17 ways to Improve SEO Rankings in 2021

Today you are going to learn exactly how to improve your SEO rankings in 2021. So if you want to find easy ways to quickly improve your SEO rankings, you will love this guide with 17 easy ways to do it.

1. Increase the Amount of Time Visitors Stay

How long users stay on your page seems to have an impact on how Google rates it, after all: what do you think it thinks if every time a user enters your page they exit a few seconds later? Nothing good, I can assure you.

So here’s a tip to increase the dwell time: use videos in your posts.

By doing so, you will almost immediately increase the dwell time of your readers since they will stop to watch the entire video or at least a part of it.

So a good tactic is to include videos in almost every post, be it as a whole step, a tip, or on a directly related topic.

2. Use sitelinks

You may have already seen what site links are but don’t know what they are, so here’s an example of Facebook site links.

Your website may or may not already have sitelinks, but I’ll tell you that you can increase your chances of getting sitelinks by creating a table of contents like the one in this post:

3. Improve loading speed

What factor in common do many pages that are at the top of the first page have? I bet you know the answer thanks to the subtitle but I will say it again: it is the great speed of loading the pages.

The speed of pages to load is an SEO ranking factor that Google is increasingly taking into account and it is not something that is going to disappear in the future, since it has a direct impact on the SEO ranking of the pages.

So it’s clear that if you want to rank higher on Google, your site needs to load quickly.

You can get a quick reference to your site’s loading speed with Google’s PageSpeed ​​Insights, and if you want to dig even deeper into the factors that slow down your site, you can also run a page on your site through WebPageTest.org.

These two tools will tell you how you can improve SEO rankings by improving page speed performance. Apart from that, here are some general tips that can help you:

• Compress the images.
• Moving to a better host (this makes a big difference).
• Reduce the file size of the web page.
• Remove unnecessary third-party scripts.

4. Create linkable assets

Here’s the truth: People don’t link to “great content,” they link to sources.

Let me explain, you may have great content full of unique and practical advice, as well as quality images but if it is really specific content no one is going to link to it.

So if you want people to backlinks to your page, you have to create content that is broad and deep.

5. Get more positions on the SERP

Found an awesome keyword that converts well? You can get extra traffic from that term with a YouTube video or by using other platforms.

The more posts in the SERP you have, the better.

6. Topic + Statistics

This is the little secret sites use to get lots of backlinks on autopilot.

I’ll show you the simplified process:

First, you have to identify a topic that bloggers and journalists tend to write about and create content that shows statistics on a topic or simply curate statistics from different sources.

Then you need to do your normal SEO process and make sure you type the stat word / s a ​​handful of times.

Why does it work so well? Think about it: Who searches for the keywords “Topic + Statistics”? Journalists! Specifically, journalists looking for statistics to include in their articles and when you rank for that term are going to link to you like there is no tomorrow.

7. Target keywords with high commercial intent

Although it is widely known that every publication requires good  keyword research first, this alone is not enough, it has to be in addition to a lot of weight in the commercial intention, in other words, the “how much do advertisers spend on Google Ads in those clicks “

And the higher the commercial intent and the CPC, the higher your earnings will be despite the search volume that a certain keyword may have.

8. Optimize content for user intent

I mentioned above that commercial intent is everything, but this is actually another important factor: if your site is not what search engines want, Google will not rank it, no matter how many backlinks you have.

But when your page makes Google users happy, you can increase your SEO rankings.

So make sure you write the content that your readers want to read.

9. Test content associations

When you publish something on your site, you send as many people as you can to your publication, but you are only one person (or company). So your reach is pretty limited, however, when you partner with someone else they both send people to your new content, which doubles the number of social media views, links, and shares you get.

Give it a try and you will discover how powerful this SEO rankings tactic can be.

10. Reuse your content

Let’s imagine a situation: you have been in your industry for a while and you run out of ideas for your new blog post, newsletter, or video script, but you still go ahead and create something totally new from scratch.

