SEO

32 SEO STATISTICS YOU SHOULD KNOW IN 2021

SEO Stats for Local Businesses

Search engines utilize powerful algorithms to deliver content that meets the needs of the searcher. With these powerful algorithms comes a lot of uncertainty from digital marketers and business owners alike. SEO, or search engine optimization, is all about adjusting content and code on your website and optimizing local and off-site elements like Google My Business to try to perform better in search.

According to Hubspot, about 64% of digital marketers invest time in SEO. The following stats will give you insight into the influence of SEO and how your digital marketing efforts can impact your business:

Organic Search Statistics

Investing in organic search performance is vital to make the most of digital marketing. When competing for a spot in the 10 blue links, understanding what performs on search and how it influences consumer behavior can make the difference between making and breaking your SEO strategy.

1. Globally, Bing accounts for 6.7% of the desktop search market, while Google took 86.6%. (Statista, 2021)
2. Google dominates mobile in the United States with over 94% of mobile search engine market share. (StatCounter, 2021) – Even more than desktop, Google is the preferred search engine of mobile users in the U.S.
3. 85% of Google users find an answer to their query with their initial search term. (Backlinko, 2020)
4. Title tags that contain a question have a 14.1% higher CTR vs. pages that don’t have a question in their title. (Backlinko, 2019) – Searchers are looking for answers to their questions, so keep this in mind when writing content!
5. Mobile searches containing “not working” have grown by over 65% in the past two years (Google, 2018) – These searches can include valuable keywords like “ac not working” that have a high indication someone needs repair.
6. The average top-ranking page also ranks in the top 10 search results for nearly 1,000 other relevant keywords. (Ahrefs)
7. The #1 organic result is 10x more likely to receive a click compared to a page in the #10 spot. (Backlinko, 2019) – Where you rank on search matters! The closer you are to the number one organic position, the more likely you are to gather clicks.
8. Only 0.78% of Google searchers will click on the second page. (Backlinko, 2019) – It’s no surprise many users don’t navigate to the second page, but this number tends to surprise people. Those top 10 spots tend to be very competitive, but they can make a huge difference when it comes to your traffic.
9. On the first page alone, the first five organic results account for 67.6% of all the clicks. (Impact, 2020)
10. 50% of people are more likely to click on a particular brand name if that brand name shows up more than once on the search results. (Omnicore, 2020) – SEO is not just to strengthen your appearance for non-branded keywords. Your branded keywords depend on high-quality SEO too!
11. 29% of search queries have featured snippets in their search results. (Ahrefs) – These helpful blocks of information pull from pages within Google’s index automatically. Featured snippets are often found for queries that contain questions.
12. In the majority of home services verticals, over 55% of consumers run a search before scheduling an appointment (Source: LSA) – Consumers researching services like moving, locksmiths, lawn care, and pest control are the most likely to use search engines.
13. Callers convert 30% faster than web leads. (Source: Forrester) – When a user needs emergency service or wants an immediate response, they tend to call. This is increasingly important to remember for home service brands where emergency and same-day service are a significant part of their business.
14. On average, ranking in position #1 on mobile gets you 27.7% of the clicks. Ranking in position #1 on desktop gets you an average of 19.3% of the clicks. (SEOClarity) – Where you rank matters, and it matters even more on mobile!

Page Speed Statistics

Google is often elusive about directly saying metrics are ranking factors, but Page Speed is an exception. Page speed’s direct contribution to your site’s performance has an impact beyond your rankings, as it can often be indicative of much more.

1. As page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases by 123%. (Google, 2017)
2. Nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer. (Unbounce, 2019) – If you want to keep customers, fast page speed is a major factor.
3. Sites that load in five seconds (compared to those that load in 19) see 70% longer average sessions. (Think with Google. 2016) – With Google’s Core Web Vitals, your site experience is not just a tool to keep users on your site; now it’s a ranking factor.
4. The first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on conversion rates. (Portent, 2019) – When sites load quickly and users stay on the site longer, conversion rates tend to rise.

Content Statistics

There’s a saying in SEO that “content is king.” High-quality content is a major pillar of SEO performance and should be seen as an investment in your business’s success. Creating quality content isn’t rocket science, it can even begin with insights found right on Google.

