10 Tips To Boost Your Search Engine Positioning Strategy

In the world of the digital landscape, websites are constantly battling it out for search engine positioning to get the ultimate prize: attention. After all, search engines are the starting point for 68% of all internet activities. But if you want any part of this attention, your pages must rank on the top, preferably on the first page of search engine results. But let us tell you that it’s not easy! Here’s why:

• Ahrefs’ research shows that within a year of being published, just 5.7% of pages will appear in the top 10 search results. 
• Semrush conducted a study with 2,155 websites and found that even if they ranked on top, only 5% of them could maintain their ranking on the search engine result page (SERP) for a year. 

Given the cutthroat competition in ranking high on SERPs, if you’re a business owner, blogger, or budding entrepreneur, you must know the concept of search engine positioning and all its intricacies. 

Understanding the ins and outs of search engine positioning can make a world of difference in your online presence and search engine optimization (SEO) game. And we all know that the end goal of SEO is to get the coveted number one spot in a Google search using only natural means. 

Lucky for you, we’re going to cover everything about search engine positioning in this article, along with ten expert tips to boost it. Excited? We sure are! Let’s begin by getting the basics out of the way– what exactly search engine positioning is? 

What is search engine positioning?

Search engine positioning is fine-tuning a web page to achieve a higher organic search engine ranking for a target set of keywords. Contrary to the belief of some marketers who see optimization as a one-time activity, it is a continuous practice that occurs over time and adapts to its present ranking position.

While there are a lot of on-page factors that contribute to a page’s ranking in search engines, nothing is more important than the actual content itself. Therefore, if you manage to optimize your content correctly, you might find yourself on the top of the first SERP for specific keywords.

From all the spiel above, you must be wondering, isn’t search engine positioning another word for SEO? Well, there’s a difference. Search engine positioning is a component of a bigger SEO strategy. The scope of SEO extends beyond that of an individual page and its visibility. It is a lot more all-encompassing word that includes both aiding in search engine positioning and concentrating on optimizations at the domain level. 

So now you know what search engine positioning means, shall we move on to how it works?

How does search engine positioning work?

To understand how search engine positioning works, you need to first understand how search engine algorithms work.

Since Google is the most popular search engine, with a 91.9% market share, it is likely that you are most acquainted with their algorithm. However, search engine algorithms of different search engines are different. They all evaluate a website’s structure, content, and connections differently. However, the core principles of their operations are the same, which are:

• The engines begin with a web crawl to discover what data is available.
• They find web pages and index them, along with any other sites they are connected to. 
• When there’s a search query from a user, the engine examines the index and retrieves relevant results.
• The user gets a display of results on SERPs in order of what the algorithm determines to be relevant to the search query.

At this point, you should be wondering– How do the algorithms determine relevant web pages for a search? We’re here to tell you that there are set factors based on which the search engine calculates a score for every page in the index. This score decides which sites to prioritize on top. These factors are:

• User’s geographical region,
• Keywords, their synonyms, and related phrases on your page,
• How often do you use the keyword on your page,
• Keywords in URLs, meta titles and descriptions,
• Relevance of your content and its trustworthiness,
• Readability of your content,
• Other websites linking to your page (Backlinks),
• Loading speed and responsiveness,
• Search history of the user.

Since you know the factors, you’ve probably also guessed how search engine positioning works. [Drum rolls please]– it’s simply by optimizing the content of your webpage in accordance with these attributes. We’ll see HOW as we give you the ten most amazing tips to boost your SERP rankings, but first, let’s understand why you should put all this effort into search engine positioning.

Benefits of search engine positioning

We’re sure you know the benefits of ranking on top of SERPs and investing in SEO and search engine positioning is a crucial component of any SEO strategy. In case you don’t need any convincing, you can skip to the main section where we give you our ten expert tips to strategize search engine positioning. But if you’d like to understand the major benefits of search engine positioning, here are the top four:

Get organic traffic

When you want your website to get search engine visibility and drive traffic, organic SEO strategies are a must. BrightEdge research states organic search makes up about 53.3% of all website traffic, and Backlinko states that the first three results of SERP bag most of the organic clicks. So if you want any part of that organic traffic, search engine positioning becomes a weapon of organic SEO. 

