7 Easy and Cheap SEO Tricks to Better Rankings

Frustrated with good articles that aren't ranking well? 

It could be simple changes or techniques to deploy to get huge improvements in your rankings!  In this episode, we discuss 7 SEO tips you can employ today that are easy, cheap, and have big impact.

Links and Resources Mentioned

Lumen5
Videos – Human Proof Designs

Transcript

Bryon Brewer: Hello everyone! And welcome to another edition of Building Online Empires podcast. So today we're going to be covering a topic of seven easy and cheap SEO tricks you can do to get your site rankings improving. We get a lot of customers who ask us, do I need to add more content? Maybe I already have 100,000 words, 200,000 words or more do I need to do back link building yet?

But there's a lot of things you can do. That are relatively quick and can have a huge impact on the rankings of your site. So let's get started and talk about those.

[00:00:44] Use Emoticons in Page Titles

Bryon Brewer: So the first one maybe not as common, but is definitely something that Google supports is using emojis in your page titles.

These page titles are what appear in the Google search, right? And Google does support these they will be displayed in the search results. Only if they're relevant though. Google doesn't always show the emojicons or the emoticons. Sometimes they do get filtered out, especially if they're not really relevant to your content, if they look spammy or out of place. But in some articles that may make sense to, to really catch someone's attention and increase your click-through rates. I'll give you an example here. Let me share my screen. And show you. This is from one of the sites I run, you can see I'm ranked number two for discover the best multi Chrome nail Polish of 2020.

And I have the heart emoji icon right there on the search results. So you can see that actually grabs people at attention. This article is ranking number two and only has 400 words within this article. And part of it is because it does have a very good click through rate. And part of that, I attribute to using the emoji within the title.

So this could be a good strategy used for some of your articles. The way you do this, let me just share. A couple of ways to handle this. Number one is if you go to the, and I'll put this in the show notes, the URL DubDubDub www.amp-what.com at that website, you can find all the different icons that are available, and then there is an HTML code for each emoticon that you want to use.

And you'll just paste that into your title. So let me show you. How I do that on my site. So we'll go back over here to one of my posts. Now, this site I'm using rank math. So if you're using rank math or Yoast you do have a separate section where you can put an optimized SEO title. So in here I've got discover the best multi home nail Polish of 2020, and then the art emoji icon.

So if we go back over to this amp-what.com site and get the codes they are, which nearly every code that you might want to be able to use is going to be included here. So if I type in like smile and here, I want to use this one so we can click on it. There's the code right there. So we'll get that, we'll copy it. And then over here in the title, we'll just paste that code. It's going to start with the ampersand and then a number. And you see now in the title has that smiley icon. Okay. So you can experiment with this to see what kind of results you get. Like I said, Google, isn't always going to display these emojicons, but they will frequently.

And especially if it you know, this site does have the word heart and the URL and some of the articles lend itself more to using these icons but something where you, you know, it's like a wow article. You might be able to use an icon and get away with it in Google display it. All right. So that's tip number one.

[00:04:09] Use synonyms for your main keyword

Bryon Brewer: So let's go look at tip number two, which is using synonyms for your main keyword. So go through the existing articles that you have and determine where it makes sense. To use synonyms or related keywords. Now using the right keywords is super important for the SEO of an article. And for most of us, we spend lots of time trying to find the perfect key word that we want to use that we think we can rank for.

And we think why not use that over and over in the article to help it rank. But Google and really from a user perspective, variation is key. So an example here that Yoast provides is like an article around candy. We wouldn't want to use the word candy in every other sentence. It just doesn't sound natural.

And there's other terms we could use, like sweets or delicacy or other synonyms that we could replace candy with. And not only does that make the article flow better and sound more attractive. It's more engaging to our end-users, but from a SEO perspective, Google is going to understand the article better when we have different related terms being used for the primary keyword that we're targeting.

You still want to think about keyword density. You know, we still want to use that primary keyword a few times in the article, in the title, maybe in the first paragraph or the. The headers as well. You just don't want to use it too many times instead use some of these related keywords are sending the items.

Now, a question comes up is how often to use these synonyms. And there was no hard rule here. Just make sure your text is readable and appears to natural. Google has a very good understanding of reading through texts. So we don't want to make it use too much or seem unnatural, but you could use a tool like rank math or Yoast to help you determine how often do you use these synonyms, which rank math does have a field there where you can put in synonyms.

[00:06:06] Use Video

Bryon Brewer: Alright. Part three, number three, here is use video in your article. So more and more videos being used throughout the internet. Even we've seen Facebook is moving over to reels and this is now saying that's their most popular post type. 80% of consumer internet traffic now is video.

Another cool stat. Here is 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube every day. So videos, very, very engaging, very popular with users. And you'll see the Google includes video and a lot of the search results. Now the search results have gone from just plain texts to much richer with featured snippets, including images and photos and videos.

So this can certainly help articles that you have today that aren't ranking where you want them to be adding a video, can get those moved up. Potentially into higher spots within Google or featured video spots. So some suggestions of how you might use these is use you know, build how to videos and some of your informational articles you know, use descriptive keywords in your video.

