Our Top Tips to Rank High With SEO in 2020

If you’re trying to rank higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) and gain more online visibility with your business, then you’ve probably heard of SEO as it’s one of the best ways to increase your presence online in 2020.

With digital marketing projected to surpass traditional marketing in 2019, now is the perfect time to start utilizing digital marketing or improve your current digital marketing efforts.

And what’s a great way to create or optimize a digital marketing strategy?

SEO of course!

But with everyone trying to clamor their way to the top of search engine result pages, we recommend using some advanced SEO techniques that can keep your page rank higher than your competitors.

So if you’re ready to rank higher in SEO or just need a great overall digital marketing plan, we’re here to help. Whether you’re looking for local SEO in Dallas, Texas or national SEO targeting places from New York City to Boise, Idaho, then we’ve got you covered.

We know just how important the right kind of SEO can help a business, so make sure to grab our free SEO audit report.

Or you can contact us today for a free consultation.

So what are the top SEO trends we project for 2020?

1. Expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

Not that this one is new, but it’s something that’s gaining importance with ranking value. Sometimes we see this as the acronym, EAT, and it basically means that your content must be credible and accurate for it to rank high.

Long gone are the days of just having well-written content. You may think that it’s a no-brainer for your content to be accurate. But with so much info on the web and with so much competition for ranking within certain industries, there’s definitely content out there that isn’t as accurate as it should be.

Whether it’s from a bad source, to propagate false information or to try to manipulate search rankings, it’s a bad practice. And we’re seeing a rise in search engines like Google cracking down on the accuracy of content in certain industries like medical and finance. However, it will certainly spread into other industries as well.

Google is looking for content and sites that can prove their expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, hence the acronym EAT, so it’s best to be preemptive and stay ahead of the game on this one.

And if you think you have been impacted negatively by ranking factors such as EAT or you just want to rank better, you can do a few things to help your ranking.

1. Go through all your website pages and content to ensure you have accurate information and data and make sure that your website pages and content are linked to credible sources.
2. Create a quality author’s bio and add it to all your content, giving it that little extra boost of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

Super simple and effective!

2. Optimize your site for speed

This may seem like one that’s been mentioned a time or two before as we all know that site speed affects your ranking.

However, this is not to be confused with page speed. And while page speed does affect your overall site speed, we are going to be focused on overall site speed for this one.

Site speed is increasingly becoming more relevant to SEO and ranking value.

But the good news?

There are many ways to enhance your site’s speed, and Rocket Park can definitely help you do this. We work a lot with clients who have trouble with site speed, and while it can be a result of many different factors, it’s sometimes because they’re on a CMS like Wordpress that can be clunky and have a lot of unnecessary features with certain plugins and themes.

While Wordpress themes and plugins can seem helpful to someone trying to manage their website themselves, these themes and plugins can come with a lot of features that you don’t need, making your site unnecessarily slow.

The other issue with slow websites is hosting. If your hosting is poor quality and doesn’t match your level of traffic visiting your site, it can cause speed issues. And speed issues not only affect your SEO ranking, but it can also increase your site’s bounce rate. A high bounce rate means that people leave your site before getting to know your brand (and probably never return), which obviously is not good for business.

We are also seeing an increasing trend in hosting HTML files on a content delivery network or CDN for short. So to better explain this, let’s say that your hosting is by a server in Los Angeles, CA on the west coast of the United States, but the person accessing your site is in Berlin, Germany. This can cause the load time for your website to slow.

By using a CDN, it optimizes the speed of your site by hosting your static files such as pictures and content on a server that is closer to the person accessing the website. In this case, a server probably based in Germany.

You may not need to use a CDN as you might get the desired speed from:

• Cleaning up your website code
• Compressing your photos
• Upgrading your hosting
• Going in and taking out all the features you don’t need with a certain plugin or theme
• Moving your site to a CMS that is a better fit for your specific website needs (we love Craft CMS)

We know that this seems like a lot, so if you’re feeling like you may need some help with this, feel free to check our website and marketing optimization solutions or call us anytime at (214) 225-2011 for a free strategy call.

But just know that site speed is important to increase rankings and conversions.

And what business couldn’t benefit from a higher SERP ranking or more conversions?

3. FAQ page markup

So this one makes our list because it’s not only important for page ranking but also because so few sites utilize it.

