10 Ways To Improve Your SEO Rankings In 2020 - Part 1
Today we’d like to show you, how you can improve your site’s ranking in 2020 through SEO. All the ways that we will mention in the following helped us grow our site’s organic traffic by 200%.
And the best part about it is, that everything works great at the moment.
1. Figure Out Low-Competition Keywords With The Help Of "Ghost Posts"
Be honest with me. In most cases where you look up keyword metrics those scores are way off.
Because of this fact most of the people try to rank with another metric: backlinks.
It’s undeniable that backlinks are very important. But they are just small part of the whole SEO theme.
If you think about this twice there are many more factors the first page rankings are based on:
- Search intent
- Page speed
- Internal links
- Organic click-through-rate (Which we will improve later on)
- Mobile Device Compatibility
- And many more
But there is a way where you can ignore most of the competition scores – „Ghost Posts“.
Just to give you an example:
Ahrefs says that it is „Super Hard“ to rank for the keyword: „Free SEO tools“.
So let’s test the given keyword difficulty with this new technique: The Ghost Post.
First step is, that you write down a quick post and publish it on a page in your blog feed. (not the first!) Don’t promote the article in any way therefore also the name „Ghost Post“.
In this example the page cracked the first Google page in the first week for a long tail version of the keyword „free SEO tools“.
When some time has passed and the article is out there for a while you should start promoting the blog on social media.
From here on you give the article an upgrade. Due to the update Google checks the value of the article again while many people visit the site because of your social media promotion.
As it turns out in this example it wasn’t that hard to rank for this „Super Hard“ keyword.
To say it clear: Now the article is ranking #1 for that keyword.
As we mentioned before backlinks are an important metric. BUT as this example shows the site which has way fewer backlinks than all the others:
With that said it’s time for the question…
2. Want To Gain More Links? Be The Source.
To be honest with you we don’t believe that people link to „great content“. Because who should promote something that is a possible competitor.
People link to sources where others can draw new knowledge.
We use the guide to the Google Search Console as an example. This piece of content definitely qualifies as „high quality content“.
The difference to other pieces is, that it gives actionable tips:
To differ even more from „normal quality“ pieces of content it even has a custom design:
But here’s the twist:
Despite being a high quality piece of content there aren’t that many pages linking to the guide.
There are just 159 domains linking to the guide. If we compare this to another piece of content which was put out by Brian Dean we figure out this:
The piece of content mentioned here is a voice search study which was published around the same time:
So this may be on the same quality level as the post above, but it has 764 referring domains. So why does a similar piece of content have 4.8x the referring domains?
The point is that while the GSC Guide is a high quality piece of content, it is difficult to link.
Because unless someone is writing bout the Google Search Console there is no reason for him to link to the guide.
BUT the voice search study gives bloggers and journalists data which they can easily implement in they content or reference to.
Because of this this content is getting hundreds of high-quality backlinks.
3. To Boost Your Organic CTR Use Sitelinks
When thinking of pushing your organic CTR there are two possible ways to get people to click on your search result.
That’s WRONG!
There is another way to get people to click on your search result or at least catch as much attention as you can get from them.
The „secret“ is called sitelinks.
So if you are wondering right now why we are the telling you this. Take notes:
It is a very good prerequisite if you already own sitelinks. BUT as it turns out, you can also get sitselinks on every other page on your site.
It doesn’t matter if it is a blog page or an ecommerce page.
These sitselinks can make a huge difference in your click-through-rate.
If you were not wondering why we told you this before but were instead wondering about how to get sitselinks on your page than you should take notes NOW:
One way would be to implement a table of contents.
4. Table Of Contents
Yes it is that simple.
You just have to implement a table of content at the beginning of the page so Google recognizes that your pages is structured well.
In this example we added the table of content to make it easier for the reader to jump to the section he stopped reading.
Once your page will crack the top 5 of the Google SERP, Google features you with the sitelinks.
Trust us this will make a huge difference in your organic CTR because the audience straight up knows the structure of the site they are going to click on.
4. Concept Visuals For More Traffic
This way is a very smart way to get high-quality backlinks without having to reach out to different people every time you post something.
With this tactic there is a good chance to get links like this:
But let’s look at it from the beginning.
First step should be that you put all your effort in creating an awesome visual that people helps to understand a difficult or tricky concept.
It is not mandatory how the visual should look like, you can choose from a graph, to a chart, a visualization or a table.
This is how an example could look like:
After creating the visual it should be featured in your content.
If the right person sees the visual, they will use it on their site to upgrade their content.
From now on it’s just rinse and repeat for every post that you publish.
Pro Tip: If you’re the first one to create a visual referring to a new topic others will be more likely to use your content because you are the „original“ source.
5. Content Partnerships To Boost Your Traffic
Content partnerships are one of the fastest ways to boost your organic reach instantly.
That’s why we are such big fans of it and recommend it to everyone!
But why?
Because it makes your content twice as powerful as it has been before.
It’s totally logical. Think about it:
When you post something on your site, you send as many people as you can to your post.