And when you upload it to YouTube or your hosting provider make sure you use descriptive keywords to describe the video, which will help it rank. And then on your site as well, create a video site map. And so as you add videos to each of your articles you know, use a tool like Rank Math to create a separate site map just for your videos, which will help Google get those indexed.

There's lots of kind of easy ways that you can create videos don't require a lot of time and money investing and, you know, real production of a video. You do want to have unique video, just sharing video from someone else's YouTube on your article, isn't going to give you much SEO value. What we do and I'll show you some examples here at Human Proof Designs, we create videos for articles.

And in example, on this page here, like the ultimate camping guide. So we'll click on that. And these do have background music but if you can get an idea of basically how to choose a camp site, what's the essential camping gear. All of this content is actually taken from the article itself.

So we're not having to write any new content or come up with any new ideas. We just take the existing headings and then snippets from the article and use that as texts on top of images and video. And we compile all of that into a two or three minute long video. So you can use a number of tools like lumen five, I'll include a link to To create these videos. So they'll pull in your article and then help you compile in in build one of these videos. There's other tools as well out there that can help you do that.

[00:08:48] Optimize old content

Bryon Brewer: Okay. So let's move on here to number four, which is optimizing old content It's sometimes a decision of, should I add more content to get more rankings and, and improve my traffic. You may already have 200,000, 300,000 words. You still not getting the traffic levels that you're expecting. Then it's likely you need to go and optimize that older content.

What we do is look for pages that are ranking already on maybe page two or three of Google we'll prioritize and optimize those first. Those have the highest potential for improve rankings and getting to page one at Google. And so we're kind of prioritize those. And then as we get all of those that are ranking page two or three, a Google we'll move down the list and start to work on those articles that are ranking further down.

The best way to do this is really to run the article through a tool like Frase IO or through surfer SEO. And that will allow you to see how your article stacks up against your competition and those articles that are ranking in the top 20 of Google. So let's take a look here just quickly at how we do this within Frase.

So within Frase, you load up and give it a URL. So one of your existing articles that. You want to improve and you want to get better rankings for so this one is that nail Polish article we just looked at that has the heart emoji in the title. And then the keywords that I'm trying to rank here for is best multi Chrome nail Polish.

Okay. Now, when phrase analyzes this, you can see that it's given a word count of 474 in my article, the average for my competitive. Is about 1200 words and you can see the average has articles in the top 20 app headings to five links of seven images of 13. A mine you can see is somewhat low. I need to improve all of these aspects.

So I'm ranking pretty well for this article already, but if I wanted to maybe move it up to number one or keep you just keep it. I don't want the competitors to slowly outrank me. So I may want to make some proactive improvements to this article here. So this will help me understand what I need to do.

I can go in here and take a look at each competitor article and see what headings, what topics they're including. I mean, Nate may need to update my article to include. Some of the topics that they're including in their article. Obviously I need to make the article longer. I need to add some more sections to it.

I need to get some links to other related content. Potentially add some images or a video would be great for this this topic here. So you can see Frase really given me some good advice on what to need. I need to. You can also go to the optimized tab here and you can get an idea of the keywords and the keyword densities and how you stack up against the competition.

So Frase given me a 16%, which is a pretty low score. We're wanting to typically get these above 70%. So these are all the different keywords that my competitors are mentioning that potentially I'm not select Polish color. Is a good keyword. I mentioned at zero times, my competitors on average mentioned at one time, some of these you're I'm doing okay with a lot of these others here I need to improve upon.

So nail Polish for example, is being used 34 times by the competitors. I only mentioned at one time in my article. So certainly that could be an improvement. To this article. So go through update your article here as you update it, it's going to update your score in real time. So you can see how your article stacking up as you modify it.

And then when you're ready, copy this publish it into WordPress and then wait for your ranking changes to happen. Okay.

[00:12:41] Steal Ideas from Your Competitors

Bryon Brewer: All right. Let's look at SEO tip number five, which is basically stealing ideas from your competitors. If you really don't have the rankings you want it may be time to look at really the content you're targeting and see if there's content that you can target and easily rank for. And so looking at competitor articles is probably a good idea.

So let me show you how we do this. I'm going to go into Ahrefs. So you can use lots of different tools where you're using Ahrefs in this example here, and I've got my website pulled up here and I'm looking at, what I want to do is look at who are the competitors? So SEMrush does this. Ahrefs does this.

I can click on competing domains and I can see. You know what sites are competing for some of the same keywords. So frequently, these are going to be within the same niche. And I can see, for example, this one here, easy nail tech.com. So this is a good one. That's in the kind of the nail salon, a niche, and we have lots of keywords in common.

So if I see keywords unique to competitor, those are the keywords that I know. I need to rank for my competitors ranking for it. So if we look at easy nail tech here, we can see it as a domain rating of eight S somewhat low. We have a domain rating of 29. So ours is definitely an, a higher authority site.

They have about 1500 backlinks. Okay. So this is probably a good competitor to look at because they do have a lower domain authority. And lots of keywords that they're ranking for that. We're not. So let's just click on the keywords here. 16,000 keywords that they're ranking for that we are not now, this jumps over when you do this to the content gap and it shows the 16,000 keywords that we hard nails is not ranking for.

