Search engine optimization doesn’t have to be complicated. At times, however, it does seem so. fortunately, there are some SEO hacks to help you accomplish your goals easily.
It’s difficult to attract new customers, and every company or business that has ever launched a functional website knows about it. You have to stand out and set yourself apart from your competitors. However, the competition is tough since there are millions of other websites out there in your industry.
Related: How To Use Feature Marketing To Attract New Customers
SEO hacks are useful to meet SEO goals and every digital marketer should use them. Let’s learn more about how you can apply these SEO hacks to your SEO strategy.
Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid Before Applying SEO Hacks
It’s essential to go through the common mistakes that marketers make when applying SEO before getting into the best SEO hacks to help you improve your rankings and increase customer engagement. After all, a strong foundation is needed before applying anything else.
Here are the common SEO mistakes you should avoid:
You’re not paying attention to on-page SEO – Gone are the days when search engine optimization was mostly about external factors. While the number of links and other off-site signals still matter, working on your website has become equally essential, if not more important, nowadays. The design of your website should be user-friendly, and you should publish great content to win more SEO points.
Related: Top Site Builders That Are SEO Friendly and ADA Compliance Checklist For Websites
Failing to implement on-page SEO workarounds won’t only make a bad impression on Google, but will also make visitors leave your site, affecting customer engagement.
You’re not taking advantage of new SEO practices – Major search engines, like Google, are constantly improving and changing. You might not see or get any favorable results if you’re not keeping yourself up-to-date with the latest search engine optimization hacks and techniques. It’s simple as that.
Related: Google Page Experience Optimization
For example, one huge traffic source for websites today is video marketing. However, many marketers still ignore its potential. Taking advantage of video content’s hugely untapped potential could mean better SEO results and increased customer engagement. A user might run through a one- or two-minute video but may lack the patience to read a lengthy article.
Related: Best Video Marketing Tools
It’s projected that around 80% of all online traffic will be made up of online video by 2021. Online video is already huge, but it’s only going to get bigger. Forty-three percent of Internet users still say that they want more video content even with the amount of video already surfacing online.
For local SEO, another example is claiming a Google My Business Page. Business owners or service providers that serve a local community, such as law firms, should claim their business listing. It’s essential for Google’s local pack and search engine result pages. The problem is that a lot of business owners still don’t claim their GMBs or disregard their importance.
Related: How Do I Optimize My Google My Business Listing?
“Contrary to traditional organic optimizations, grabbing top rankings for videos or a Google My Business listing can be achieved in far less time,” says Matthew Post of SEM Dynamics. That means not taking advantage of new SEO practices, like the ones mentioned above, could really affect the performance of the websites of local businesses or service providers.
Find out if you’re still following outdated SEO practices if your customer engagement campaign isn’t getting your desired results. It’s, maybe, time for a change.
You’re Still Playing The Blind Game – If you want to improve search engine optimization results and increase customer engagement, you can’t just depend on guesswork. It holds no matter what kind of business you’re running or what niche you operate in. That means you have to track your goals and set up website analytics. That way, you’d know what’s actually working and what’s not.
Related: Top Free SEO Tools
You must have access to the correct data and use it effectively. Improve your SEO game by understanding the reason behind your failures. It’s important to get some real SEO vision and stop playing the blind game.
SEO Hacks For Better Customer Engagement
If you’ve already created a website and are now ready to improve your visibility, attract traffic, and increase customer engagement in your business, then, follow the SEO hacks listed below:
Hack #1- Improve User Experience
One of the most important steps a website owner must take when it comes to improving search engine ranking is making the experience of users better when visiting their website.
In the words of Rand Fishkin, former CEO of Moz, “We’ve got to create a unique, special experience for them and delight visitors in addition to satisfying their query”.
In fact, RankBrain is Google’s third most important ranking factor. It’s a trend that will continue and will become even more important in the next couple of years.
