankings by creating generic content as a single piece of content may not provide value to different customer types.

Instead, building buyer personas and creating content on relevant topics to your audience will bring significant results. Identifying the shared traits of your ideal customers will also help find the appropriate titles.

B. Divide The Content Into Topic Clusters

According to HubSpot, rather than focusing on standalone keywords, if your content is organized based on different themes or groups, you would attract more traffic from organic searches.

Having great content and using the right keywords just aren't enough to get Google's attention these days. With so much content being published online, Google wants to confirm that you're an authority in your niche. And one of the best practices to establish authority is to divide your content into pillar pages and topic clusters.

To organize content using clusters, you need to create a pillar page and a few related cluster pages, which must be linked to the original pillar page. These pages would answer different questions and cover topics related to the pillar page.

Let's define what a pillar page and topic clusters are. A pillar page is a part of cornerstone content that we add to our website to provide a comprehensive synopsis on a topic. The topic clusters supplement the pillar page; these are the articles and web pages created to cover subtopics listed on the pillar page.

Both pillar page and the topic clusters are interlinked to provide an enhanced user experience that helps in exerting your authority to Google.

For example, suppose you're creating content on decluttering. In that case, you can create a topic cluster around different subtopics such as decluttering of clothes, household stuff, cutlery and crockery, books, electronic gadgets, toiletry, and cosmetics, etc. In these clusters, your readers, who are likely to be "minimalists" or "want to be minimalists," will easily find the topics of their interest.

It will make your website a better resource where your audience can find information on different topics in your niche in one place. It will also help Google index your site as a valuable content resource for the minimalists. Any of these cluster pages can rank high in Google search and drive traffic to your site.

There are four types of search intents:

1. Informational: When the user is searching for specific or in-depth information.
2. Navigational: When you’re looking for a specific website or app such as “DashClicks”
3. Commercial: When the search intent is commercial, the user is looking for a specific product such as “best smartphones under $300.”
4. Transactional: Here, the intent is buying when you’ve already decided what to buy. For example, Apple iPad Pro 11 (2nd Generation)

One standard SEO best practice is to always keep the search intent in mind.

C. Don't Ignore Keywords

Even though search intent is more important for Google, the present algorithms still consider keywords as the signposts that help Google index your web pages based on different queries and matching keywords. You can use the SEO tools such as Ubersuggest, Moz's Keyword Explorer, or SEMRush for keyword research.

2. Write Long-Form Content

According to a study by Backlinko, long-form content is the best for getting backlinks and better rankings. According to Snap Agency's research in 2017, the word count of the blogs with the largest organic traffic volume ranged between 2,250 ā€“ 2,500. However, search intent is more important than the length of the article for rankings.

Use your common sense to determine the length of your article. The article length should justify the user intent and information they are looking for. You should also not target multiple keywords and search queries in one post.

Use jump links for the people looking for just a fraction of the information to quickly navigate the relevant information in your long-form content.

How To Write Long-Form Content?

A. Sky-scraper technique

To create long-form content, you can adopt various strategies. The skyscraper technique is one of them in which you can pick the best points from different articles and create posts that cover the highest number of subheadings.

B. Update old content

You can also refresh your old content by updating the existing information and expanding it to make it more useful and relevant. This way, you can easily convert a current 1,200-word article into a 2,000-word article.

You can also update time-sensitive content. For example, if you have a published article titled "SEO tips to rank high in 2020" on your website, you can update this article by including the latest info and trends and change its title to "SEO tips to rank high in 2021".

3. Create a Diverse Backlink Portfolio

Backlinks were and will remain an important ranking factor for search engines. However, search engines are getting smarter in identifying quality backlinks and penalizing spam links. So focus on link building from high domain authority sites. However, you will be under Google's radar if your site is squeaky clean and contains the backlinks only from higher authority sites.

High-quality links may look like engineered links rather than earned links. Google may flag your site for a manual review. So ideally, a diversified link portfolio not only looks natural but also helps you rank high. Google doesn't ignore link equity from smaller sites as they also add value, but they should be from your niche. Disavow links that are harmful and shady.

4. Measure SEO Performance

SEO is incomplete without reporting and analytics, which are crucial to your overall marketing strategy. Effective reporting also helps you improve your content marketing and UX issues. Analytics tells you what kind of content appeals to your customer more. It also enables you to identify the UX issues in your website and which page received the most or least traffic.

You can monitor the following metrics to improve the UI/UX of a website:

1. Bounce Rate
2. Average Session Duration
3. Pageviews
4. Click-Through Rate

In the absence of monitoring and reporting, it can be challenging to understand these complexities. For measuring SEO performance, you can use various tools such as Google's Data Studio, Wayback machine, SEMRush, Google Search Console, etc.

5. Improve the User Experience on Your Website

User experience is an essential consideration by Google because it's ultimately the users who matter. It includes page speed and some other factors such as readability and visual appeal of the content.

Over the past few years, Google has evolved and it can figure out whether your website is UI/UX friendly or not.

You can use the following tips to improve the user experience on your website.

• Create visually appealing content: To improve the usability of your content, you can use videos, images, infographics, and screenshots to increase its visual appeal.

• Use subheadings: Introducing subheadings and heading tags such as H1, H2, and H3, makes your article more readable and easy to understand. Google loves it as it helps its spiders understand the content better.

• Avoid unnecessary pop-ups: Intrusive pop-ups are incredibly annoying for the website visitors and these are also not good from an SEO perspective. Google penalizes sites that use annoying pop-ups. However, you can use opt-ins sparingly if it is crucial to generate your email list. You can also use exit intent pop-ups, which people use to make the last-ditch effort to persuade the customer to take action before they leave the website.