1. Companies that blog have 55% more visitors on average (HubSpot) – Looking to drive traffic to your site? Start a blog with high-quality content that solves problems and answers questions.
2. The average Google first page result contains 1,447 words. (Backlinko, 2020) – Word count does not have a direct influence over where on page one you rank, but what we can tell from this average is that Google and users alike love comprehensive content that matches user intent.
3. 61% of pages have meta descriptions that truncate. (Ahrefs) – Don’t bury your lead in your meta description! Highlight competitive differentiators and value propositions early in your meta to prevent the valuable info from being cut off by Google.
4. Google rewrites meta descriptions 62.78% of the time. (Ahrefs, 2020) – As Google gets better at understanding search intent, it changes meta descriptions to try to emulate what a user is looking for. So no, you aren’t crazy, you didn’t write that meta description, Google did.
5. 23% of searchers use autocomplete suggestions to complete their Google Searches. (Backlinko, 2020) – Need new content ideas? Check out autocomplete for frequently asked questions and related topics.
6. 7% of all voice search answers came from a featured snippet. (Backlinko, 2018). – Content creation like blog posts can help capture voice search users as they often rank for featured snippets.

Local SEO Statistics

Local SEO efforts help capture traffic from people looking for services in their immediate area. Customer intent is everything, and when your business serves a local customer base, understanding that intent can drive results at a greater rate than you might guess.

1. 40% of mobile searches have local intent. (Think with Google) – User intent is everything, so when performing SEO for local businesses, be sure to keep your mobile site in mind.
2. 57% of consumers will only use a business if it has 4 or more stars on local reviews. (BrightLocal) – Home services marketers need to have a strong review management strategy in place to secure and maintain a good star rating.
3. Google saw 350 times more searches for the keywords “local” and “near me” in 2019 than in 2009. (Google) – If you have a local business, these types of keywords are going to drive essential leads for you, as they reflect a desire to convert.
4. Local and “near me” searches are especially common on mobile. Among the fastest-growing search terms are “HVAC repair,” “landscaping near me,” “plumbers near me,” and “roofing companies” (Google).
5. 88% of searches for local businesses on a mobile device either call or visit the business within 24 hours. (Nectafy, 2019) – Want your rankings to convert to leads? Invest in Local SEO efforts including a Google My Business profile, which encourages users to call from search.
6. For local queries, 42% of searchers click on results inside of the Google Maps Pack. (Backlinko, 2020)
7. Whether it’s by visiting the business or contacting them by phone, a combined 47% of consumers get in touch with a business after making a local voice search. (BrightLocal) – Voice search often provides users with local pack results. Is your business likely to appear in voice search for local searches?
8. 28% of searches for something nearby result in a purchase. (BrightLocal) – When users are looking for local businesses, they tend to be closer to the purchase stage in the sales funnel. Gaining visibility in your area means gaining traffic from those customers that are likely to convert.

How to “SEO” Optimize a Page For Keywords

Welcome back to mddigitalgraphicdesigns’ weekly content series, where we give you actionable SEO strategies and tips that you can implement today and start seeing results.

In my previous guide, I went deep on why keyword research is critical and how to actually go about doing it for your own website.

The response was unanimous.

Karl, What the Hell Do I Do With All These Keywords?!

Relaaaaxx. 

You’ve heard it a million times: make sure your page is optimized for the target keyword.

Well, today I’m going to cut the bullshit and show you how to actually optimize a page for keywords.

Time to learn: 10 minutes

Impact (1-10): 10

Tools required: None

Tools suggested: SurferSEO, Ahrefs

Now, let’s get to it…

How to Optimize Pages for Keywords

Before any of what I’m going to teach you has any relevance, you need to figure out what the keywords are that you’d like to rank for on Google.

After all, if you don’t know where you’re trying to go, I can’t help you get there.

Check out our keyword research guide from last week and I’ll show you exactly how to do that.

When you’ve done that, you should end up with a massive list of keywords related to your business, and even more keywords related to those keywords.

Now you’re going to learn what to do with your pages to actually rank for these terms.

Terms and Concepts

Before we start talking about the different ways to utilize your keywords, there are a few general concepts we need to get out of the way.

Like I mentioned in our keyword research guide, a page never just ranks for one single keyword. It’ll likely rank for hundreds of them, whether you’re trying to do so or not.

