Five Ways to Improve your Site’s Ranking in 2020

Today you are going to learn about the most promising ways of improving your website’s ranking. 

Read this post from the first paragraph to the last, and I promise you’ll take away with you the exact process of increasing SEO rankings in 2020. 

At Troop Messenger, an office chat app, we regularly re-evaluate our content marketing strategies that’d bring us the visitors, leads, and customers. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen it all. There were plenty of lessons to learn from. 

Apart from realizing the intensity of competition, we also came to terms with strategies that worked and plans that failed. 

With different experiences of our multiple SEO ranking experiments, we are sharing with you the strategies that helped as attract plenty of eyeballs and convert browsers into leads. 

These 5 factors mentioned below are most likely to influence your site’s ranking, especially as per Google’s 2020 ranking algorithm. 

It’s important to stay versed with Google’s algorithm and the following five factors if you want your content to appear in top search results:

1. Drive Traffic Through High-Intent Keyword

Companies that produce a blog using high-Intent keywords have 434% more search engine–indexed pages than those that don’t.

When they say ‘keywords,’ there’s a possibility to ignore that advice because it has been told so many times. 

Keywords are an integral aspect of SEO ranking. You cannot ignore it. I certainly won’t take that risk. 

Since you are on this page that talks about SEO rankings,  I am assuming you already know plenty about Google Keyword Planner, Long and Short-tail keywords, Search Volume, and Keyword Difficulty. 

So, I am not going to delve into these things. I am here to talk about Exclusives: Keyword tactics that will actually drive results. 

I am here to spread some light on Driving convertible traffic through high-intent keywords. 

“When Choosing Keywords, prioritize them in order of user-intent.”

Ask yourself, what Google query or phrase can lead users to your website, or what phrase can bring them into reading your articles. 

At Troop Messenger, we’ve focused on hundreds of search queries for our keyword research. We browsed through the many queries offered by Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs Keyword Planner and placed our bet on a phrase that reflects a significantly higher user intent:

For Example: 

1. ‘Slack Alternatives’

The search intent behind ‘Slack Alternatives’ shows that the buyer already knows about Slack and they are looking for an alternative of Slack. They are probably looking for a more efficient and cost-effective tool. It’s easy to convert this specific audience since Troop Messenger is a great alternative to Slack.

1. Slack Comparison Articles 

‘Slack Vs MicrosoftTeams’ 

‘Slack Vs Flock’ 

‘Slack Vs Discord

Similarly, the search intent behind phrases like ‘Slack Vs Teams’, ‘Slack Vs Flock’, and ‘Slack Vs discord shows that the buyer is looking for apps that are similar to Slack. Picking up such keywords in a good choice since they have good Search Volume and also a higher user intent.

Al these keywords are a jackpot for us since

• They have a super high intent: People putting ‘Slack alternatives’ are surely looking for a tool other than Slack
• They have a decent search volume: 100 to 500 SV a month
• They also have a lower keyword difficulty level: We only need to get a handful of backlinks to rank among the top search results 

Bonus Tip: 

You can also use Reddit to find keywords with significant search volume, and it is still not targeted by others. The reason others are not targeting these exclusive keywords is that they cannot find them.

Everybody else is using Google Keyword Planner to find the same keywords you’re using. This way you end up competing endlessly for the same phrase. 

So, the trick is to use another platform, which is Reddit. Here’s how you can uncover untapped keywords using Reddit:

• Identify a  relevant subreddit where most of your audience hangs 
• Browse through the thread, comments, and extracts posted there and look for phrases that have been used again and again 
• Check the Search Volume of these keywords through Keyword Planner 

2. Enhance Website’s Loading Speed 

Have you ever abandoned a website because the web page was taking too long to load? 

I am sure you’ve. Even 10 seconds of additional wait time throws the users off-page. Hence, the time it takes for your site to load has a direct effect on your site’s Google rankings.

Pages ranking among the top search results of Google tend to load way faster than the pages ranking at the bottom of the page. 

Long story short, if you want your site to achieve a higher google ranking, make sure that your site’s loading speed is great. 

The pages, content, and media on your site should load AFAP: As Fast as possible. 

Page Speed Insights: 

It’s a great tool to get a quick insight and benchmark on the load speed of your website.

We recommend using PageSpeedInsights to analyze the loading speed of your website, for both mobile and desktop versions. 

1. Open PageSpeed Insights and Enter your site’s URL 

1. Click on Analyze Icon, and Switch to ‘Mobile’ icon to get an analysis of mobile load speed of your site

1. Switch to ‘Desktop’ icon to get an analysis of Desktop load speed of your site

B. Web Page Test:

Web Page Test is another great tool for those who want to dig deeper into understanding and evaluating factors that are responsible for slowing down the site. 