Outrank your competitors

Now going off of our first point, when you start bagging more traffic by showing up on the first SERP, you’re likely to outdo your competitors in your niche in the battle for visibility on search engines. Backlinko research shows only 0.63% of users ever visit a webpage on the second SERP of Google. So a solid strategy for search engine positioning will help you rank before your competitors and help you gain more authority over them, which brings us to our next point. 

Become a leader in the industry

When your website is positioned such that it shows on the top page of search engine results over other brands, you not only get massive brand recognition. Searchers will start seeing you as an authority figure in the industry. This is very important because more than 80% of 1,000 respondents in a 2021 study said that trust was very important to them when making a purchase. When you have a consistent presence at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), you get more exposure which results in beating the competition and becoming a market leader. This will result in more click-through rates (CTR) and more recall for your brand, and that brings us to our last and most important benefit of search engine positioning.

Boost your bottomline

A well-planned approach to search engine positioning will start paying off as all the above benefits condense to more revenue. How?

• Increased traffic translates to more sales. 
• Success in business is directly proportional to the quality of your reputation and trustworthiness in the market. 
• Consumers are more likely to prefer buying from you over your competition when you are an industry leader.

Knowing these benefits should entice all businesses to rank on top of search engines, and by now, you’re probably eager to adopt a search engine positioning strategy to boost your search engine visibility. And as we promised, we’ve got expert tips to help you plan. So here’s our list of 10 expert tips that will shape your search engine positioning strategy.

10 tips to help with search engine positioning

1. Find your keywords and dominate them

We already know that search engines retrieve web pages from indexes based on search queries and their related keywords. Therefore, researching your keywords and using them in your content properly becomes one of the most important parts of the search engine positioning strategy. Here’s a summary of how keywords work:

Pick relevant keywords: 

When you start the keyword research, pick a primary keyword according to your topic and check what other relevant search queries appear. Check its competitiveness by finding out who shows up when you search for those keywords on a search engine. 

REMEMBER – It’s easier to beat Pinterest or other social media posts in contrast to major companies or brands.

Choose the right length: 

Let us also mention how important it is to pick the right length of keywords. Sometimes it’s easier to rank for specific phrases that enjoy high search volume than a single-word keyword with high competition. For example, you might get a better shot with “search engine optimation techniques” than simply “SEO.” 

Bonus Tip #1: Low-competition, long-tail keywords can be especially helpful for new websites. Whereas an older, high-authority website will likely compete better for harder keywords.

Be niche specific 

Since 2023, search engines have prioritized niche content. If you’re an expert in a specific niche, you’re more likely to rank for keywords on topics pertaining to your expertise. For example, an automobile website is more likely to rank for “automotive technician” over “SEO Tips.” So maybe it’s not a bad idea to do keyword research in your niche particularly.

You can use Google Trends to check all of the above criteria. Additionally, there are some amazing tools out there (both free and paid) that can help you with keyword research, such as Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Keyword Planner.

Bonus Tip: Don’t engage in keyword cannibalization in which you attempt to boost your site’s ranking for a particular keyword by using it on every page. Dozens of web pages will compete for the exact same first-page placement, making it difficult for any of them to succeed.

2. Optimized meta tags and description

It’s already established that Google and other search engines need meta titles and descriptions for a webpage when they show up on SERPs. They show up in the displayed results as shown in the image below:

Many businesses either:

• Don’t optimize them at all and rely on auto-generation by Google,
• Or do it wrong.

In fact, 40.61% of all meta descriptions are longer than the requirements. When you don’t optimize your meta titles and descriptions, you lose a good opportunity to target keywords and rank for them. So, there are two things to keep in mind:

• Use primary keywords –  to appear when someone makes a relevant query. 
• Make it enticing – so users choose you over other options. 

If you fail to do this, the ultimate result is a lower possibility of ranking well and a potentially devastating drop in click-through rate (CTR).

3. Maintaining a schedule

One of the common pieces of advice you’ll receive when you’re working towards search engine rankings is to add content regularly. Let us bust a myth– There is absolutely no correlation between search engine positioning and how often or regularly you generate content.

So are those people wrong? Not entirely… 

Maintaining a schedule helps you generate consistent content. That increases the number of pages in the search engine index. When you do that, you will have more content that stands a chance to show on the top of SERPs. 