But for each page we’re going to target, you’ll need to decide on a primary keyword. That is the most important keyword you’re going to try and rank for and most likely best reflects what the topic of the page is.

For example, coming back to our keyword research piece: “How to Do Keyword Research – the Ultimate Guide”, the primary keyword would be “how to do keyword research”.

Not only is it reflective of what we’re talking about, it has the highest search volume out of all the keywords we were able to find, other than “keyword research”.

Next up we have secondary keywords. These are keywords that reflect the same topic and are highly related to your primary keyword.

Continuing with the same example, our secondary keywords would be:

• Keyword analysis
• How to find keywords for seo
• How to research keywords
• What is keyword research
• Keyword research guide
• Keyword research checklist
• Seed keywords
• Etc

The last thing you’re going to need to know is how to categorize keywords.

Let’s say I’m talking about the best keyword research tools – I could easily include a massive section on this in my keyword research guide…. Or I could create a separate post about it?

What about for keyword research vs keyword analysis?

Which way is correct? Should each target keyword have a separate page targeting it?

Fortunately, there is no right answer for this.

Why fortunately? Well, because that means 90% of your competitors are probably going to screw this up and you’re about to know “the secret”!

And it’s stupid simple.

Any time you’re faced with this type of question, simply Google your keyword, and look at the top results and it becomes clear.

You’re either going to see that all the top 10 posts are about the “parent topic” (e.g. keyword research guide) or that Google treats it as a separate topic.

You’re going to want to repeat this for every single keyword and based on the results, categorize your secondary keywords under primary keywords.

If you’ve got access to Ahrefs, this process becomes much easier because you can already see which keywords your competitors (optimized) posts rank for. Not only that, you’ve also got the “parent topic” feature to assist you in your research.

To learn more about the above, check out our keyword research guide.

How to Keyword Optimize Titles

The page title is one of the first places Google is going to look to try and understand what a page is about and thus, what it should rank for. It’s also the bit that is actually displayed in the search results and convinces your potential customers to come to your site.

Back in the day, we used to stuff as many keywords as possible into these and that was a massive chunk of our SEO efforts… and it worked.

Nowadays, I encourage you to include your primary keyword in the title but put the vast majority of your focus on creating the most clickable and compelling title for the user.

This is because evidence shows click-through rates (CTRs) are now a part of the algorithm and also determine rankings. So even if you make it to #1 with all of your other SEO efforts, if users are clicking less frequently on your result than the previous top position, it just may drop you down a few spots due to the “negative feedback”.

You’ll also see a lot of SEOs insist on the importance of having the primary keyword towards the beginning of the title tag. I’ve seen little to no benefit from this and prefer to focus on the CTR instead. But if it makes sense, you could try and take advantage of that.

The last thing I want you to think about is whether there’s additional keywords you can include in your title tag.

Sure, like I said before, the primary keyword should be your number one focus and everything else is a bonus… But if people search for your keyword + 2020, it only takes a second to add the year in and potentially benefit from that.

Optimizing Your Permalinks

A permalink is the address of a page on any website on the internet. Essentially it consists of two parts – your domain name (smashdigital.com) and the slug (anything that comes after – e.g. /blog/).

Permalink optimization is super simple on a page level. There are also site-wide considerations but we’ll leave those for another time.

When it comes to optimizing your URLs for a specific page, you’re going to want to follow three super simple rules.

First, you want to include your primary keyword in there. So if you’re trying to rank for “best SEO agency”, you’ll want to have “best-seo-agency” in the URL.

Secondly, you want to keep it as short as possible and cut out all the fluff. Often times I’ll even leave it as just the primary keyword and maybe a modifier (e.g. for sale, best, reviews, etc). This means that “the-best-seo-agency-in-the-world-2020” is not okay.

Lastly, you want to make sure URLs are evergreen (last forever). So if your post is about the 11 best keyword research tools, you’ll leave the URL as “best-keyword-research-tools” because the amount of tools might change in the future. The same applies for the current year and other similar variables.

SEO and the Meta Description

The meta description is the little box you see below the title tag in search results.

While this used to be a direct ranking factor, Google hasn’t been using it as such for a long time now.

