I cover 20 key tips in a new piece I just did for Content Marketing Institute:
20 of the Best SEO Tips for Keyword Rankings and Google in 2020
At the end of the day, backlinks that matter the most. Sure, you need quality content. But well-written text doesn’t guarantee top Google rankings for your favorite keyword phrases.
My CMI article looks at:
- Ranking factors
- BERT, the natural-language-processing algorithm
- SEO complications and opportunities related to changing SERPs
- E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness)
- One-and-Done Syndrome
- and more…
The article cites several studies, including this ranking factors survey by SparkToro:
https://sparktoro.com/blog/resources/google-ranking-factors-2019/
I mention SparkToro data in Tip #5 as well:
Don’t expect relief from buried organic pages on search engine result pages (SERPs)
A No. 1 organic page ranking is not necessarily a cause for celebration or a traffic increase. In the past few years, I’ve seen website pages with high rankings lose traffic.
You know the painful scenario. A set of four paid ads appears first. Then a featured snippet follows with some shopping results, a pack of images, videos, and a People Also Ask box. Then, after scrolling way down, your “No. 1” ranking appears.
Google often provides so many basic facts on the results page that searchers don’t need to click. That happens nearly 49% of the time, according to a 2019 SparkToro report based on Jumpshot clickstream data. The study referenced more than 1 billion web searches on 10 million U.S. domestic desktop and Android devices.
3M is just one of countless SERP victims. You think 3M would rank well for “anti glare film,” which has about 900 monthly searches on Google.
But the “top” 3M result appears far down the page.
Hang in there. Make the best use of your time and focus on what makes the most sense for your website (and don’t neglect link building).
Wishing you SEO success all year long…