A frequent questions and answers page, when implemented the right way, will add your question to your search listing.

This may not sound like a big deal, but think about what happens when you ask a question in Google or Bing…

The most helpful results and (the ones you most likely use) are the ones where your question comes up and you can click on it, having it extend below with the relevant information you’re searching for without ever leaving the search results page

Some people are concerned about website traffic as technically these people would never leave the Google search page and make it to your website. However, it makes things really easy for the person searching for an answer to find it, thus creating authority and trust. And when you build trust with your potential buyers, they remember your site that gave them great info quickly, increasing the likelihood that they’ll trust your brand and/or visit your site in the future.

Think about it…

When you search on the web for something and a list of questions pop up related to what you are asking and all you have to do is click on the question for it to give you the answer you are looking for without ever having to leave the search results page, you are going to take note of who is providing you with the information you are looking for in a quick and easy way. This means that you’ll likely visit that site in the future or trust the information on that site if that site shows up in search results in the future.

This is a great long-term strategy to use. And it’s also a fantastic way to get your site out there if you aren’t ranking on the first page of search results because it puts your site’s info in front of people without actually having a first-page search results ranking.

And not to worry, even if you rank first, data shows that your site traffic likely will not drop by doing this.

4. SEO A/B split testing

If you use any type of digital marketing, then you have probably heard of split testing. We use this to evaluate different strategies. So it’s a must for optimizing your search ranking.

You can use our free SEO audit to generate a report that will give you some valuable insight into what you might need to test and optimize.

Back in the old days, you would have to go in and manually change the technical SEO on your site, which can be a hassle and not to mention, time-consuming. But with new technology or the right digital marketing agency like Rocket Park, it’s so much easier to change the technical SEO on your site. This would include optimizing your site’s HTML code for better SEO ranking.

You can also add code to your website that can track and report on data that will give you information to help you compare (AB test) different pages, giving you valuable insight into what is performing and what’s not, ultimately helping you make better decisions about your digital strategy.

If you have a robust site with a lot of pages or a lot of content, we can go in and change things on your site whenever Google search ranking factors are updated. This means that you are always optimizing for Google’s new requirements so you are on top (figuratively and literally) of search results.

5. SEO topic clustering

You have done the research, have a content calendar, and a great content strategy…

Or so you thought. You are writing quality (and accurate) content, but you aren’t quite getting the traffic you want.

So what to do now?

Well, one way to rank better and drive more (better quality) traffic to your content is using something called topic or content clustering. Yes, I know, it sounds a bit weird, but bear with me because it actually makes a lot of sense.

Let’s say you have a lot of content over a lot of similar subjects. Guess what happens when you publish content over similar topics?

It confuses the search engine and therefore can hurt your SERP, and you don’t want that.

For example, maybe you have a lot of content written about SEO. When you publish a lot of content with similar topics, Search engines like Google may not know which piece to rank.

But not to worry, with topic clustering, you can organize your site and even content by specific topics that helps Google easily find all the content on that topic on your blog. Then Google’s bot determines how to rank them. And creating these kinds of topic clusters allows readers to easily navigate to all the relevant articles on a topic on your blog.

So how does it work?

You have different sections of your website that help organize each topic you write about.

So let’s say you have one main page that covers the main topic (often a competitive keyword like SEO ) and then you would have several supporting blogs that cover subtopics.

From there you link all the sub-topic blogs back to the main page and to each other, creating a sort of digital web (imagine a spider web linking each piece of content to another piece of related content).

The combination of the main page and the sub-topic content tells Google that your site is an expert on the main topic. (In this case, SEO.)

For example, let’s say you have a content piece, “A definitive guide to SEO”, you would not only link that blog back to the main SEO page but also link it to other SEO blogs on your site. Now the search engine will understand that all the sub-topics under the main page are all about SEO. Using this kind of topic clustering is an easy way to improve your overall SEO ranking.

How Rocket Park can help you rank high with SEO in 2020

I’m sure you know by now that SEO is an important part of your overall digital marketing strategy, and Rocket Park can make sure that you’re using the most innovative SEO tactics to help you rank higher.

We help businesses with awesome SEO strategies everywhere from Augusta, Maine to New Mexico and all over the US. So if you’re ready for better page ranks and a better online presence, then we would love to hear from you.

Contact us today and see how we can help you rank higher, faster.