In spite of that, the meta description is still one of the first things we optimize as SEOs.

Guess how that works…

If you said something along the lines of “put your primary keyword in there” – you were right.

But unlike every other time, we’re not placing the keyword there because Google is going to better understand what the page is about (they claim they don’t use it for that but I really don’t believe them 100%).

Like I mentioned earlier, a ranking factor that has been growing in importance is the clickthrough rate from Google to your site.

That’s why we always try to get the keyword in there – if people search for that term, it’ll get bolded in the meta description and help us stand out just a little bit more. 

But other than that, I try and optimize our meta descriptions for the highest clickthrough rate (while still including the keyword).

In general, it ends up something along the lines of:
“Looking to solve the problem of primary keyword? We offer X, Y, and Z things and that is our unique selling proposition. Click here for a special offer/to read more.”

The maximum length of a meta description is 156 characters so these only take a minute or two.

Content Optimization

This is the most important part of optimizing a page.

“Yeah, yeah, I know – put your primary keywords in the content”.

Well, yes…

But there’s more to it than that.

You’ve got the first part right – you’ll want to include your primary keyword (probably more than once) as well as your secondary keywords.

You should already have a list of both of these. If that’s not the case yet, the best way to do this is look at the competing pages and see what keywords they rank for using Ahrefs – you can see a full guide here.

What keyword density to use?

Fine… Use keywords, but how many times? This is probably one of the most common questions I get.

As SEOs love to say… It depends.

Back in the day, it was a lot simpler – a looong looooong time ago, the more you used a keyword, the better you ranked for that term. As Google advanced, 1-2% keyword density became the new standard.

Nowadays there’s no magic number and it seems to change from keyword to keyword, which means you have to adapt accordingly.

Naturally, you take your most important keywords, look at the top five results for them, and look at how often they use the keywords in relation to their body word count.

While it’s totally fine to do this by hand as well, the tool we’re going to talk about for the next optimization factor will also take care of this for you.

Which brings me to… related words and phrases.

The reason we don’t have fixed keyword densities anymore is because Google has gotten smarter. The algorithm is now capable of understanding the meaning behind content and how different words, phrases, and entities are connected.

In other words, they know that if I’m writing an article about “how cars work”, I probably can’t get by without using the words: engine, tires, petrol, etc.

This also happens beyond the meaning of the words.

While this is a massive exaggeration, it gets the point across quite well. If everyone on the first page of Google for “best restaurant in New York” mentions Lombardi’s, but your article doesn’t – it might give Google a hint that you don’t really know what you’re talking about.

When you start creating an outline for your article, always read through the top ranking pages and figure out which topics they cover as well as which questions remain unanswered. This’ll help you create the best possible content for both Google and your users.

To see our exact process for this, also check out our guide to creating content that ranks.

Beyond the topics, you also need to figure out what secondary keywords to include and with what frequency – that’s where Surfer SEO comes into play.

Surfer is a correlational analysis tool that was created to make on-page and content optimization easier. Instead of guessing, they crunch the numbers and give you actual data to work with.

And it’s super easy to use – you type in a keyword, it analyzes the top 50 results for that in your desired location, and then clearly displays what is working for pages that rank and what doesn’t seem to matter…

While there’s insane amounts of on-page optimization data there, the most powerful feature is called “True Density” and helps us optimize the two things I’ve just covered – keyword densities and related words and phrases you need to be using.

I entered “link building service” as an example keyword and hit the “Audit” button to see what Surfer suggests.

Immediately I know that my page should be between 3,220 and 6,734 words long and that it should include these 52 phrases in these quantities. Not only does it show phrases, we also have 219 words that should be included as well as their “relevance” and frequency.

No guessing, no math – just data.

Is this 100% accurate? Of course not, but it’s a hell of a lot better than creating pages based on your intuition and gut feeling.

I generally try to follow their recommendations for any words and phrases that have a relevance of up to 70%, anything beyond that is a bonus.

Optimize Images

The next bit of content you’re going to want to optimize is the images on your page.

Google doesn’t see images the way that we do, they just see what is in the website’s code and usually, that’s something along the lines of:

<img src=”https://smashdigital.com/images/photo-3523.png“>

That tells us absolutely nothing about what’s on the image and the same goes for Google…

However, if we change the file name from “photo-3523” to “link building service pricing”, it’s a bit clearer to Google what that image might be about. Not only that, that gives the page overall a bit more context as well.

