“How do you keep ranking highly on Google?” So many business owners ask this question almost every day. So, why isn’t there a simple straightforward answer? The truth is, there isn’t one bullet-proof technique to maintain a higher ranking in Google. That said, there are quite a few different techniques that you can implement to improve your chances of gaining more organic search engine traffic to your blog posts and ultimately ranking higher in Google. So, which one of the techniques below are you going to implement to improve your SEO ranking?
Let’s take a look.
Rewrite Old Content
This is probably one of the most straightforward techniques that you can apply. Start by taking a look at blog posts that were published over 12 months ago. Analyze the content and find areas that need updating. But how do you know what needs updating? For example, if your blog post was published in 2018, the likelihood is that many of the references and data included in your article aren’t necessarily relevant in 2020.
Start by picking around 3 main areas of your article that need updating and focusing on them. So, by looking for key points of data that are relevant to a specific year and simply updating them to fit with data in the current year, you’ll be taking a huge step ahead in ranking higher in Google.
You can also look at recent trends and refresh your blog post to align with said trends. For example, if your post is about the best apps for social media content in 2018, look at what apps are now better or more popular in 2020 and update your post accordingly.
Recreating Blogs into Video Content
Many search engine results now contain videos — even above the #1 ranking blog post or web page. So, what does this mean for you? Yep, you need to look at recreating your blog posts into videos? While I appreciate this may seem like a daunting task, especially if you’ve never created a video before, I can assure you it’s easier than you think — and you don’t need much to get started.
All you need to start making great videos is:
Most people have access to the essential above, but you can also hire the help of a professional video editor, actors, and voiceover artists to help make your videos stand out. It’d also be best if you took your blog post and translated it into a script for your video.
Once your video is complete, simply upload it to YouTube.
Recreating videos of blog posts also has another huge benefit — you can embed the video into your blog posts. But why is this useful? Put simply, it makes people spend more time on your blog post as they’ll likely want to watch the video as well as reading the content.
The longer a reader spends on your page, the higher Google will rank your content, as the Google algorithm sees longer time spent on a page as a sign of good content, thus ranking it higher.
Regularly Optimizing SERP Titles
On a regular basis (I recommend monthly), you should look at the titles of your blog posts and analyze whether they’re ranking high enough. During your analysis, you should look at competing articles that are ranking higher than your blogs and see what they’re doing with their titles. Are they doing anything that you should be doing? Or are they missing something that you can implement to stand out from all other web pages?
It’s very important that you ensure all titles are within Google’s title length limits — which is around 60 characters and 571 pixels. The reason it’s important to stay within the limits is so your title doesn’t get cut off, which can affect whether readers click on your title. You should always try to optimize pages that aren’t ranking too highly, but it’s also important to try and refresh your titles to stay ranking highly.
Important note: If your article is already ranking #1, or it has the famous #0 featured snippet position, it’s best to not change the title — changing it could lower your ranking.
Staying Relevant on Google
It is really important to ensure all of the content on your website is up-to-date — the content itself, SERP titles, images, references, and more. It pays off massively to regularly update your blog posts so Google’s ranking algorithm pushes your content higher, which leads to more traffic on your site.
To learn more about how to improve your marketing strategy, read through some of the latest posts on the Intentionally Inspirational blog.
Written by Lewis James