You've worked hard to get to the top of Google – now you have to defend your position. The columnist Daniel Faggella He offers us his advice to stay on top.
Generate a constant source of traffic Your website is the foundation of all online businesses. If you don't have visitors to your website, it is impossible to convert them into loyal, long-term customer prospects. When you establish yourself as an authority in the eyes of Google, you increase your visibility in search engines.
But what happens after you've earned a top spot on Google's results pages?
Contrary to popular belief, keyword ranking is only half the battle. The basic principles of SEO are constantly evolving, and marketers need to keep up with the latest trends.
Today I'm going to talk about how you can maintain keywords that you've worked so hard to rank for. These strategies will also help you protect yourself from any possible Google algorithm updates.
1.- Update your site
This sounds intuitive, but it is one of the most common mistakes in the e-commerce niche. Google takes into account both the quality of the content and the content update as part of their ranking algorithm, so keeping your site up to date is a great way to maintain your position.
Outdated strategies like “just put text” can potentially hinder your search engine rankings. If you want to keep your keywords, you must update your content adding a variety of videos and images to your articles. This will improve your readers' experience and attract other people who will link to your site.
Take time to improve the visual appeal of your brand. Optimize your site design will reduce bounce rates and will increase the likelihood that visitors will stay on your site longer.
2.- Speed up your site
La speed of the site has long been a ranking factor in google search, however, many websites still do not load very quickly – especially on mobile devices, where most searches currently happen. Keep in mind that there are over two million blogs published every day, so if your website isn't loading fast enough, your visitors are going to turn to a workaround.
Google pushes webmasters to get their page load time to less than a second for mobile devices, which is very fast. However, even if you can't get it to go down, keep in mind that Every second you reduce the loading time you reduce the bounce rate.
Fortunately, making your pages load faster shouldn't require you to hire a tech expert. Below are three easy ways to improve the speed of your website:
- Switch to a faster and more reliable hosting service.
- Enable compression on all images on your website.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN) to increase download speeds.
If you are still having problems with your upload speed, then you can also try the tool called Google PageSpeed Insights, which will help you identify specific problems that delay web loading time suggesting how you can solve them. You can read more about Google page speed suggestions here.
3.- Expand your linkbuilding
One of the most common mistakes is that marketers focus more on the quantity rather than the quality of their backlinks.
If you have ranked for a certain keyword, there is no need to build backlinks excessive to that page. Google can detect if a site is gaining links at a reasonable rate. Building links too quickly can be perceived as a red flag that can potentially penalize you.
Your ranking may also decrease if the majority of your links point to a particular article. Google wants its users to be able to access relevant and useful content on your site.
If you want to maintain your keyword rank, then you should extend your inbound links for all the different pages on your site. This strategy will diversify your backlink profile and increase the overall authority of your website from Google's perspective.
4.- Outgoing and internal links
As counterintuitive as it may sound, links within your site can be just as important as inbound links. Placing outbound links to brands with authority in your niche helps Google determine the relevance of your website.
Always make sure that the external pages you are going to link to provide relevant content, valuable for your readers. For example, if you're in the outdoor survival skills niche, then you probably shouldn't link to a Harvard University page. Although .edu links are often considered by SEOs to be very valuable, the content would not be congruent with a brand's focus on survival and protection.
Every time you link to related articles on your own website, you are internal linking, which is another useful strategy that will help you maintain your keyword rankings. When done correctly, internal linking will help search engines understand better the importance and topical focus of each pageto. As an added benefit, smart internal linking can also keep users on the site by giving them easier access to site content.
As with outbound links, use internal linking sparingly. Don't go overboard with adding a lot of links to your existing content.
5.- Build presence on social networks
There is some ambiguity as to whether social media engagement is a ranking factor in search, directly or indirectly. However, it is very clear that search engines view every major social media platform as a brand of authority. Websites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have a high PageRank on Google.
Getting links from these networks will help Google determine the relevance of your website. The more people like and share your content, the more visibility you will receive from these channels.
As you continue to gather quality links, they can help increase and maintain your rankings in the long term.
Here are some quick tips you can use to increase your blog's visibility on social media:
- Add social media action buttons to the sidebar of your articles.
- Use explicit calls to action in your content (for example, “If you liked this content, be sure to share it by clicking this button here.”).
- Offer something free to your users in exchange for sharing on social networks.
Final Thoughts
Search engine optimization is a long-term process that does not generate results overnight. Typically, it takes a couple of months before you start to realize the fruits of SEO labor. Implementing the five strategies above will help you maintain your authority long after you've ranked for a given keyword.
Source: Daniel Faggella in Search Engine Land