Beyond the file name, we can also  add an ” alt tag” to further describe the images on a page.

Now, this doesn’t mean that every single image on your page should be named and alt-tagged based on your primary and secondary keywords.

Generally I make sure to use the primary keyword on both of them at least once but then in the rest of the cases, try to make them descriptive and relevant to the actual content, while using related words and phrases in a natural way.

Make sure to check out our full guide to image optimization for some additional tips on this.

Internal Links to Page

Last but not least, the last critical thing you’ll want to do to optimize a page for specific keywords is to build internal links to them.

Google crawls the internet by clicking on every single link it can find and then making connections between those pages.

The same is happening within your own website. Through the structure of the website, Google will understand which pages are more important, which ones are related to each other, and so on.

Just by having any internal links going to a page, you’re already going to help it rank way better.

But links also come with anchor text and that’s a great way to put more emphasis on what the page is about and use your primary and secondary keywords.

When it comes to internal links, currently, there has been zero evidence of over optimization happening due to anchor text so feel free to just use the primary keyword all the time. If you want to err on the more natural and safer side, mix it up with variations and secondary keywords (I do).

9 CTR Optimization Strategies To Grow Your Organic SEO Traffic

Welcome back to mddigitalgraphicdesigns’ weekly content series, where we give you actionable SEO strategies and tips that you can implement today and start seeing results.

Let’s kick today’s lesson off with a quick screenshot.

That’s a keyword with 3,600 monthly searches jumping from #5 to #1 and staying there.

What did we do to make this happen?

If you guessed link building… You know us well, but not this time.

Keep reading and I’ll show you the strategies we used to optimize this page and many others to double the site’s traffic.

Time to learn: 15 minutes

Impact (1-10): 8

Tools required: Google Search Console

Tools suggested: None

Now, let’s get to it…

Working With What You Have

You’ve probably heard of this concept in a few different ways. It goes along the lines of…

“It’s a lot easier to make more money off existing customers than to acquire new ones.”

Or…

“It’s easier to make more money with your existing business than start a new venture from scratch.”

The same holds true for SEO. It’s often going to be a lot easier to increase traffic on your existing pages instead of going after new keywords, creating more content, and building more links to a fresh page.

That’s exactly what we did in this case and we used the power of copywriting to do it.

Enter Clickthrough Rate (CTR) Optimization

If you’ve read a few of our previous SEO guides, you’ll already know that your CTR is going to affect search engine rankings.

In other words, even if you’re able to rank #2 with great on-page optimization and high-quality backlinks, if people are clicking on the #3 result more often than usual, Google might drop you further down for being irrelevant and not meeting the expected CTR.

Obviously, the opposite also holds true and that’s what we’re going to use to our advantage to improve our rankings and get more traffic

We’re going to find pages that are close to getting some traction but have a poor CTR and then I’m going to show you how to fix that up and hopefully climb to higher positions.

Not only that… Increasing your CTR literally means getting more people to visit your site.

How to Find Underperforming Pages

First up you’re going to head to Google Search Console and their “Performance” report. You’ll want to click on the CTR and average position boxes to get some additional data.

You’re going to have a nice overview of thousands of keywords that are bringing you traffic, what position you’re ranking in for these terms, and what kind of CTR you’re seeing.

Our goal is to find pages that are already doing well but have a poor CTR in relation to the position you’re ranking in.

According to data from 2019, the CTRs for the top 10 positions look something along the lines of:

1. 32.58%
2. 16.69%
3. 10.34%
4. 7.24%
5. 5.27%
6. 3.93%
7. 3.02%
8. 2.35%
9. 1.86%
10. 1.53%

These are averages and are going to vary massively from search to search, but they give you a pretty good idea of what is acceptable and what is not.

To actually find these pages, I recommend sorting the data by either the highest number of impressions or highest average position and then looking for odd CTRs.

Sorting by position, we can clearly see that there’s a bunch of keywords that have CTRs way below the average for #1 rankings.

We’re going to be optimizing these on a page-level, not for specific keywords, but you’ll want to save down any and all opportunities you see for later reference.

