Do you know why certain pages rank higher than others? Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing your online presence for search results. With the right plan in place, it’s possible to increase your rankings for prominent searches.

Here are 10 tips to optimize your SEO rankings.

1. Be Active on Social Media

There are many ways social media helps SEO. Social media fundamentally influences how search engines determine how websites are ranked. Search engines consider how active your accounts are, how many likes and shares your content receives, etc.

If you regularly post about topics related to your industry, you’re more likely to gain followers and grow your visibility among those interested in those topics.

Select the right social media platforms for the reach according to your business. Social shares also influence SEO. If you’re a travel brand, relevant and creative posts about your destination can help expand your reach.

2. Add Backlinks

Backlinks are links that will direct a viewer from another website to yours. A great thing to find bloggers specialized to your niche and offer them an incentive for coverage.

Plus, if the other website’s domain authority is high, your rank will improve. It informs Google that it trusts you. There are many free backlink checkers available. 

3. Improve CTR

CTR (Clickthrough Rate) refers to the number of people who view your links, and click on them. Although CTR may not directly be a ranking factor, SEOs vouch for CTR being a part of your ranking. Through an enticing and interesting title tag, you can hook readers on your website. 

You can improve your CTR with crisp and detailed headlines that concisely give necessary information. 

4. Update Your Content

A simple content audit will tell you if organic traffic to your website decreased over the past year. If so, it is time to create fresh content. Knowing how to write for SEO is a key detail. Update older posts by adding newer keywords.

Refresh outdated sections of your website. Google Analytics allows you to look into pages with reduced traffic. Apart from that, there are several tried-and-tested strategies that solely utilize content marketing for lead generation. 

5. Boost Website Pages with Internal Links

Internal links have an incredible impact on a page’s performance in search engines. These are the pages of a website that link to other pages on the same site.

Simply put, the higher the number of links on a page, the greater is the page rank. Look for pages that rank higher because of their keywords. Since these pages are already doing well, internal links will impact them greatly. 

6. Featured Answers

Featured snippets are short answers Google shows when asked a direct query by a visitor. If you already have a ranking post on the first page of a query search, optimize the page further to win the snippet. 

Keep in mind the most-googled questions can vary based on seasonality. There are many ways to boost seasonal SEO traffic and target those timely searches.

7. Time is Money

It’s boring to stay on a page that loads slowly. If your website is too slow, users may leave for another one.

Fix your page and website load speed. A few seconds is the ideal load time in the online universe. Fast pages add to your business and a slower pace will deter your customers. Use Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool to find out your site’s web speed. Reducing image sizes will also help.

Pro tip: Check the pages with the most traction to save time. 

8. Fill in the Gaps

Mastering a topic provides the opportunity to add long-tail keywords. This increases the amount of traction you’ll receive for that topic.

Since visitors may look for the same content in different ways, Google runs a search for identical sets of keywords. Having many keywords on a topic and subtopic improves traffic to your page.

To find sub-topics look at the other pages that rank higher for the keyword. Creatively update your topics with newer subtopics that include the relevant keywords.

9. Fix Broken Backlinks

If you deleted or moved a page with backlinks, you may face the issue of broken backlinks from other sites. Losing all your traffic from a relevant page that refers to you is a nightmare that you don’t want to come true.

Instead, redirect the broken page to your new page location. You can also restore the original page instead of killing it. Another easy way of fixing the problem is redirecting the broken page to an already existing relevant page of your website. 

10. Be a Regular Creator

Published content regularly to learn what resonates best with your audience. Even if some does’t do well, learn from it to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t. Start with easier topics and slowly move into other areas.  

Conclusion

It’s natural to be frustrated about not ranking as highly as you’d like. Generating organic traffic especially in competitive travel industries takes time. Take time to learn 2020 SEO trends and implement tactics like the ones mentioned here. With smarter work and better organic marketing approaches, it is possible to gain traction.