6. Impact of BERT Update

Google continues rolling out various algorithm updates, but BERT was a significant update announced in October 2019. It negatively impacted numerous websites, so it's essential to understand how it can affect your website's rankings. BERT update was focused on content quality along with content relevance, keywords, and user intent.

If you want to improve the search engine rankings of your website, pay attention to the overall reputation of your website using the following factors:

1. YMYL (Your Money Your Life)
2. EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)

Tips to address BERT Update:

1. Ensure that your content answers your target audience’s queries as per their search intent (use topic clusters and create content around them).
2. Context should be a major concern while creating content rather than keyword density, an old school practice.
3. Create pillar content that answers maximum questions from the searchers about your brand

7. Add Lots of Relevant Data That the User Wants

To create content that adds value, avoid creating content mainly to stuff keywords. For better conversion and improved rankings, use lots of data in your content that helps your target audience.

You can follow these tips:

1. Restrict keywords to prime SEO spots, such as meta titles, meta descriptions, and alt tags, etc. and avoid stuffing them in core content
2. Create content for your target audience and keep it natural
3. Use a mix of short-tail and long-tail keywords to increase organic traffic

8. Improve Your Page Load Speed

Page load speed affects user experience on the site, so it's an important ranking factor.

To check your page load speed, you can use PageSpeed Insights, a tool from Google Developers, and start tweaking your website accordingly.

Follow specific useful tips published on Search Engine Journal to improve page speed.

9. Optimize Your Website for Voice Search

With voice search catching up, 55% of US adults are expected to use smart speakers by 2022. So, your SEO strategy is incomplete if you don't incorporate voice search into it. Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Cortana, and Siri, are already influencing it in a big way.

Follow these tips to make your content voice search-friendly:

1. Start adding content on every web page with natural language flavor. Provide short answers to match the voice queries of users.
2. Voice search queries are usually in sentences and appear more like FAQs. Use long-tail keywords and create long-form content to match those queries.
3. “Near me” searches are an essential part of local SEO. Include correct addresses and maps with matching structured data to help people find you using location-based queries.
4. Go through these SEO strategies to optimize your site for voice search.

10. Create Rich Snippets

According to Yoast.com, snippets with rich content have a higher click-through rate. They provide more information on the search results page than the standard snippets.

You can take the following steps to create rich content:

1. Make sure the headings are relevant and match with the content and SEO title
2. Use structured data on your site as Google shows it in its results
3. Follow the recommendations of the latest Google updates
4. Add proper keywords
5. Use attractive and informative meta descriptions
6. Mention your brand in meta titles

11. Optimize for Local Searches

Almost 50% of searches include users seeking information about local businesses and stores, their opening and closing hours, phone numbers, and locations on the map. Local SEO can direct massive traffic to your store if the searchers are within a 5-6 mile radius. According to a study, 72% of searchers looking for local business info end up visiting your store.

You can take the following steps to improve your local SEO.

1. Improve your directory listings
2. Enter your details on Google My Business
3. Fix your local directory listings (hire an agency for the tedious job)
4. Interact with data aggregators to manage massive directory listings
5. Build and optimize local landing pages such as “SEO services in Miami” to rank on top of SERPs
6. Use schema markups
7. Use JSON (Javascript Object Notation) injection

12. Leverage Video Content

According to a study, the number of video viewers in the US is expected to touch 248.9 million by 2022. With increasing video viewership, many businesses have started using video content as part of their marketing strategy. It keeps the website visitors hooked by using storytelling and situations to relate and connect with your audience.

Videos help trigger a chain of thoughts in viewers’ minds when the products are shown in action. Video making can be expensive and time-consuming, but it’s highly engaging and has a high ROI.

13. Leverage Social Listening

Social listening involves monitoring all your social handles to get your audiences’ pulse and connect with them using engaging content on your website. It includes tracking customer feedback, monitoring online conversations about your brand, and gaining insights to revamp your existing marketing strategy for better results.

Here are a few things you can do to leverage social listening to improve your SEO.

1. Look for brand mentions: Use a tool like Brandwatch to find online brand mentions. If they are not linked to your website, contact the owner of those websites or the social influencers and ask them to add your link to those mentions.
2. Find guest posting opportunities: Use a social listening tool and find all the popular blogs that publish quality content in your niche and seek guest posting opportunities with them.
3. Surveil your competitors: Use social listening tools to spy on what your competitors are doing. Surveil their activities, find out which influencers they are collaborating with, and find the guest posting opportunities.

The Conclusion

If you act on the tips mentioned above with a proper plan, your organic rankings will improve tremendously and sales will rise sharply. If you haven’t started investing in the SEO of your company website, it’s never too late. Even with content marketing making waves, You can’t ignore Search Engine Optimization. It provides the right mix of digital marketing and compliments content marketing to help your site rank on top.

Here are a few pro tips you can begin with:

• Update your web pages for local search
• Focus on whitehat guest posts and link building, internal linking, and overall SEO strategy of your site
• Perform keyword research and use a mix of long-tail and short-tail keywords
• Perform conversion analysis and encourage the visitor to take a specific, desirable action
• Look into your EAT (Expertise, Authority, and Trust: the three factors that Google uses to measure how much trust it should place in a brand or website for ranking purposes) Factors & optimize it.
• Focus on the mobile experience of your website and zero-click searches (zero-click searches are those searches when the users use the information already presented on the SERPs such as “featured snippets” and “People Also Ask” features to get the answers to their query) to rank in 2021.

Follow these tips and if the information seems overwhelming to handle, hire a professional SEO agency to leverage the enormous potential of SEO for your website.