When sorting by impressions, you’re going to see much lower CTRs across the board because the average positions will likely be lower and the queries more generic.

Nonetheless, you can find some pretty amazing, high-impact opportunities from here.

How to Improve Your Organic CTR

Let’s talk about how to actually go about increasing your clickthrough rate for a page.

To do that, let’s first look at the Google search results.
There are really only two things we’re able to influence when it comes to our results – the meta title (purple on the image) and the meta description (the paragraph below it).

While the meta description definitely has an impact on the CTRs, it’s going to be quite insignificant when compared to changes you can see from improving the title. So that’s what we’re going to be focusing on.

Think about it… Unless you’re doing a highly important or specific search, you’ll likely simply skim through the top 5 results by looking at the titles and choosing the most compelling one.

I’m going to share 9 strategies and tips you can use to stand out in the search results and increase your CTR.

1. Assess Your Relevance to the Search Results

Google’s gotten pretty damn good at making search results relevant. In fact, it’s one of the most important ranking factors – if your pages serve a different intent than what is currently on Google’s first page, you’re probably not going to rank well.

But… There are also search results that display mixed intent.

You might see some e-commerce stores and some product reviews… Or how-to style articles and listicles.

This is the first question you’re going to want to ask yourself when it comes to both improving your position by being more relevant as well as increasing your CTR – what does the average searcher actually want?

If you’re ranking #7 for a keyword with a product page while everyone above you has informational content – you won’t really have anything to optimize for. You’re irrelevant.

It’s time to decide whether to create a new page and angle to rank with or move on to the next keyword.

Other times it may be as simple as shifting the angle of your page. Maybe you’re ranking with a listicle style post (15 tips for achieving X) but everyone ranking above you (and what the searchers want) are “how to achieve X”.

In summary – give people what they want and Google might give you what you want.

2. Change Your Title to Stand Out From the Crowd

I always try and read through the top three ranking pages and try to put myself in the searchers shoes on a deeper level… Beyond whether they want to see some reviews or to buy a product.

Let’s say I had an article reviewing the email marketing tool ActiveCampaign and was ranked #4 but not getting very many clicks.

The top three results are titled:

1. ActiveCampaign Review 2020 – When (and when not to) use it
2. ActiveCampaign Review
3. ActiveCampaign Reviews and Pricing – 2020

These titles don’t set the bar too high but let’s roll with it…

One of the best ways to increase our CTR is going to be standing out from the search results and doing something unique.

If everyone else is putting pricing, features, comparisons, and other boring stuff in the title tags, I need to find a different angle.

From experience as well as reading through the top pages, I know that this is more of an advanced tool. This means that the searcher likely doesn’t need to be convinced that this is a good tool or that email marketing is necessary.

What they really need to be convinced of is to ditch their old email marketing provider and make the switch over to ActiveCampaign.

This is something we can take advantage of.

I might call the page something along the lines of:
ActiveCampaign Review – Why I Switched Over From Mailchimp

This is just an example but there are a million other angles you could take with it, that create a lot more curiosity and interest than a generic “when to use it” or “why it’s good” title.

Some additional ideas:
ActiveCampaign Review – How We Grew Our Store 157%
ActiveCampaign Review – Is It Really Worth $XXX/mo?
ActiveCampaign Review – Best Email Solution for eCom?

So simply doing something different from your competitors is going to be one side of it and the other goes back to our previous point about matching the searchers intent and what might compel them most.

To give you another example… We had a website ranking for a keyword where the top five results were all listicles along the lines of…

• 6 Steps to Sleep Better
• 15 Proven Tips to Sleep Better
• 6 Secrets to a Good Night’s Sleep

We tested several titles that were radically different from this, but they ended up going a bit too far from the searchers intent.

The winner of the test?

X Strategies to Improve Your Sleep [TRIED AND TESTED]

The hypothesis for the page was that we all had already heard of tips for sleeping better – sleep in a cold room, stop using screens before bed, etc… But what people really wanted to know was which ones are actually important and make a difference.

3. Look at Similar Niches for Ideas

This is probably one of my favorite little tricks when it comes to SEO (and it applies to more than just titles…)

Whatever you’re trying to achieve – in this case – a better title tag… Someone has already put countless hours into doing it the right way and finding the best approach.