An expert at Google, John Mueller, told Search Engine Journal that Google can choose not to crawl your site even when you have a database large enough to generate a million web pages instantly. Because when your website shows a lot of pages all of a sudden, Google gets suspicious. In addition to many other content optimization tricks for SEO, quality content still remains one of the top priorities. 

Therefore, when you plan out your material for the next few days, weeks, or even months, you can:

• Avoid the stress of generating a lot of content in one go,
• Use the time to think of fresh ideas and plan your target keywords, 
• Maintain the highest quality of search-engine optimized content.

And take it from us, when it comes to planning ahead for articles, a content calendar is invaluable. We have one too!

There are several ways to maintain it using tools like Google Sheets or Google Docs. If you’ve got a WordPress website, you can use plugins like CoSchedule and Editorial Calendar.

4. Optimize speed

Here’s a hard fact– All search engines will prioritize your website’s speed during search page rankings. Websites that appear on the first page of Google search results typically load in just 1.65 seconds! 

The simple reason behind this priority is that no user will wait too long while waiting for pages to load. They’ll quickly go back and click on another result to find what they’re looking for. Don’t believe us? Take a look at these stats: 

• Slow page loads discourage 82% of customers from making a purchase on a website.
• More than a quarter of users will give up on a web page if it takes longer than four seconds to load.
• If a website takes more than three seconds to load, the likelihood that a visitor would leave jumps from 9% to 32%.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is one of several available resources for determining how quickly a website loads. There are several ways to optimize speed, and it’s a whole different topic. But we promise to share them with you soon in the coming days.

While we’re talking about website speed, let’s also talk about how you can ensure optimum performance with an eye on Core Web Vitals.

5. Keep a tab on core web vitals

Just like speed, performance affects if people visit and stay on your website; therefore, it also affects how high it ranks on SERPs. If you want your website’s performance to be top-notch, the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console can help. It provides information in addition to your website’s speed that affects your web page performance. 

Web vitals analyze data from real users of Google Chrome to give you insights that can help you boost your page’s user experience, engagement, and ace business metrics. In fact, when a site’s performance satisfies the standards set by Core Web Vitals, visitors are 24% less likely to quit the page while it’s loading. There are three different scales based on which Core Web Vitals rates your website’s performance, as shown in the image below.

• LCP is the metric to measure the time to render the largest content element on your webpage when the URL is requested by the user.
• FID is the metric to measure the time taken to respond to the user’s first point of interaction on your webpage.
• CLS is the metric to calculate the total score of the sum of all individual layout shifts for each unanticipated layout shift that takes place during the course of the page’s lifecycle.

Note: In 2024, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) will replace First Input Deliver (FID). It is a pending metric to measure how quickly a website responds to clicks, taps, and keyboard inputs during the course of a user’s visit to a page in order to determine how responsive a page is overall to user interactions.

Are you wondering how Core Web Vitals can help your website? Check out these numbers before we jump on to our next tip:

• The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) latency reduction has been shown to boost website conversion rates by 1.3%. 
• Domain authority may be greatly improved, as shown with redBus, as they brought down their Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) to 0 from 1.65. 
• The Indo-German Magento development firm Netzwelt observed an increase of 18% in advertising income and 27% in page views after implementing changes to Core Web Vitals.

Do these case studies show something you wish for, then follow our advice and optimize your website performance as per core web vitals. 

6. Update old content 

Is there a chance that your website has old content that may not be getting enough traffic anymore? Use it to your advantage as you can change whatever you want and re-optimize to attract more traffic. Here are some of our tried and tested ways to optimize previously posted content:

• Find relevant keywords and edit the content to use them.
• Add new content that is useful for the present time. 
• Change the structure and organize it to enhance readability. 
• Change links that are not functioning or update them with more recent ones. 
• If needed, update meta tags to include relevant keywords and make them more enticing. 

By keeping your content fresh at all times, you can ensure that even the old content stands a chance to rank high and get search engine visibility.

7. Internal linking

We know you have old content, but does your website have any blog posts that did extremely well in the past? It’s likely that blog readers will continue to be interested in its content. When you create new material, you can even promote older, related pieces by linking them to the new one.

