Whether you are an online business or a traditional retailer, an aggregator of something or an agency of artisans, if you don’t tap or don’t know how to tap the enormous potential of online communities, you are sure to be crushed by the competition very soon.

This is no exaggeration but a true reflection of the growing dominance of online communities in deciding the fate of a business. More so in 2022, because people have got used to being online for long hours and Google search has reached an all-time high, thanks to the 2-year long lockdown.

If this makes you wonder what should be the best way to tap the right prospects in the ocean of online communities, the answer is search engine optimization or simply SEO. 2022 will see further enhancements in On-page and Off-page SEO techniques to help businesses generate more leads, pinpoint targets and stay ahead of the competition. Want to get to the top of your SEO and rank high on Google search consistently in 2022, focus on these top five SEO strategies:

#1 Website optimization

Your website is responsible for the result of your SEO strategies. The technical sides of website optimization includes improvement of page load speeds and structural improvements.

Optimizing page load speed is extremely important because it determines the time taken for the web pages to open up on desktops as well as on mobiles. If loading is not fast enough visitors’ interest level will decline and they will move away to a competitor’s site. According to a study visitors stay-rate drops by an average of 4.42% for every extra second of page load time. Following are the suggestions for improving your page load time:

• Remove any code or scripts that aren’t needed.
• Use clean, web-optimized images to replace cumbersome and crowded styles.
• Make your webpage scannable by using content formats.

Website structure analysis is another vital step in optimizing your website, which entails improving the nature of your site in order to improve your rating. The number of site links, improved crawling, logical hierarchy, menu, and sitemap, to name a few, all contribute to a good website structure. It’s also important to ensure that the structure of your website is simple to navigate.

#2 Use of seo keywords and phrases

SEO keywords are the keywords and phrases used in your website content that play a vital role in getting your pages searched by the search engines. Therefore it is important to use seo keywords because they make your content easily searchable.

For instance, a buyer looking for a restaurant could search “best restaurant” or “best budget restaurant” or “where is the best restaurant on a budget?” or “best budget restaurants in Mumbai.” So if you include the above seo keywords in your blog your chances of viewership will definitely increase.

Therefore, do your keyword research to have your seo keywords list ready before writing your seo texts. Also, make sure that you understand your target audience, their needs, and how they should communicate their needs. Social media forums like Quora, Reddit, and the likes are ideal places where you can collect free seo keywords because these are the platforms where people exchange views on various topics through writing. If your product or service category happens to be among the topics, you may find a handful of highly probable keywords and phrases.

#3 Create content that can hook your potential customers

The most important factor in search engine rankings is content. Many visitors come to your website because the title grabs their interest, but the quality of your content is what keeps them coming back. The key components of good quality content are proper and relevant information, presented in a good format (easy to read), and written in proper perspectives and simple language.

However, you should also be looking at using non-textual content as well. Research shows that judicious use of non-textual content on the website levels up your SEO game and elevates ranking. Here are some data and predictions made some years ago that can help understand the trend in 2022:

• Voice and image searches will secure at least 50% of the total volume by 2020. (Vox | recode)
• Tenor (now a sub-brand of Google) entertains a staggering 12 billion GIF searches per month. (TechCrunch)
• Having a video on your website’s landing page will up your chances of showing on Google’s first page by 53%. (HubSpot)
• 72% of the people owning voice-activated speakers use them in their daily routines. (Google)
• Users will spend more time looking at images than the text if they find it relevant. (Nielsen Norman Group)
• The average listener consumes 7 podcasts every week. (LinkedIn SlideShare)

Therefore, a sensible adaptation of your website may be the need of the hour for you. Try to incorporate some or all from the following list of non-textual content into your website to ramp up your SEO optimisation:

• Images.
• GIFs.
• Videos.
• Audios.
• Infographics.
• Podcasts.

Finally, some guidelines for an effective SEO content:strategy

#4 Build more links and backlinks

Links are connections between two or more web sites. A backlink is a link that connects another website to yours. But the other websites have to be authentic and of repute. The more such quality backlinks your website has the higher will be its Google ranking. Here are some simple steps to enrich your sites with quality backlinks:

• Use a backlink checker to find out one or more top ranking sites on Google that are appropriate and relevant as backlink sources for your website.
• Write high quality and information rich content and approach the editorial teams of those top ranking sites for creating backlinks to your page.
• You should also generate internal links, which direct the viewers to other pages in your site that contain the details of relevant terms or phrases.

There is also a word of caution – you should trace out and remove all the dead links from your site. Dead links are the inactive, invalid links that return error messages when the viewers click on them. This lowers the user experience quotient and reputation of your site.

#5 Try more content syndication

Content syndication is a technique that improves the efficacy of content marketing. Content marketing is a proven seo strategy for driving organic traffic to your website, but its effectiveness is highly dependent on where you place your content. To put it another way, having outstanding content isn’t enough; you also need to put it on a strong platform for maximum exposure.

#6 Invest in Social Media Marketing

Although the numbers of social media shares, likes and followings can be manipulated, and Google also doesn’t consider them as valid pointers for search engine ranking, still the concept of Social media SEO is gaining popularity because of its contributions to SEO results.

Yes, Social Media and SEO might be two different concepts but observers agree that they help each other, albeit indirectly. The number of visits to your Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram pages, the links shared by you, the mentions of you in the discussions within the communities, etc. boosts your brand popularity and influences your SEO results in terms of the number of organic traffic to your website.

The reason being simple, people remain online for longer periods, switch from one channel to another. And when they find mention of a brand across channels their confidence on the brand elevates. This reflects on the brand’s SEO performance. You will find that many websites with top-ranking positions in Google searches have strong social media presences. If you, as a marketer, invest in a social media marketing strategy, you are, in essence, also enhancing your search engine optimization capabilities.

Source- Fluidscapes
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