I like to look at other similar niches or markets and see how they’re optimizing their title tags.

This becomes even more efficient if you can look at much more competitive or lucrative areas that are similar.

Let’s say you’re ranking for the best law firm in Charlotte (that’s a US city) and want a better title tag.

I would start to Google for law firms in some of the bigger and more competitive cities. See how other law firms have approached this in New York, California, Chicago, San Diego, San Francisco, London, etc.

If you’re an online business, the same logic applies but on an industry level.

Ranking for best facebook ad agency? Look at the SEO agencies, marketing agencies, Google Ads agencies etc.

Ranking for the best coq10 supplement? Try searching for magnesium, fiber, fish oil, calcium, and other way more popular supplement types.

An affiliate site ranking for long-tail tech stuff? Look at the most popular titles in tech and how they do it – best bluetooth earbuds, best wireless headphones, best gaming laptops etc.

Sometimes you’ll see the same formulas repeated over and over that you can implement in your own business.. Other times you’ll just get one word that’ll help you turn things around.

Either way it’s super easy and you’ll learn a lot by doing it (and not just in terms of titles).

4. How to Write a Well-Optimized Title Tag

Other than the above points and SEO best practice in general, you’re going to benefit from learning more about copywriting and headlines.

Here are five principles I try to follow with each title tag:

Be Specific

While it’s great if your headline creates some curiosity, it shouldn’t be regarding what the page is about or what value you’re going to add to the reader’s life.

The more specific you can be about what they have to gain from reading it, the more likely you are to get the click.

Here are a few examples I found on Google 🙂

Problem: How to fix your posture
Title: Good Posture in 30 Days: Exercises, Calendar Plan, and More

Problem: Improve copywriting
Title: 75 Resources for Writing Incredible Copy that Converts

Problem: Creating an SEO strategy
Title: How to Create an SEO Strategy for 2020 [Template Included]

Problem: Learn guitar
Title: How To Learn Guitar: An 11-Step Programme For Beginners

Whether it’s discussing additional tools you provide on your page to solve the readers problem (e.g. templates, calendars, exercises) or simply indicating that this is targeted to them (beginners, experts, kids, old folks) – the more detailed you get, the more attention you’ll receive.

Avoid Neutral Titles

Have you ever searched for a product review for “final confirmation” only to see that the first Google result calling it a scam?

You get a strange feeling in your gut, quickly click the result to see what the fuss is about, only to see the article conclude… “No, it’s not a scam – here’s my (affiliate) link to go buy it.”

While that’s one of the worst examples of this, it’s also the best proof that this strategy works.

You want your titles to have either positive or negative sentiment – avoid anything neutral if your goal is to get as much traffic as possible.

Tell people about:

• Things they have to try
• Mistakes to avoid
• Negative feelings they can get rid of (Stuck in a rut? Feeling broke?)
• Positive outcomes (5 steps to getting your dream job)
• Potential scares (Still building backlinks through blog comments? Watch out!)

Headline and Subtitle

Traditionally great headlines come in two parts – the headline itself and a subtitle.

With meta titles we don’t always have the luxury of fitting that in due to character limitations but for some topics, it’s still a great strategy to keep in mind.

The only difference is that in search results, the first part will often be your target keyword. This’ll ensure you rank well while also establishing some relevance for the query.

The subtitle will help you convince people to actually click on the result and differentiate yourself from competitors.

An example from our own site:
Using FAQ Schema– Double Your Search Visibility in 5 Minutes

Include Numbers

Using numbers in headlines to increase interest is probably one of the oldest tricks in the book.

Hell, I used in for the guide you’re reading now!

BECAUSE IT WORKS.

While behavioral psychology is much more complex, the simplest explanation is that it creates curiosity (can there really be 65 ways to walk your pug?!) and has the potential to deliver a lot of value in a compressed format (I’m going to skim the headings and learn all 65 ways, fast.)

There have also been studies conducted that show that headlines with odd numbers in them generate more clicks.

I’ve never noticed a huge difference in this and recommend you do the same. Write the best damn content possible and go with whatever number of items you end up having.

Point being – some numbers > no numbers.

Keep It Short

According to The Psychological Review, people can keep seven, plus or minus two, objects in their working memory at a given time.

In other words, we’re not great at paying attention when too much is going on.