Mueller also approved that interlinking can help you with search engine positioning. It helps search engine crawlers decide what content is important and needs more attention.

Therefore, you can also use internal links to lead the crawlers to some of the most important pages, such as your product page. Just make sure the anchor text of your links contains relevant keywords.

8. Aim for organic ctrs

Google utilizes organic Click-Through Rate (CTR) to figure out which search results are worth showing users. While many businesses invest a lot of money in paid online advertising in the hopes of getting more clicks, you can do without spending a penny, simply by investing your time and efforts . You can boost your organic CTR by following their lead and simply replicating their efforts:

• Find Google Ads that are relevant to the subject of your website.
• Read and analyze their snippet and see what type of content they use.
• Replicate it for your own content without spending any money on it! 

Search Console displays the typical clickthrough rate you’ve registered for your website on Google. The typical placement of a page or website is probably between 2% and 4%. Google will know that your site is quite popular if it’s between 5% to 7%, and we’re sure that your search engine rankings could improve from it. Our next tip is an addition to this one and will ensure you don’t miss out on organic CTR.

9. Add featured image

Images are more fun than text, and it’s nice when you’re greeted by one when you open a webpage. The featured image for a page is prominently shown on the SERPs to attract users to your webpage. But the users’ trust in your content might take a hit if they come across a picture that seems out of place or unrelated to the topic. This affects your chances of getting better search engine rankings and reduces the organic CTR. So we have two pieces of advice for you here: 

• Intentionally assign a featured image to each page while making sure it relates to the content in some way.
• Don’t allow your website builder or publishing software to select it for you since they can choose an image that has nothing to do with your content.

10.  Provide google with xml sitemaps

Even while search engines like Google and Bing may periodically monitor your site and crawl for updates, wouldn’t it be nicer if you could let them know yourself? We’re sure that they’re going to appreciate it, and we’re also sure that it’ll boost traffic on your website.

When you provide search engines, like Google, with your XML sitemap, it gives them directions to all the pages on your website. If new pages are being uploaded on a regular basis, such as once per day or once per week, this is something you should definitely prioritize.

When should you submit XML sitemaps? We’ve noticed it’s best to submit periodically, depending on how you maintain your content calendar. In most cases, one or two times a month will be enough.

BONUS TIP:aim for rich snippets with schema markup

In 2011,  Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex began collaborating with Schema.org, which founded Schema Markup. The addition of schema markup, a kind of microdata, to a website results in a more detailed description, or rich snippet, which is shown in search engine results. 

There is no proof that microdata affects organic search rankings. So why are we including it as a bonus tip? Well, the thing is that rich snippets do increase the visibility, consequently CTRs, of your websites in search engine results pages (SERPs). And that’s what the intent behind search engine positioning boils down to, right? 

You can use Google’s very own Structured Data Markup Helper to generate schema markups for your website. Additionally, you can test if your schema markup is valid via Schema Markup Validator. 

Even if you employ schema markup, search engines may not use it to provide rich results. However, you can use Google’s Rich Results Test to find out what rich results your web pages are eligible for to show up on Google.

There you have it! Ten tips + a BONUS straight from the experts to include in your search engine positioning strategy. Stay with us for a little more time as we’re going to let you know about our favorite tools to measure site rankings and help you beat search engine algorithms to rank at the top.

Tools to use for search engine positioning

There are numerous tools out there that can help you see where your web pages stand in relation to others in the results pages, giving you insights on the following: 

• Where do you rank on different search engines?
• What keywords are you competing for?
• How ranks have changed over time?
• Where do you rank globally?
• What are the competitors’ ranks?
• And much more.

Here’s a list of three tools we recommend as experts to help you keep an eye on your page’s position in the SERP and boost your ranks.

Google search console

Ahref’s

Semrush

Conclusion

By now, you know everything there is about search engine positioning. By including a solid strategy to boost your webpage’s position on SERPs, there’s a lot to gain, including more traffic, more authority, and more revenue. Using the ten proven tips we’ve given in this article will surely help you ace the SEO game. We know the competition is tough, so if you need help with search engine positioning, rely on us. Experts at Anglara come with great experience to help businesses improve their search engine visibility. Simply fill out the form below, and we’ll get back to you to discuss how your website can drive more and more organic traffic by the day.