Advanced SEO: On-Page UX Signals

So google tracks your title, the meta description, your content, your backlinks, and your CTR. Guess what? None of that matters if the content you create doesn’t keep your audience engaged and on your web page.

Google’s “How Search Works,” says that to help them rank the best results, they “use aggregated and anonymized interaction data to assess whether search results are relevant to queries.”

Here are things you should be implementing with your content to help keep people engaged.

Bottom line: people are impatient. We live in a world where we can have almost any answer at our fingertips. Well, that also includes the attention span that people have now.

Images are great but only if used properly. Don’t use an image with a massive file size as these will take FOREVER to load. For best practice, you should always serve images in nextgen formats like “webp”.

Backlinko does a fantastic job at keeping an aesthetically pleasing blog post while reassuring the user that they’re on the right page.

Just make sure that you have a headline to reassure your audience of your content. 

Now let’s say your content is awesome and there’s so much great information!

But if your audience can’t skim through and get what they’re looking for… they click off.

Search engines AND people prefer content to be easily digestible and quick to read, people want to find the answers quickly. 

This varies depending on the topic. 

A great way to help is to use H2 Headings for important parts in the body of your content.

Bullet Points are AMAZING, people will eat these up!

We love images, just make sure that they don’t take away from reading the content and that they add to it.

Lastly, be active in responding to people who comment on your content. Having a little community or questions and response area can help further drive home your content.

Think of it as reviews left by other experts or people to show new readers that you know your stuff and help you learn new things or even create drama in the chat room to keep people engaged.

Advanced SEO: On-Page SEO Tips

In our last chapter as we close on this blog, we hope that you have learned some new stuff and if you’re an expert we would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Once you have followed our steps of everything above now it’s time to get into some fun stuff that helps your audience trust your content even more.

Advanced SEO: Start with Original Images

We’ve done the stock images thing before and let us tell you it’s not great… People don’t like seeing the same images all the time and it can be really easy to tell what a stock photo looks like.

So our advice? Go and create some original images!

Get creative, and have fun with it. Most of us have a smartphone that has a decent camera on it so even if you don’t have a DSLR, you can still take some great photos with a smartphone. 

This is a study that was done by Shai Aharony on the effect stock images had on Google rankings.

After trying both out and using original images versus stock images the data it’s clear that sites that have original content for their blogs rank higher.

Here’s the deal. People want to see REAL PEOPLE! They don’t want to see models or actors in a stock photo of office space. 

How are they going to relate to that?

Do they look like they struggled to get to work today and forgot to make themselves breakfast? 

Do they look like they have to take care of 3 screaming kids while trying to work?

NO! They’re models so of course, they are going to look amazing and that their life is together. But if you want your content to rank well and connect with a bigger audience. Then use original images that are relatable in your content.

Advanced SEO: Internal Linking

This is it.

‘La crème de la crème.’

It’s how you can rank higher not only on your blog but also with your website as a whole. It can even help those pages that aren’t doing so hot to get some more traffic.

Like we said before, you should use emotional words that will trigger some reaction in your audience..

So what can you do to help your internal linking?

Backlinko has a great article on the SEO tool Ahrefs to help you know which pages have the best link authority. 

Then use those to create internal links on the page that you are trying to rank higher with other helpful information you have!

Wikipedia is a great resource to see how to do internal linking. I mean their pages are flooding with keyword internal links.

Advanced SEO: Write Comprehensive Content

Now we know that people skim but if your content doesn’t help them know the topic you’re writing about when they’re done. 

Then your content sucks… 

So a little secret to help your content reach more people? Use LSI Keywords, these are synonyms that Google uses to determine a page’s relevancy.

Now depending on the length of your content you may or may not want to add more or less of these. 

We’re sure that you have seen them. 

They pop up at the bottom when you are searching for something on google. 

These are the LSI keywords that you’re looking for and Google is just handing them to you. 

For Free.

So use them. Use all of them if it makes sense and doesn’t mess up your content.

Advanced SEO: Boost your Page Speed

Your site is gorgeous, your content is unique, comprehensive, and entertaining.

It doesn’t load fast at all.

The person goes back to the Google Search Results page because your page won’t load fast enough.

DO NOT LET THIS BE YOU!

These analyses were provided by Backlinko and we can agree that by checking third-party scripts, the hosting provider you use and the biggest is bytes total which is the size of information or the storage.

Advanced SEO: Optimize Your Images

One thing to help with your SEO is to give each image a name and alt text. Google can’t read images, so adding alt text to them allows Google to read your images and better determine what content is on your site.  

The more you label your images on the page, the better Google can understand what the page is about and better help people searching for the topic.

Advanced SEO: Get Featured On Google Without Paying For It

Something that can increase your CTR is getting a little feature snippet on the Google Page. You know these:

They’re also known as answer boxes and they’re awesome right? They can give you the information to know quickly that this page is going to help you. Plus, people tend to trust top results more than the ones down below.

So what can you do to help you get featured on that first page?

Well, the first thing is you probably need to be on the first page already according to Ahref’s blog. So everything you’ve learned from our blog. 

Go and apply it to your content today. (Well at least one, you’re human like us that would be insane to do them all, MENTAL HEALTH IS IMPORTANT GUYS!)

Now, according to Google, “Google systems determine whether a page would make a good featured snippet for a user’s search request and if so, elevates it.” So basically they say that there’s no secret to it… but if there’s one thing that we learned in life it’s that it’s not true.

So here are 7 steps to help you have a better chance of getting your content featured. 

Advanced SEO: Use the Tools You Already Have

Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or other SEO software to find out which of your top-ranking pages.

Filter for the keywords that already have a featured snippet.

Then search it on google to double-check the keywords. 

If you see something specific in the featured snippet; like a list, definition, or images. Make sure to go and further those along in the content. Make that ‘definition’ Google is using and turn it into a definition. 

If it’s just pulling stuff out for a list, go and make your content structured so it’s easier to make a list out of.

Advanced SEO: Voice Search SEO

The future is here, or it has been for a few years. (Don’t be a boomer) Alexas, Google Mini’s, Phones, Laptops, and even our watches. A lot of these today can help you find what you’re looking for just by using the voice search that’s programmed into it. 

Why are we talking about this? Well, we figured it would be obvious… but imagine if you can have your content be searchable for voice search results? 

I mean the possibilities are there, your content could rank so much higher than others if you can help optimize for voice search results. 

All you have to do is create some phrases, keywords, and such that someone would search via voice search. 

We think it’s pretty awesome and it’s why we saved it for the last.

Conclusion

We hope that this guide will help you in your SEO endeavors and give you a great starting point to create some new ideas to help your content. Drop us a comment below, we would love to hear what your thoughts were as well as any constructive feedback you have. Have a great day and we wish you the best.