How To Improve SEO: Strategies To Try First

There are so many factors affecting SEO performance and so many different threads to be overcome when implementing SEO strategies.

How do you know where to dedicate your time and effort in order to have significant results on your KPIs and demonstrate progress?

Every project in your SEO strategy should have a clear end goal, and there’s a very useful framework known as “PIE,” which stands for Protect, Improve, and Expand to fully put into practice.

1. Protect

Your first instinct may be to go after incremental visits right away if you want quick results.

However, it is critical that you take precautions to protect the performance of your website.

This means ensuring your site’s technical foundation is strong and knowing which keywords and pages drive the most organic traffic to your site.

2. Improve

There are almost certainly keywords for which your site already has relevant content, but these pages are not ranked in position in order to give you the desired traffic you want.

Prior to investing in new content, optimising these pages to rank higher will assist you in capturing this search interest and increasing page visits.

3. Expand

The final stage of your strategy should include expanding your site’s content to drive more site visits.

This entails identifying searches for which your site could rank with new content and creating content relevant and optimised for those terms.

SEO Strategies to Protect your performance

Audit your website’s technical health

When it comes to paying attention to your site’s current performance, the first step you should take is to audit its technical health and ensure that it meets Google’s guidelines and ask on current and future ranking signals.

This includes ensuring the indexability of your important content and mobile-friendliness of your content and core web vitals.

Keeping an eye on your site’s technical health over time will help you understand and fix any problems before they affect search performance or user experience.

Tip: Look for crawlers that can notify you of problems as they occur.

Understand your most valuable content

If you want to protect your site’s SEO value, you must identify the top traffic-driving terms and pages for your site.
This information is available through Google Search Console and will assist you in monitoring traffic changes.

Creating keyword groups and tracking their ranking positions will also allow you to identify what causes traffic fluctuations (i.e.: interest vs. rank change) and ensure that you can make changes if any of your key terms do not perform as you would like them to.

Page segments can assist you in tracking the performance of these key pages independently of your overall reporting.

SEO Strategies to improve your performance

If you want to improve your website’s SEO performance, you should look for opportunities where existing content could perform better.

Spot keyword rankings with room to improve

There are two major factors to consider when identifying high-potential keywords to optimise for:
1. The terms’ monthly search volume.
2. Your content’s current ranking position.

The number of clicks a result receives rapidly decreases as it moves away from the first page on search engines – your goal  to be ranked in the top10!.

The best way to understand the most effective optimisations is to look at the content that Google is already ranking at the top – look for common elements in the breadth or specificity of the content, the metadata, the content length, complexity, etc, and then you can modify your content to align with these pages.

Use schema for higher result opportunities

Examine the result types available on the results pages for the terms you’re targeting, particularly those owned by your direct competitors, and modify your content structure to make it more compatible and suitable for these results.

SEO Strategies to expand your performance

By expanding your performance we usually mean creating new content. Yes, we know it’s hard but it will pay off eventually.

Thus, you must identify keywords for which your site lacks “targeted” content (pages perfectly aligned with terms users are searching for).

Keyword Identification for content expansion

Finding keyword opportunities for new content is far more difficult than finding keywords to protect or improve your rankings. This is because, by definition, they will not be found in the keyword data for your own site.

So, where should you start?

1. Content mapping

You can divide your content into several categories including user type or persona, customer journey stage, etc.Cross-referencing these segments can reveal weaknesses in terms of how you assist your users, providing guidance as you begin your keyword and topic research.

2. Competitor analysis

Researching competitors’ websites and understanding where they rank can help you identify areas where you’re missing out on opportunities to appear in search engines.

Create new content

Creating new content for SEO allows you to customise your page with all of the structure and on-page elements required to rank well.

New content, on the other hand, may take longer to be discovered and perform well in the search results. Therefore it is important to make sure that is well-integrated into your site via internal links, and to consider what are the current trends in order to create your content accordingly.

Because new page creation usually involves other teams, it’s important to go through a detailed brief to ensure that your SEO research is clearly captured and incorporated into the new content.

It may look like that improving your SEO strategies is easy work but it’s a lot more complicated. That’s why at DomainStar we have all the tools and the right people to help you not only improve but create a new strategy that will work best for you according to your needs.

Should you require help, do not hesitate to contact us or visit our website to see all the services we offer in regards to SEO and digital marketing overall.