Basic SEO Techniques For Maintaining Your SEO Ranking

Focus on the basic SEO techniques

With so many things in life, we concentrate on becoming the best. We want that No. 1 spot, and that’s true in both SEO rankings and sports. After building a Super Bowl-winning NFL roster, coaches and general managers need to ask themselves how they maintain that level of talent to continue winning. As SEO marketers, we need to do the same thing with our top-ranking search engine results. This blog post highlights a few basic SEO techniques to make sure your winning SEO lineup doesn’t change.

Internal linking and topic clusters

The easiest way to make sure your content continues to rank is to link back to top pages (and link from top pages to relevant pages) within your own site. Utilize anchor text to your advantage, highlighting the focus keyword when you do link to a certain page.

You can even take it a step further and build topic clusters around your best-ranking terms. This not only allows you to defend your current rankings, but will increase the SERP for the lower-ranked pages that are part of your cluster.

Continued backlinking

It’s not enough to link to your own content, you need external sites linking to you. Building backlinks is an absolute must in your SEO strategy. Reach out to other sites that are ideal partners, and see if they’ll share your content. Be specific about your ask. Have a page in mind, and be willing to reciprocate.

Also, keep an eye out for pages that link back to you on their own. If they valued your content enough to link to it in the first place, they might be willing to include anchor text you ask for. Don’t be shy—the worst thing they can say is “no.”

It’s also integral that you monitor any low-authority or spam domains that backlink to you. Get them to stop sharing your content, as backlinking from these types of sources may hurt your top content over time.

Regular social media sharing

Don’t share your pages once and be done with it. Continue sharing those top pages, in addition to those pages that need a little TLC. You don’t have to rely on holidays as occasions for re-sharing certain content. Keep an eye on trending hashtags, respond to other companies’ similar content on Twitter, and just share for the sake of sharing.

There’s nothing wrong with saying, “We love this topic. It’s still relevant, and we think you’ll love it, too.” Your social users likely have a short-term memory when it comes to things you’ve shared, especially with weeks or months in between. Rely on that and keep on sharing.

More fresh content

Google and Bing like to see new content. So, make them happy and don’t halt your new content efforts to focus on what exists. Your new content efforts help boost your legacy content. As a site that continues to add relevant content, you’re telling Google that you care about giving users good information. It increases your page authority, and will boost lower-ranked pages and keep your No. 1 pages in the No. 1 spot.

Ask users to subscribe to your blog

With select pages receiving your primary site traffic, this is a great opportunity to ask users to subscribe. Create a CTA at the bottom or a pop-up asking for an email in exchange for awesome weekly content straight to their inbox! Building a base of regular readers increases your site traffic, and tells Google that people care about the content your site is creating.

You can even test your sign-up rates against your top-ranked content to test how you ask readers to subscribe. Optimize your ask, and continue to get interested readers over time.

Interested in more basic SEO techniques advice from the DemandZEN team? Check out these SEO best practices for 2018.