If you’ve been huffing in your attempts to implement effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, don’t you think it’s high time you turned to experts for insights? By “experts,” we don’t mean every result page that pops up when you launch the query “top search engine optimization strategies” on Google. There are certain elements that top digital marketers and search engine optimization agency use to boost their websites’ ranking. Refer to GotchSEO’s article on “How to Learn SEO in 2020“ to explore the topic in many details.

By having thorough research, we’ve been able to narrow down these winning strategies, so dig in. Here are SEO secrets that experts use to get ahead of the competition:

Know Your Audience

Who inputs keywords into search engines in search of information? You guessed it, your target audience. So, if you don’t thoroughly understand who they are and what they want, how do you create content that’ll get indexed by search engines when these people launch queries? 

There are numerous ways to research information on the needs of your target audience. You can start by snooping around on social media platforms, like Twitter and Quora, to get an idea of what your users want to learn about, the questions they’re asking, and the things that catch their fancy. 

Next, analyze your best performing content or pages and create similar content. This way, you’ll always have the kind of content your audience wants.

Use Your Competitors’ Keywords     

As you get to know your audience and begin to create content they want, your next aim should be to optimize such pieces of content with the right keywords. You can look to your competitors whose content rank high on result pages to get an idea of the high performing keywords they’re applying. 

Your competitors are the right place to hunt for appropriate keywords because chances are they’re crafting content similar to yours. It means the keywords they’re using to optimize such pieces of content are what you need to beef up your content, too. Since SEO keywords aren’t trading secrets, you shouldn’t be reluctant to pick up some of them and sprinkle them over your works.

Another way to use your competitors’ keywords to your advantage is by researching which topics (long-tail keywords) make them rank higher on search results pages. Then, use these topics to create better content for your website. Fortunately, there are many online tools you can use to conduct this research, such as Ubersuggest. 

Ensure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly

The needs for mobile-friendly or responsive sites have never been higher, which Google agrees, too. It’s why the company tweaked its search algorithm to favor websites with responsive designs. SEO experts used this development to create an advantage for themselves and you should, too.

Implement a responsive web design. This design will ensure that your web pages will adjust to fit the screen size of whatever device your visitors use to view the pages. That way, users can easily read the text on your website and interact with several other elements.

Create Internal Links

Creating internal links or deep-linking is the practice of using few words contained in one post to link to another related piece of content on your website. Say, for example, you have crafted a blog post on shoe maintenance, and amongst the tips you gave, you listed polishing shoes. If you have an article on types of shoe polish, you can link to that post from the first one by using the words “polishing shoes” as your anchor text (the text you place the link in). This strategy is simple but highly beneficial.

One of the positive effects of deep-linking is it organizes the content on your website and makes it easier for search engine crawlers to index them.

Link To High Authority Sites

You can also link to external high authority websites. These are websites with a high domain authority score, meaning they usually rank highly on search engine results pages due to several factors, like the number and quality of links leading to those sites. 

For instance, Moz developed a domain authority as a metric for determining a website’s visibility strength, and you can find out some of the high scoring websites that create the content you can link to. Linking to these sites, as well as having them a link to your site, will improve your domain’s integrity in the eyes of search engine crawlers. 

Spammy SEO link building strategies should be avoided at all costs. The key should be to pitch authoritative content to industry leading sites and try to get your content published on them. This will help you get dedicated traffic; help improve SEO metrics and build your credibility as a brand that is getting published on high authority sites. If you wish to know more about linking to industry authority sites, visit site.

Conclusion: Stun Your Competitors

Learning from the best can certainly make you one of the very best, too. So, if you think you’re ready to beat your competitors at their own game and push several of your web pages to the top of search engine results pages, implement the strategies discussed in this post. They’re what top digital marketers use in directing traffic to their websites, and they can produce the same effects for you, too.