Whether you acknowledge it or not, search engine optimisation has grown in influence and in one way or the other, affects the performance of your business online. Most business owners especially small business entrepreneurs and marketers tend to overlook the potential benefits of SEO with some thinking that it is expensive or complicated.
Far from it, search engine optimisation is an art and a science which you can employ quite easily to outsmart your competitors and please search engines. Through the insights provided by SEO, you can come up with solid analytics-based strategies to push your business up the ladder.
To enable you do this, there are a variety of tools and techniques. Some of the levers you can pull to boost your SEO efficiency are discussed below:
Keyword Grouping
This is simply the organisation of keywords into several clusters to meet a variety of purposes. Some of the objectives for clustering keywords include identification of potential areas of content development, bringing out the information architecture of your website, optimising your landing pages, and many more.
Among the benefits of keyword grouping are improvement in PPC and SEO workflow and gaining a clear understanding of the benefit of each keyword to your business. It is also important for on-page SEO optimisation, topic selection, and copywriting. You can use AdWords Editor or Excel to group huge collections of keywords into smaller targeted lists. Other tools such as Wordstream Keyword Grouper and SE Ranking Keyword Grouper can help you speed up the process while at the same time maintaining efficiency and quality.
Page Change Monitoring
When optimising your pages, it is important for you to receive alerts of any changes happening on these pages especially if you have a team managing or accessing your website. When a webmaster or a client changes any part of your website, you will be notified so that you can make any necessary adjustments to avoid Google penalties.
There are tools that can allow you to set a scan frequency to analyse and track any changes which occur in between successive scans. Through this tactic, you can know when your website is being hacked and when bad links point to your site.
Competitor SEO Research
Keeping track of the marketing activities of your competitors all the way from links, content, and even search rankings can help inform your strategy. Using competitor monitoring tools will allow you to discover beforehand the tactics employed by your competitor in generating quality traffic and how you can counter them in even more smarter strategies. Among the tools that rank highly in this niche include BuzzSumo, SEMrush, and SpyFu.
Long-Tail Keyword Variations
If you want to get high rankings online for your business, long-tail keywords can help you deliver that. Over time, these keywords have been neglected because at the starting point, they don’t garner as much traffic compared to their short-tail counterparts. However, if you persist in cultivating the audience searching for these terms, you can get excellent results in the long term.
The biggest challenge you may face is finding useful and profitable long-tail keyword variation for your website and niche. The good thing is there are lots of keyword suggestion tools that can help you optimise your pages for long-tail keywords. The most known of these tools include free keyword tool by Wordstream and keyword planner by Google.
Mobile Rank Tracking
Mobile has an incredible impact in the daily lives of your target customers. Google is yet to roll out its mobile-first index in its entirety, but the algorithm is already taking effect. Keeping close check on your mobile rankings and any changes and fluctuation taking place may thus be an important step. You can quickly check your mobile search rankings using Google Search Console’s Search Analytics report. Here, you can compare both your mobile and desktop ranking at different times and the clicks and impressions of your mobile rankings.
If you find your page ranking lower in mobile and higher in desktop, the problem could be in the mobile friendliness of your page or site.
In addition to the above tactics, you may also want to consider local keyword ranking especially if your services or products are of interest to people in your geographical area. Optimising for local searches has become increasingly important because people move with their Smartphones and perform searches on the go.