So, what’s RankBrain? You’re not alone if it’s something that’s not clear to you. Maybe, it’s a little sci-fi, but it’s a machine learning system that Google uses to decide where web pages should rank in the search engine results page.
The website will start to lose ranking if users click on a specific result and immediately bounce back. That’s because RankBrain watches how Internet users interact with search results. It will, then, rank the results based on such a metric. However, if users spend time on the website after clicking on a result, the website will either stay at a higher ranking or gain better ranking. All of that is based on the experience users will have with the site.
Hack #2- Make Your Site Mobile-Responsive
The greater Internet availability worldwide and the increase in the number of smartphones and other mobile devices have led to a significant increase in the number of mobile searches. The number of smartphone users will continue to rise in the coming years.
Traffic generated from tablets and smartphones is also increasing because of the greater use of mobile devices. A whopping 52.2% of all traffic originated from mobile devices in 2018. That being said, it’s important to incorporate a mobile-responsive design to your website so it could adapt to any screen size. Designing a mobile-responsive website is a key search engine optimization growth hacking tool.
Related: How To Fix LCP Issue?
The following tips can help you make your website mobile-responsive:
- Make sure to optimize your site visuals for them to take less time to load.
- Make sure to come up with relevant, cohesive, and legible content.
- Use touch-friendly navigation tools and buttons.
- Ensure that you have vertical page designs and avoid horizontal or static pages.
- Make it easy for your website visitors to share relevant content from your website with their social networks by adding social sharing buttons.
Hack #3- Build Trust And Improve Security With SSL Security
Website security is paramount when it comes to SEO strategies to increase traffic and customer engagement. Websites that have SSL security are preferred more by search engines, like Google, over ones without it. What’s the purpose of the SSL or Secured Socket Layer security? It’s installed on a web server as a form of precautionary measure against negative elements, such as viruses, unwanted threats, malicious activities, and hackers.
Google considers websites with HTTPS to be genuine and threat-free. That’s why being secured by an SSL security is important if you want your website to rank higher. Not to mention the fact that an HTTPS protocol also gains a significant amount of trust from your business prospects and customers. It gives them an impression of a site that’s safe to proceed. In short, the Secure Socket Layer certificate gives an advantage not only in terms of SEO but also in customer engagement. This SEO tip is one way of making your website trustworthy.
Hack #4- Leverage Video Animation
The immense potential of online video is going to be bigger and bigger in the coming years. Every day, around 300 hours of videos get uploaded to YouTube, and five billion videos on the platform are watched daily. People want more even with that much video content available over the Internet.
Leveraging video animation can easily become one of the best search engine optimization tips for 2020. How do videos help in SEO? Well, they just make for ultimate user engagement.
Related: How Do I Create Shoppable Videos?
Nowadays, Internet users are already more interested in watching videos than reading articles. That being said, increase customer engagement by concentrating on meaningful content through videos instead of publishing superficial content in the hope that better SEO results will come.
Rather than only texts, extend your content to movable animation. Remember that you can’t achieve genuine organic traffic just by having a number of indexed pages.
Video animation is a tool that can make your spoken words visible and crawlable by web crawlers.
Hack #5- Optimize Your Website For Voice Search
In 2018, voice search started becoming big news in the SEO world. The trend is expected to continue as voice-activated technology becomes more accessible and improves further.
You can maximize voice search by using geo-targeted keywords if they make sense for your brand. That way, you can optimize for local searches. It’s an absolute must, especially since most voice searches on the web are local. If you have a target audience or prospects in a specific geographical area, optimizing your website for voice search is essential.
It’s also important to rank for both questions and answers. Create high-quality FAQs that are optimized for voice search to get your posts ranked.
Final Thoughts
The SEO hacks to increase customer engagement discussed above can significantly impact how you rank and your conversions. SEO strategies, such as improving user experience, making your site mobile-responsive, adding SSL security, using video animation, and optimizing for voice search can help you immensely. Take your business to new heights by leveraging them.