Well, this may be a mistake.

If you are present on several platforms, such as YouTube, in addition to having your website and you already have valuable content on them, use them!

I assure you that it will be faster than making a post or video from the beginning. But be careful, by this, we do not mean that you copy and paste everything almost to the letter, but that you base yourself on something already existing to create something equally great.

You would kill two birds with one stone by taking advantage of and also growing your audience on YouTube, making content for both formats and each type of client.

11. Use broken link building

To use broken link building to your advantage you should do the following:

• Look inside your content for a good quality publication and your users love it.
• Find a page that deals with the same thing and enter the URL of its home page in Ahrefs.
• Click on “Outbound Links” → “Broken Links”. With that you will have all the external broken links of the site.
• Reach out to the person who runs the site once you’ve gotten a post that looks like your star content. Let him know about his broken link and offer him your content as a replacement.

If they see that your content adds value then it is very likely that they will link it.

12. Find new backlink opportunities

Let’s say you find a site that has just linked to your competitor. You have no idea if that site linked to them because they have a previous relationship, they just sent an email of impressive reach… or for a million other reasons.

But when you look at who links to multiple competitors, that takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation. That’s where the Link Intersection comes in.

To use it, start Ahrefs and enter three domains into their Link Intersection tool, make sure you put your site in the “Do not link to” field, and voila!

You will see everyone who links to these 3 sites but not you, and if your site publishes better content than your competitors, there is a good chance that these people will also link to you.

13. Get Featured Snippets

Featured Snippets are those pieces of information that appear in search results so that you do not have the need to navigate between pages and pages. Try to qualify for as many Featured Snippets as you can.

Let’s see how you can get them:

You need to have a keyword that you are already qualified on because the vast majority of Featured Snippets come from the first page. Then be sure to look at the Featured Snippet and identify what type it is, whether it’s definition, list, or table.

Lastly, add that type of Snippet to your page that is designed to fit inside the Featured Snippet box. For example, you want to enter the Featured Snippet for the keyword “Featured Snippet.”

14. Target new keywords

Who doesn’t want to target keywords that are popular and low-competition? For me, it would be like a dream come true.

But you have to make dreams come true yourself so I will show you a good strategy to achieve it:

Most keywords are competitive for the simple reason that there are many sites trying to rank for them, but when you target new terms, you are competing with fewer people. This means that you can often reach the top of search results.

In other words, the secret is to target new keywords that are not in high demand.

15. Use the visual concept

If you are old school you probably know that many of the backlinks were achieved by sending hundreds and hundreds of outreach emails.

Well, that era is dead.

But many still base their strategies on this technique so here is another much simpler option: 

You must create an amazing visual that helps people understand a difficult concept or idea. This can be a graph, chart, or table. Include that visual in your content and if the right person sees your image, they will use it on their site.

That’s all you have to do with every post you make.

Pro tip: Focus on creating images for the new themes. That way, you’ll be one of the few sites with a high-quality visual on that topic.

16. Get backlinks from content curators

Continuing with the previous point, if you are going to send a disclosure email you can at least one good email instead of something like this:

The biggest problem with this email is that it doesn’t align with the existing content on my website where a link to its content makes sense.

That’s where content curators come in. These, well, curate and select the best of your industry.

17. Take advantage of industry glossaries

One of the broadest sources for searching for new keywords is industry glossaries. For example, this nutrition glossary covers more than 100 different terms: You can directly copy these keywords into a spreadsheet or use them as initial keywords and put them into a keyword research tool. Either way, glossaries are an awesome way to find new keyword ideas.

Extra: Rank for brand terms

Brands get far more searches than topics or categories – they have low competition, high volume, and generally high CPC. The big downside to targeting brands is that you will never rank first.

But it can still be worth it because people are also interested in knowing what other people think about brands they like or don’t yet know about.