How To Rank Higher In Google (Without Content Marketing)

These marketing and SEO techniques can earn your website a top spot in Google. Courtesy of SEOPlanter

Dedicating resources to content marketing isn’t the only way to earn higher rankings in Google.

Rand Fishkin of Moz covers marketing and SEO techniques in a video titled 6 Ways to Earn Higher Rankings without Investing in Content Creation and Marketing .

Listed below are the techniques, with our added details and additional references for support.

1. Optimize Rich Snippets

Rich snippets in search results and social media help improve your click-through rate to your blog or website. They are the content that makes up social media posts and search listings.

Marketers can preview the look of their current rich snippets by entering their URL into Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. The tool will also tell you whether the blog or website contains Google Authorship and Publisher markup.

If your snippet isn’t optimized in its title, image, URL or description, use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper. Enter your website in the URL, and Google will bring up the website and show you where to add data markup to optimize its Google appearance.

Marketers can also control the appearance of social media posts by downloading WordPress plugins or manually formatting snippets through Open Graph Schema.

2. Improve Site Navigation

Improving a website’s crawl bandwidth can significantly increase organic search traffic. Fishkin encourages marketers to perform a site audit to determine which pages are no longer serving any purpose to the website. When you improve the ratio of good-to-bad pages, Google will see higher quality content and raise your ranking.

Additionally, a poorly-structured site will drive away visitors and directly affect SEO. Sandra Hennessy provides some great website quick-fixes in her 12 steps to great navigation.

3. Optimize Page Load Speed

If a website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 40% of consumers will abandon it, a Radware Ltd. study found. Google Analytics provides statistics in the “Site Speed” function like Page Load Time, Lookup and Page Size so marketers can assess site performance. Google also offers Page Speed suggestions for problematic pages.

One factor that often causes page loading problems: the number of tracking tools installed on your site to gather data from visitors. If those trackers load slowly or with errors, they can cause latency in page load time.

4. Leverage Your Social Network

A great way to build links (in addition to creating content) is to leverage your network by attracting links, shares and traffic through social media. Engage with satisfied customers and brand advocates and encourage them to help your company by telling others about their great experience.

Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Pinterest are all drive traffic to your website, while LinkedIn is a great channel to promote brand services, find brand advocates, and refer consumers to your website.

5. Promote Effective Pages that Are Hidden

Identify the pages on your website that help customers but aren’t receiving much search traffic. On Google Analytics, these are the pages with high engagement, low bounce rate, a fair number of visits, and a high browse rate — meaning people click and visit other pages after them.

Often, these hidden-gem pages lack keyword targeting. Find the keywords these pages should rank for, and then update the page, titles, content and, if necessary, URL. It’s also helpful to “re-launch” the page by sharing it through social media.

6. Build Links through Media Relationships

Google’s restrictions on link building over the past several months have made it more difficult for brands to build white-hat links. To avoid Google penalties, press releases must be free of keyword anchor links, and marketers should only publish guest blogs for branding and exposure, not for SEO.

What marketers can do, however, is build links the old-fashioned way: create a prioritized list for outreach and contact journalists and bloggers that may be interested in your products and/or content. Then, ask them what you can do to be featured in their next story. Fishkin recommends prioritizing the list by how easy each contact will be: if a writer already follows your brand on Twitter or has written about your competitors, for example, that contact should top the list.

Summary

Marketers place a huge emphasis on content marketing in their strategies and budgets. However, special attention should also be given to techniques that affect how that content is displayed — rich snippets, site navigation, page load speed, etc. — or all the hard work put into creating content can go to waste. These marketing and SEO techniques can earn your website a top spot in Google and significantly enhance your brand’s online and social presence.

This article originally appeared in the CyberAlert Blog and can be viewed here.

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