For a small, growing business, it may not be practical to invest heavily in Google AdWords or Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. While most businesses would welcome the opportunity to advertise online to improve their SEO, they do not want to put themselves in financial peril to do so.
Let’s take a look at how to show up on the first page of Google without paying for PPC (Pay Per Click) based on the SEO trends in 2021:
Rank for Low-Competition Keywords
The most effective SEO is dedicated to working smarter, not harder. During your keyword selection process, you’ll be tempted to choose enormously high-volume keywords that are searched several hundred times each month. Such keywords are met with intense competition as many corporate giants will be striving to compete for them as part of their SEO strategy.
Instead, choose and target a less competitive keyword at the beginning that still has a decent search volume. For example, if you’re a web development agency, instead of selecting ‘best Internet Marketing agency,’ target ‘best Internet marketing agency for e-commerce’ or ‘best Internet marketing agency Toronto’, changing the city/town depending on where you’re located. Making your keywords more specific and long-tailed (a longer selection of keywords combined) should help you find the right low-competition keyword.
Enhance Website User Experience (UX)
No matter how engaging your web content is or how well it’s optimized for the targeted keywords, it won’t have a positive impact if the site offers a disappointing user experience. From the beginning of the web design process, your main goal should be to ensure that site visitors can easily find what they’re looking for.
Your first priority should be to ensure that your landing pages are quick to load because a typical site visitor won’t wait more than a few seconds before closing the tab and finding a competitor. As they navigate your site, the platform’s menu should facilitate navigation and assist them in finding their desired webpage. Adding a search bar is a good idea to help visitors find information quickly.
You’ll also want to present your web content and position your call-to-actions (CTAs) strategically so that a site visitor behaves exactly the way you want them to.
By focusing on the website user experience, visitors will be more likely to spend time navigating your site, lowering your bounce rate. These are strong SEO signals that will boost your ranking on search engine results pages (SERP). If you’re able to excel in website usability optimization, very little can stand in your way from securing a spot on that crucial first SERP.
Include High-Quality Content
Now that SEO has evolved beyond keyword optimization, there’s no way you can rank high on Google without adding genuinely valuable content to your site. It’s important to understand that the underlying goal of Google is to offer maximum value to users by identifying their precise search intent and providing results that best address their queries. This is where you hit with quality content.
Your aim should be to add blog posts that continue to identify the most pressing problems of your target audience and offer the best solutions to them. Blog posts help to build authority and trust among site visitors, who will then be more likely to return to the site and choose you when making a purchasing decision. Google silently tracks all that activity and goes on to rank you on its first page.
Conclusion
While these were some of the most effective SEO strategies to secure a position on the first page of Google without paying for PPC, you’ll need to make sure that you stay updated with the latest SEO trends in 2021. Google algorithms that rank websites are constantly being changed and updated, so you need to constantly adapt your website content strategy to achieve your SEO goals.
If you would like to explore implementing or improving the SEO on your website, call an Internet marketing expert at (647) 556-6071.
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