So let me scroll through here and look at this. So for example, I see the ranking number two for nail rap. So, you know, given that I have a much higher domain authority and I don't have content ranking for that at all, I could probably write an article, make sure I maybe run it through Frase and make sure I get a better article than they have in rank out, rank them in position one or two for that.

Some other ones down here. There's a cuticle remover. That would be a good one. Fake nail for kids 9,700 volume they're ranking number five. That would be a good one to target nail decals, a nail stamper, how to remove nail glue that has pretty high search volume and they're ranking number eight for yet.

So you see, I can come up with quite a bit of a list of just this one competitor. Articles that I could target and likely rank better for them since I do have a better domain authority. Okay. So that's a great idea is to kind of steal some of those ideas from your competitors. What we normally do is generate a list of all of those keywords that we want to target.

Put that into a spreadsheet, run the stats as far as search volume. And then determine which ones we want to do first, second, third, and prioritize those that are going to bring us the best return. And then we run those each keyword into Frase and then write an article and get that published. Okay.

[00:15:53] Internal Linking for pages not indexed

Bryon Brewer: All right. Tip number six. Internal linking for pages that are not indexed. So this can be a frustrating issue where we have. Pages that just are not indexed in Google, even though they're valid pages on our website and they're in your site map. So one of the easiest ways to determine this would be to just go into Google.

And if, you know, let's say you have a hundred posts you can do a search here. We are coming on and we're going to search and I can see that it says I have 236 results. So if you go look at your pages and posts and WordPress and realize that, Hey, maybe I have 300 posts and pages, but only 236 are showing up in.

You have some that are not indexed, you can also go into Google search console and, and get a list of those that are not indexed. Okay. And then from there you want to figure out what, what can I do to get those index now, probably first, want to check everything else out? Does it have a no index tag on it?

You know, maybe you, you check box that when you were drafting the article and that needs to be removed. Maybe it's not showing up you and your site map, and you want to check that maybe there's some other technical SEO issues on your page or your site that you need to look at first. So check out all of those things.

And if you, everything checks out, everything looks correct. This page should be getting indexed. Then it's some other issue that Google doesn't see that page as important, or maybe a duplicate. It is what it thinks. And so what you can do to kind of forced Google to get that indexed is number one, you can try adding some internal links to that page to help it increase its importance to the site.

So at you know, several internal links from relevant places on your site and do that the other thing you can also do is use some some backlink built. So get a guest post link or a quality PBN to increase the authority of that page. Once we typically, once we get those internal links in place or get a couple of back links on that page, then it will get indexed in Google will start picking that up.

So that those usually are the techniques you can use to get those pages ranking for you.

[00:18:05] Use schema

Bryon Brewer: All right. And number seven, use schema. Is super important today. Google is trying to provide more rich search results, more data. So schema markup is what helps Google to better understand the context of your page and understand the content within it.

It kind of parses it out better for Google to understand. So we can see that it's an article or here's a section that's an FAQ or here's the Arthur of the article. All those things would be spelled out within the scheme. And so you can get a richer search results that stand out more and Google get better conversion click-through rates using schema.

Typically a plugin like RankMath or Yoast are going to have settings that you can configure to set up your schema. So you'll want to run through those settings and get everything configured for your site. There's also some separate plugins available that are dedicated just to. An example of what this might look at, like is here's an, a good example of a few sites with schema.

So we see result number one here at the top best ever brownies. We've got the ratings here. We've got how many votes we've got, how long it takes. This is from a recipe on their site. We've got how many calories we've got a thumbnail photo and we've got a good description. So they're doing perfect with schema.

They're using the rating schema they're using the article schema. All of these aspects are implemented. It's we really get full detail. The next result here is starting to get some, you see that they have the thumbnail image but they don't have the schema for ratings set up at all. So we're not getting the ratings, the votes, the, the time, the calories, none of that information.

And then the last result here is lacking schema completely. You see, it has the standard title. And then the standard description, which is you're coming from the meta-description or from the first paragraph of the article. So they're not really able to control that without schema. So obviously when you look at these search results, this one here with schema implemented is more likely that you're going to click on it, especially the first two, because they have images compared to the third result.

So that's why the schema is so important. And if you can get the schema implemented, you're likely to see those click-through rates improve and as they do your rankings go up. All right.

[00:20:27] Summary

Bryon Brewer: So those are our seven tips to keep in mind pretty easy to implement. So just to review here use the emojis in your title. And we'll improve your click-through rates. Use synonyms throughout your article for your main keyword. Try to use video. You can use tools like lumen five to do those pretty quickly and use to just existing content. You already have to generate those videos optimize old content to get it ranking better steal ideas from your competitors.

Taking articles that they're ranking for writing similar articles and outranking them and then internal linking for pages that are not indexed. You've put all that work into an article. You want to make sure it gets indexed. And then lastly use schema which you can do pretty quickly, but just standing up the plugin.

All right. Hopefully these tips help you. If you have questions, please leave some comments like the video, and we will talk to you next week.