While it’s critical to have your headlines be concise and clear, you’ll want to stick between 5-9 words for the best CTR.

Try Stealing the Featured Snippet

You’ve probably seen featured snippets in search results. Google has been making them more frequent for the last few years.

What’s a featured snippet? Here’s a screenshot of a featured snippet explaining and showing it.

Featured snippets provide an answer to the searchers query straight within Google, without having to visit a website. While it’s great for a quick overview, most searches are far more complex than the limited amount of space in a featured snippet – this means they still get a myriad of clicks, especially considering they rank above all the other search results.

Why are these a big deal?

Well, because you don’t really have to “earn” that ranking in the traditional way. Anyone who ranks on the first page may be selected for the featured snippet instead. It’s a lot easier to rank within the top ten than to lock down the first position PLUS this ranks even higher than that.

So how does Google choose who gets the featured snippet?

They algorithmically choose “the best answer” to the search query, which effectively means that they mostly focus on the content itself and its relevance (as long as you’re on the first page already.)

The best tip I can give you to score more featured snippets is to be a lot more concise with your writing. Instead of writing sentences along the lines of “To summarize things, featured snippets are basically blah blah” you’d do better with “Featured snippets are X.”

Beyond the words on the page, it’s clear that Google also takes on-page SEO into consideration when it comes to selecting the featured snippet. This includes the use of things like numbered lists, use of headings (and doing so in the right order and a logical way), the cleanliness of your code and much more.

What if the search results already have a featured snippet but a competitor has it? 

Well, that’s the best part,

It’s possible to steal featured snippets from your competitors and do so instantly by asking Google to reindex the page using Google Search Console.

I’m going to write a dedicated guide about this in the future that’ll walk you through the entire process. To give you an idea though, it mostly revolves around analyzing what the current featured snippet has done to obtain it (their length, format, structure, etc).

Increase Your SERP Real Estate Using FAQ Schema

What better way to get more attention than to take up more space?

That’s exactly what you’re able to do by using FAQ schema.

Here’s a screenshot of a blog post that has FAQ schema attached to it and as you can see, it takes up nearly double the space of a traditional search result.

People can also click on the “Show more button” to see even more questions.

The best part? You have 100% control over what the questions and answers are and you can make this appear for almost any page, instantly with some simple code.

Click here to check out our detailed guide on how to implement this, step-by-step.

Add Other Relevant Schema

Beyond the FAQ schema, there’s a bunch of other types of page-level markup you can use to get Google to enhance the search results and stand out more.

I’m sure you’ve seen the recipe snippet, which displays user ratings, their count, cooking time, and nutritional information:

Or the fancy star-ratings under product reviews, along with the reviewers name:

Of course, there’s a lot more out there – ranging from event details to product stock levels.

To learn more about these, check out the official mddigitalgraphicdesigns’ website

Update Your Content and Publish Date

This used to be one of the most effective SEO “tricks” just a few years ago. While Google has made it a lot harder to abuse, it’s still an amazing strategy.

Google absolutely loves fresh content because in many industries, that’s a sign of a high-quality page and website. Who’d want to read an outdated guide?

Simply by keeping all of your most successful pages fresh and up to date, you’ll often be able to jump a few positions in the search results. It’s usually not enough to just change from 2020 to 2021 though – we recommend adding a few paragraphs of text at least and ensuring you also update the publish date.

The other aspect to consider for this is your competition.

While your article or page may have been the best out there when you initially published it, your competitors are also trying to grow and improve and may have overtaken you.

Google the top keywords your page should be ranking for and compare your content to the competitors – is it as long, detailed, and helpful?

If not, that’s a perfect opportunity to give it a refresh and also increase your traffic.

Build. More. Links.

Cmon, you knew this one was coming.

In fact, I really struggled when trying to not list this as the number one tip in this (and every other) guide.

Want to get a page ranking from #7 to #1?

Considering the number one ranking factor in Google is backlinks, the most efficient way to get there is going to be to  score more high -quality backlinks.

There are extremely few instances where building more links is not the right way to go.

Wrapping Up

I hope you found this weeks guide helpful and as always, if anything was unclear don’t hesitate to reach out and we’ll help you out.

I’ll see you next week with some more SEO valuebombs.

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