At Troop Messenger, we use the Web Page Test tool to do the same:

Bonus Tips:

• Delete all unnecessary and unwanted 3rd party scripts 
• Always have your website on a good host
• Avoid using too large web page files
• Compress the images uploaded on the site  
• Use either Page webpagetest or Google’s PageSpeed Insights, or both to analyze load speed. 

3. Repurpose your content into different formats

72% of marketers believe that relevant content creation is the most effective SEO tactic.

Repurposing is always a smart move, whether you do it with a glass bottle or a content you’ve previously published content. 

Finding an appropriate way of repurposing content can be a challenging situation, which is why we are putting together a list of proper ways of reusing content. 

Different tactics work for different niches. Thus, we recommend reading them all to choose the ones that may work the best.

• Convert your previous blog posts into a hand-on-guide 
• Collect all the interviews into an E-book of expert advice 
• Transform quora answers into valuable Q & A blog post 
• Repurpose facts and statistics into the Twitter post  
• Create an infographic to make the most of your old content
• Put your different articles on a similar topic and publish as an ebook 
• Convert testimonials into a Quality Content 
• Mix your blog posts and convert them into a valuable online lesson 
• Share your posts as a newsletter 
• Convert your content into a series of email course content 
• Turn your post into a Webinar or Vice Versa 

Using a similar approach, you may as well create a Linkable Assets. 

If you want to win it on the web, create great linkable assets of repurposed content. 

Bonus Tip:

Make sure to optimize your old content for User Intent. 2020 is here, and the world was throwing some random keywords into a blog post helped escalate ranks, is a past. 

Now SEO ranking is all about what the customer is looking for. Hence, it’s important to write and repurpose content for user intent. 

• For this strategy to work, you must know your customer, be connected with them to provide just what they want. 
• Survey your patrons, go back to make amends in your old content, do the revisions. 
• Revisiting and Republishing articles has become a common practice for it has helped site owners increase their rank in search engines. 

4. Image Optimization 

97% of page-one results have at least one image on the page

Think about the last image you uploaded on your website. How did you upload that image? 

Let me Guess. You browsed through a stock photography site, downloaded the image, then uploaded into your site’s backend, and inserted it to your page. 

Do you think that’s a good example of Image Optimization?

No. 

You’ve only added a giant weight to your site, which is reducing the page speed.

Let’s change that. But before we start, here’s a fact you must know. 

As per the 2018 Jumpshot data, more than 20% of all web-searches happen through Google Images, which is enough to indicate that image optimization is a sure way of increasing the page ranking. 

Without doing a proper optimization of your page, you are losing a significant part of your SEO rankings. 

Here are the things you need to keep in mind:

Choose the appropriate format

PNG: This format produces a better quality image, but has a larger file size 

JPEG: You are likely to lose some image quality, but the quality level can be adjusted to find a better balance 

Always compress the images 

I highly recommend compressing the images before uploading them. Your site’s speed is likely to increase by 33%/2 seconds if images are compressed. 

Customize Image File Name 

For better SEO rankings, it’s imperative to customize the images. Image file names always alert Google as to the subject matter of image 

Bonus Tips:

• Always write SEO-friendly Alt-Text 
• Make Sure that your images are mobile-friendly 
• Consider adding videos too
• If there’s a video on your site’s landing page, you’re 53% more likely to show up on Google’s first page.

5. Content Partnership 

I’ve been a fan of Content Partnerships because it makes content promotion twice as effective.

Think about it: 

When you create content and publish it on your sire, you share it with as many people in your reach. 

But when you partner with another company or author, and they share it with their audience, the reach is twice. Both of you share it with different audiences. 

In short, content partnership increases the content reach.

Partnership doubles the number of links shared across social media, and the number of eyeballs a content gets. 

Hence, this year, try to make as many connections, create and publish content with bloggers having better reach than you. 

Bonus Tip:

There’s no denying the importance of social media integration. Thus, ensure you and your content partner share the content exclusively. While doing so, keeps these two facts in mind:

• According to the 2018 SEO stats, 82% of successful agencies and 74% of companies say that their social media is highly integrated.
• 40% of people prefer to spend more of their money on businesses that are engaging on social media.

Takeaways 

Creating content that converts is always a challenging task. Even the high-quality content sits dusty and gets lost among the millions of pages vying for your target audience’s attention. 

We need to acknowledge that creating great content isn’t the direct road to success. It’s a long walk with many obstacles. You’ve to earn the trust of your audience by publishing content that is informative, formatted for skim-reading, and has the potential to engage them. 

Apart from that, you must employ wisely chosen keywords. At Troop Messenger, we aim for low difficulty keywords and high-intent phrases with large search volume. 

Optimizing web-pages and images is also a smart way for conversion. Make sure that your web pages load AFAP. 

All of these require a continuous effort in the promise of a great result!