Rafi Chowdhury

Competitor

Nothing is as thrilling as the thought of beating your competitors. It is why everyone is chasing for a spot on the first page of search engines. Serpbook.com is one of the sites you need to visit to find out everything you need to know about SERPs and how much or a chance you stand against your competitors.

Also Read : Neat Software Tool for Researching Competitors’ Sites

Whether or not your competitors have been around longer than you, the urge to beat them is the same. Part of the reason you should optimize your website is your competitors, creating a name and reputation for your brand online. You want to ensure you are doing something extra that they may not know, and here’s a head-start for you:

Optimizing your landing pages

Landing pages should be the information providers for your audience. Whatever you choose to put on your landing page, it should have all the relevant information about your brand and what your audience should expect.

Choose long-tail keywords you can use for the content on your landing page, as well as emphasizing on quality, relevance, and clarity for your copy. With the Copyblogger tool, you can create one of the best high-quality landing pages for a widely held topic of choice.

Optimizing voice search

Google is among the leading developers championing for voice search today, with Amazon following close with Alexa technology and Microsoft with Cortana. Voice search has allowed convenience for users to acquire answers online without having to type in words.

Today, close to half of the internet’s population is using voice search, so you must optimize your website for these searches. Create more conversational kinds of content, long-tail keywords and question-based phrases to address these searches.

HTTPS over HTTP

More often than not people ignore the importance of HTTPS. What you may be overlooking is that HTTP is not a secure network protocol, and today, security is everything. This is why HTTPS protocol and VPN encryption have become increasingly popular.  After all, all communication should be secure by default, and this feeling is mutual for Google and audiences.

In fact, going forward, it is possible that Google might change its algorithm to penalize HTTP protocols, so why take the risk? To transit from HTTP to HTTPS, purchase and install an SSL certificate.

Also Read : How to Make Your Product Stand Out In a Crowded Market

Identify and fix broken links

As resounding as it is, link-building is not a one-off process. It takes continuous effort to source out for links, but more importantly to manage links.

Although losing quality links is a threat to watch out for, there are broader issues as concerns links. Broken links are distasteful to audiences and can mess up your user experience. The implications will be evident on search rankings. With an easy-to-use tool like Screaming Frog Spider, you can effortlessly identify broken links and fix them.

Join question-and-answer sites

Quora is among the most popular site for questions-and-answer. The reason you should join such sites is to learn more about what the audience wants.

You could say question-and-answer sites are a good way to spot prime keywords for your site, but it is all about getting to know which question your website is a solution to. A great trick that will help you do well on question-and-answer sites is finding questions that do not have many answers to them, then provide the best structured timely response.

Videos

Videos strike many website owners as time-consuming, hence explaining why they avoid them. However, videos are quite the catch these days. People would rather watch a video over reading through a long text-based content.

This is not to demean the value of text-based long-form content, but videos are a great type of material you should consider for your website. Aim for appropriately long videos with content worthy of people’s time, either in the form of entertainment, information, persuasion or exploration.

Mobile friendly standard

As overemphasized as the need for mobile optimization is, people still ignore it. You must be deliberate about optimizing your site for the mobile audience that is rapidly overthrowing the desktop audience. In fact, before you can think about your desktop site, standardize your mobile site.

Ensure that all the relevant information that is visible on the desktop site can be seen on the mobile site without compromising on font size and image quality due to screen size difference. You can try out Google’s Mobile Testing Tool for free to ascertain whether or not your mobile passes the mobile-friendly standard test.

Use infographics

You know how much valuable images are today? Infographics gratify the visual need, not to mention their high ease of sharing. To get it right with your infographics, opt for great design and content. Remember that not all people that see your infographic will go through the whole text, so you must be clear with the message you pass across.

However, long-form content is great for coupling up with infographics because Google needs text to rank your website.

With the SEO, you cannot bank on immediate results, which is why you should forget about being an overnight sensation. Your competitors might be practicing SEO, but with these eight tactics, you can rest assured that your brand will outshine them all.