Sometimes, it’s hard to know what else can be done to boost traffic and rank. Especially when you feel like you’ve tried everything! Here are some suggestions – an SEO cheat sheet comprised of tips and tricks that I use on a daily basis to help my clients’ businesses.
I always start by looking at my data through these lenses: impressions, click through rates and keyword ranking. In a recent post, I described how to find low-hanging fruit in SEO by identifying pages that are hovering around success, but need a little push. Check out that post for details about how to find impressions, click through, and rank data about pages that are ripe for improvement using Google Search Console data.
Once you’ve found a page you want to optimize, select a tactic below that best matches that page’s situation.
Page title and meta description are what we call “on-page” SEO, as they are short lines of HTML that are added to the page code to inform search engine crawlers about the content and intended search matching of the page. Additionally, page title and meta description are usually used to populate the text of organic results.
| Metadata Guide | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Character Limit | Best Practices | ||
| Page Title | 60 Characters (Including Spaces) | Include primary keyword (and secondary, if possible) | |
| Meta Description | 155 characters (Including spaces) | Include primary keyword (and secondary if possible) Include a call to action ("Browse our inventory today!") | |
If you’re lucky enough to be using Branch Explorer, please refer to the Topic Explorer page.
The Topic Explorer page can drill down into metrics surrounding specific topics to give greater visibility for the highest volume keywords and modifiers.
The screenshot shows the Topic Explorer page of the TO Explorer, which contains graphs, date range control, and filters for the following to give you maximum visibility into optimization of on-page SEO signals like page title and meta description;
The same type of filtering is available within GSC’s native data exports with Sheets or Excel, but ends up being significantly more difficult to achieve the layering of filters that TO Explorer includes as a standard. Formulas we would recommend include CountIf, AverageIf, and Query for parsing within Sheets or Excel.
The typical checks that should be completed surrounding metadata are as follows;
In the example used during the webinar, we audited a page for all 10 of these opportunities. In the case of the page we reviewed, the meta description was short, included the author names only, and lacked crucial information about the page content. In this case, we revised the meta description from;
“By Maggie Castle & Jaimee LaTorra”
to:
“Learn about data storytelling and Two Octobers’ 8 commandments for telling a story with data visualizations and examples. Make your data speak for itself!”
Is the information clearly laid out and easy to understand?
Tool Tip: Need a quick way to access this information?
Check out: Chrome Extension “SEO META in 1 CLICK”.
Links are the basis of authority signals in Google’s index, as they indicate which pages on your site are most important to your business, and which pages are most important to internet users. Ask yourself :
Tool tip: Google Search Console: “Links” tab
Search for your target keyword in Google, and audit the top listings to get a sense of what the competitive landscape looks like for given keywords.
Tool tip: This is best performed in Google search with manual reviews of competitors. Old school sometimes can be the best school.
Is this page clearly marked as the ‘original’, or is it pointing elsewhere to a different ‘original’ page? Canonicals demarcate pages which are either:
Using canonical links is especially necessary for eComm stores with filtered pages. Original pages should be “self-referencing”.
Are your competitors providing popular products/services on their pages? Do your customers have clear “next steps” which direct them toward your desired conversions? Here are some examples of next steps you could encourage them to take by adding more content to existing pages:
Are there any questions being searched in high volumes which aren’t bringing any traffic to the site? Keep in mind that FAQs are excellent drivers for keyword matching and keyword expansion. Make sure you take a look at these as a potential SEO opportunity to improve your rank.
Tool Tip: Use Explorer’s Question Searches page to go deeper into this area, and layer on filters to get an extremely granular drill down into keyword data.
Check your Core Web Vitals to make sure everything is working as it should.
Are there parsing or rendering issues which cause the content to take longer than 3 seconds to load? If there are, please dig into those because they are blocking your success.
Tool tip: Make sure to go to Google’s Page Speed Insights to check your vitals.
Schema markup is a great way to help your website stand out from your SEO competitors.
It’s a form of microdata. Once added to a webpage, it will create an enhanced description (known as a rich snippet). It’s important because it is how a search engine interprets the context of a keyword. This is what determines the overall quality of a search result.
Schema markups provide pages with eligibility for Rich Results in Google’s results (People Also Ask, Featured Snippets, etc.). You’ll want to make sure this is optimized. Here’s how:
Location pages and information provide Google (and other search engines) with information for “near me” searches. Here’s how you can go about optimizing for location.
I hope these SEO opportunities will help you fight the good fight to improve rank in Google and other search engines, ultimately driving more traffic to your website.
At Two Octobers, we love receiving feedback about our tools, processes, and work. If you have further questions, reach out to us! Feedback about ways in which a tool could be improved? Reach out to us! Comments about ways in which our tools or work have impacted your business? Reach out to us!
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