As marketers find it tough to keep up with COVID-19 due to cutting costs and minimized
outreach, this is a good time for small businesses to focus on their digital campaigns. If your brick-and-mortar business was forced to transform into a digital store this year, then here are some top SEO strategies for ranking in 2021
1. Review Core Web Vitals
Google introduced a new tool in 2020,
Core Web Vitals, which has made it clear that page experience has become a top priority for Google. With Core Web Vitals, you can measure the visual stability, interactivity, and
load time of your website. This is perhaps the best way to evaluate your SEO in 2021. Once you know what is broken, you can fix it with considerable ease.
2. Remove Stop Words from URLs
Take a peek at your website URLs. How many of them contain filler words, such as “the,” “or,” and “of”? These words are known as the stop words, known for taking up a certain chunk of your URLs. Due to this reason, it becomes tricky for crawlers and readers as they can’t skim quickly and it even slows down the loading time of your pages. Therefore, remove these stop words from your URL. However, do not take them out from a URL where they are a part of a keyword. In addition, reduce your URL’s limit to 100 characters or less.
3. Take Care of Your HTML
This is where a lot of website owners exhibit carelessness as they refuse to touch their HTML for SEO. HTML is quite easy, even for those who lack any programming knowledge. It is the web standard for any web page and serves as their skeleton. Bear in mind that Google does analyze HTML code.
For starters, check the title of any web page. The header tag is created through HTML by using the H1 tag. For instance
<h1>Top SEO strategies in 2021
</h1>
Similarly, the subtitle at your section’s top is also made of a header tag, known as an H2 tag; it comes second in the hierarchy of header tags, demonstrating its significance as the second-most important tag.
<h2>Learn HTML Basics In Less Than One Week
</h2>
Over time, you will get familiar with tags. They offer a formal structure that can allow you to develop the building blocks of your webpage. Google and other search engines go through these tags to learn about a page’s content. Hence, using relevant keywords in your HTML code can increase the possibility for it to appear in searches.
4. Rework Your Almost High-Ranking Content
Go through your analytics tools and find posts. You have to look for ones that are doing well, but still ranking considerably lower than the highest-ranking ones. One way you can do this is by customizing a filter on
Google Analytics. By doing so, you can assess your performance in terms of keywords. In case you are unfamiliar with Google Analytics, contact us right now, so we can help with its configuration.
Now, determine if there are some easy fixes that can help you to improve the ranking of your “okay” content. Perhaps, it is possible to add new updates with new links. Alternatively, you may explore a certain topic to increase your post’s word count. Sometimes, raising your word count is good enough to outrank your competitors. Similarly, see to it if you can add imagery or graphics, such as an
infographics. In this way, you can make your post more user-friendly and readable.
5. Create a Backlink Profile
Less than 25% of small businesses spend time in creating high-quality backlinks. Hence, you do not have much competition and can excel quickly in your niche. For this purpose, you can consider
guest posting or guest blogging, answer questions on popular forums (e.g., Reddit, Quora), and perform outreach to earn coverage. However, earning backlinks is one of the most challenging parts of SEO.
With these tips in mind you will have a better time understanding what you should be doing to help your website rank. If you don’t have the time to experiment and spend several hours learning SEO practices, get in touch with SEO professionals. So, call us right now, so we can create high-quality backlinks for you and help your website reach the top.
