If you have already shelled out quite a bit of your hard earned money to SEO professionals, and haven’t had the pleasure to witness the search results you’ve desired – you’re not alone! Spending on raising Google rankings and getting to see results quickly quite often don’t go hand in hand. This can be frustrating, especially when you’re investing a good amount of time and money into it.
As a fact, as you may have heard already, SEO can be quite a long-term process. Also, the level and type of competition that prevails for you is highly likely to impact the pace at which you get to see results. Additionally, there’s another dominant problem that is quite common. Most companies end up delegating the SEO improvement tasks to incompetent agencies that just claim to be experts. Many of the SEO agencies in the market are commonly plagued with lack of knowledge, and follow a one-size fits all approach that brings poor ROI from the continuous investment into improving ranks.
Now, whatever be the reason that you’re not getting to see measurable results fast enough, there are some easy DIY hacks that you can follow to observe a much quicker improvement in your rank. And no, they’re not any of the black hat tricks that will just bring quick results now but make you fall prey to penalties over the long term.
Well, here are 4 super easy, SEO hacks you can follow to observe a quick improvement in your rank
Hack#1 – Work On Page Freshness
Updating and improving existing content on your domain is a tactic that rarely fails to deliver. It is one of the most under-rates techniques, but it is really effective.
Whether you’ve hired an agency, or you follow popular SEO blogs, you must have already been exceedingly urged to create new content in volume. However, a simpler, quicker, cheaper and a more result oriented hack you can try for yourself now is to keep revisiting your old content pages and updating them with better, more accurate, detailed and fresh information.
The thing is that the search engines love websites that stay up to date. As a fact, the spiders tend to treat websites as living entities. A sign of life is regular updating of content. Websites that remain the exact same, unchanged over years naturally give out an outdated signal and are less likely to be visited by the spiders.
Hence, modifying and upgrading your existing content pool is a good way for you to attract that attention and get the spiders to index your site. Moreover, instead of creating new content from scratch, it’s easier and more economical to work a little extra on the existing pages, improve them and add more useful information to capitalize on value and keyword usage. When you do this simple step well, the increased indexing will automatically make it more likely to increase your ranking fast. A by product of this step is of course better, and more authority content that automatically drives visitors to become repeat visitors and stay longer on your site due to the value they get from your content.
Interesting Fact: As per a study on the time it takes for a page to rank in the first page of Google, it was found that a top 10 ranking pages are typically 2-3 years old. On the other hand, less than 22 percent new pages (less than a year old) made it to the top SERP results.
Takeaway for you: Older pages with better content have a brighter chance to rank higher.
Hack#2 – Target Rich Snippets
When running a Google search, you might have noticed that the results sometimes return content in a special featured snippet right on top, even above the first ranking site. That position zero is a great place for you to target and in it lies a hack to quickly win more traffic on your website.
If a website’s content answers a highly searched question well, in a clear authoritative manner, Google tends to pick it up and display it in a way that instantly catches eye and stands out. This snippet could be in the form of a paragraph, list or table.
Now, the way for you to target getting featured in those snippets is by starting with identifying the organic keywords you’re ranking for. These are essentially the high opportunity areas you can target. Once you have the list, you can restructure the content on those pages. You can assign the relevant tags, say H2 for Google to identify the different key points on list type snippets or format the description you want to be featured in paragraph snippets under the optimal word length of about 54-58 words with a <p> tag.
Alternately, you can also try and uncover new snippet opportunities by scanning through content ideas, or search engine queries that return snippet paragraphs but might have a list type description that you can expand on. If you see any such potential, you can work on creating or optimizing existing content to capitalize on that opportunity.
Another great way to get your website awarded with rich snippets can be by adding a well-structured summary at the end of your list posts or how-to guides and make it easier for the Search Engine to understand and feature your content.
Interesting Fact – Even though getting featured in snippets doesn’t raise your rank per se, it actually makes your website come up even above the highest ranking page and gives you a very high click through rate. Research suggests that content with featured snippets get a 2x higher click through rate.
Hack#3 – Integrate AMP On The Website
Another great tactic that you can follow to increase traffic is by integrating Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on your website. AMP is essentially an open source mechanism to infuse super fast loading speed onto your website on mobile devices. Upgrading your mobile website with AMP is quite simple in process, and it can help to increase rankings and grow your traffic quite fast.
The fact, as you already may know by now, is that search behavior has evolved to become exceedingly mobile driven. This naturally implies that the search engine algorithms favor websites that offer the best mobile browsing experience. Moreover, as the expectation of people searching from mobile devices has gone up immensely, their patience levels are getting lower and lower. People now only want to consume content from fast loading mobile websites.
Interesting Fact: As per studies, as many as 77 percent of websites take longer than 10 seconds to load on mobile, and more than 50 percent users abandon sites if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds.
Way Out: The ideal solution in this case to address the slow load speed of mobile websites is by upgrading to Accelerated Mobile Pages as a quick, open source solution.
If you do integrate AMP on your website, it will display your pages much faster than traditional HTML pages, which is a great positive boost for SEO. Moreover, integrating AMP will ring in additional benefits. By offering a good experience it will reduce your bounce rate, that typically stems from slow speed of website. All of this is sure to culminate into better rankings and higher traffic levels at a very sharp pace.
Hack#4 Use A CDN To Deliver Images & Static Files
Finally, implementing a CDN is also a great tactic that can work wonders for you when it comes to raising your website speed, and offering the best static multimedia experience. The result – improved Google rankings and higher traffic levels!
Whether searching through mobile or desktop, users today like to consume multimedia content in the form of videos, graphics. As these static assets grow in number and size on your website, its bandwidth usage and the consequent page load time on your website keeps on increasing. This reduces the server’s capacity and at the same time hampers the browsing experience to a great extent. This deterioration in experience hampers your website’s search ranking.
Given this common situation, simply implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can help to immensely improve your website’s performance. CDN basically caches the static assets across geographically distributed servers. Implementing it reduces your infrastructure costs and dramatically brings down the page load times for user. It also improves the technical aspects of your website by fighting the duplicate content issue with its caching algorithms.
If you implement a CDN, you are sure to be able to see the result of this for yourself. You’ll observe a much superior browsing experience with higher page speed, more efficient content delivery and reduced scope of downtimes. Setting up a CDN is quite simple, and its virtues can be highly instrumental in improving your SEO outcomes and raising traffic within a relatively short span.
Conclusion
Raising a website’s rank on Google is not necessarily an outcome of investing regularly or heavily in SEO services. While consistent content creation, link building etc. do help tangibly over time, there are some highly underrated tactics that can bring out measurable and faster results, irrespective of the prevailing competition level for your website.
These tactics essentially cover improving the existing infrastructure of your website, and the content experience from already published content. In that regard, the 4 tactics mentioned in this article are quite simple, do not involve investing money to agencies for implementation and actually bring out results, which you can see and measure for yourself.
Try it out and let us know your experience in the comments below.
