There is no single ‘SEO hack’ that will suddenly dish out results and turn your life around because in order to truly see SEO results you have to play your cards right, wait and watch the magic happen.

That being said, it doesn’t mean you can’t focus your efforts on the little things that all add up in terms of impact.

We all know SEO is a broad subject and this list could be endless. So for the sake of this post we've picked out 5 hacks that are often overlooked when it comes to SEO and shouldn’t be underestimated when it comes to their long term impact on your site’s success.

We’ve also highlighted some of the best tools we use to help hack our SEO. Learn how to make the most out of our top picks below.

1. Be Genuine in Your Copy

When it comes to writing content for your site - you should always be authentic with your words. Whether you are writing a blog post, copy for a key landing page; channel your inner writer and focus on what would be useful and pleasing for the user and consider technicalities and optimising afterwards.

Keeping that in mind; your content should have a clear intent behind it - preferably from your SEO strategy. So when you’re writing; ask yourself ‘Does this content provide an answer to this query/question?’ ‘ or ‘have I covered all aspects of this topic?”. Put yourself in the users’ shoes and consider if your content is useful, fun to read and authentic. By doing this first - you’ll be less likely to spend copious amounts of time optimising around specific keywords because your content will naturally flow using relevant keywords and terms already.

Want to sharpen your knowledge on SEO content? Read up on our top tips for SEO Content in 2020

2. Increase Organic Click-through Rate (CTR)

Improving CTR should never be overlooked. If you’ve already spent time improving visibility and rank are ranking on the first page, but just aren’t getting enough clicks; then you need to do more to maximize CTR. After all, you don’t want your ranking efforts to be wasted and it’s no use leaving a job half done!

So here’s what you can do to make sure more people are clicking on your website and not your competitors.

  • Make Your Headline Pop - Your Headline needs to catch the users eye and the best way to ensure this is to test it. There are many free tools you can use to do this such as Co Schedule’s Headline Analyzer. Another way to test could be through pay per click ads and seeing which search ad performs best.

Interested in knowing how to strengthen your paid activity? Our PPC team have got it covered here.

  • Nail Your Meta Descriptions - A meta description is your chance to provide clear, concise information to a user about what to expect by clicking on your link. Use your character limit wisely and make sure it’s convincing.
  • Use Descriptive URLs - Whatever your topic, you can include it when properly formatted in your URL, it will give the user an idea about what to expect and hopefully get them to visit your site.

3. Broken Link Building

Let’s get real here - no one wants 404s, they are no good for the user or for search engines and they are no good for you as they negatively affect SEO rankings. How do you fix all the broken links associated with your site? Find 404’s, reach out and replace and it doesn’t have to be a lengthy process.

Broken link building is a great tactic to ensure you are making use of all opportunities for potential users to visit your site. There are plenty of tools you can use to find broken links such as Screaming Frog or Check My Links Chrome Extension.

Once you’ve scraped the site for 404’s you can reach out to whoever is managing the site and notify them. Why is this a good thing? If you point out a broken link to a webmaster and give them a replacement, you are offering value to them; you are essentially helping them out and doing yourself a favour at the same time!

The more links you fix; the healthier your backlink profile will be and it might just be the fix you need to see your site’s visibility considerably increase in search results!

4. Compress Large Images

We get it, adding large images to your site is powerful for visual design. The problem here is that large images are a real killer for page speed which isn’t great for the user experience, not to mention it will hurt your rankings. So it’s always good to consider the file size or resolution of an image before implementing it on your page as this is probably the number one “quick hack” for improving your site speed. It’s a good idea to use a tool like WebPageTest to check the file sizes of all the elements on a page, including images.

After you’ve identified your slow culprits you can reupload a compressed version to your site. Squoosh is a great tool for this - it’s a Google web-based app that super simple to use as you can upload image formats such as JPG and PNG. It works by showing you a visual comparison of the original image and the compressed version of the image side by side so you can check that the visual impact is not affected. When you are done making tweaks to it, you can download the image ready to upload to the page on your site. It’s that simple.

5. Keep Publishing

Whatever you do; don’t stop publishing content on your site. Keep active so google knows you are alive and so do your (potential) users. If you are used to frequently posting a weekly blog, it’s likely that some of your website users will be expecting it. So if you fall off the face of the earth you will not only damage your reputation with your site visitors but also with search engines. It turns out that most search engines favour sites that are updated frequently. This means you should always think about adding new content to your site as well as refreshing old content to add new value

If you are feeling uninspired and running out of content ideas; we’ve got some solid ways you can repurpose content to boost SEO.

The list of SEO hacks could be endless; because let’s be honest: SEO is never a quick win task! If you put effort into all areas of SEO and keep these tips in mind you are bound to see your efforts paying off. If you want more advice on how SEO can help your business and see results; feel free to drop us a line and contact us and we’ll go from there.

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