As a digital agency, growing your business is dependent on many different things. Everything from your social media strategy to your content marketing efforts plays a role in how you find new customers and increase your search traffic. Another major impact on your growth success is your SEO efforts. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of improving your rankings on search engines like Google and appearing higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Your SEO strategy is key to the guess of your web pages and ranking factors of your website. In order to improve your on-page and technical SEO, it helps to have some tips and tricks in your pocket that can help you improve your SEO ranking and become an SEO expert yourself. 

1. Optimize content for featured snippets 

One of the best ways to get found on the search results page and help your brand grow is with the help of featured snippets. Featured snippets are different ways of displaying information on a Google result page that is usually easier for users to comprehend and read. These featured snippets help brands stand out and get more clicks than a traditional Google search result. 

There are a few different ways to capture a featured snippet, such as understanding search intent and running competitive analysis. You can also format your content in such a way that Google automatically considers it for a featured snippet above other competitors. Other things like graphics, lists, bullet points, and concise paragraphs can also help your content get discovered by the right people and feature at the top of the search results page. 

Tips for optimizing for featured snippets 

There are four different categories of featured snippets that you can rank for. When you optimize your content for one of these categories, you can have a higher chance of getting recognized by Google and featured on the results page. 

• Lists: Lists are one of the ways that featured snippets appear on Google. They can come in ordered lists (numbered lists) or unordered lists (bullet point lists). These tend to populate for “how” and “why” searches. 
• Paragraph: Paragraphs are the most common type of featured snippet and are around 42 words each, or 250 characters. They also tend to appear for searches starting with “why” or “what.” 
• Table: A table is another form of featured snippet that includes different rows and columns, averaging at five rows, two columns, and 40 to 45 words. In order to appear for a table-featured snippet, your content needs to have table tags in HTML, not a table graphic.
• Video: Video-featured snippets are the least common type of snippet but will occur with a chunk of a video pulled out of a larger video that tends to be around six and a half minutes in length. Video snippets are great for audiences that rely heavily on video to get their answers. 

2. Create a process for updating and refreshing content 

Content has a lifespan that can be short if new data is published and your current content becomes outdated. In order to mitigate decaying content, you need to have a system in place to update and refresh content as needed. You can have a really great piece of content that just needs a few facts or statistics changed, so it doesn’t make sense to replace the content instead of just fixing it to be accurate. 

A great content marketing strategy will have recurring tasks where you can go in and update your highest-performing pieces of content and ensure that they are accurate and updated as needed in order to still be helpful and useful to your readers. This will allow you to expand the lifetime of your content and avoid having to constantly replace outdated content, which can be time-consuming, frustrating, and costly. 

Tips for updating and refreshing content 

Updating and refreshing content doesn’t need to be a huge undertaking. By following these helpful tips, you can create a plan for updating and refreshing that helps you remain relevant and expand the value of your current content offers. 

• Update all data to the most current data 
• Clean up headers and add relevant content 
• Start with your most popular pages 
• Prioritize pages with high traffic 
• Don’t add every blog to your update list 
• Add new internal links to older posts 
• Add schema markup for featured snippets 
• Set a schedule for consistent content updates 
• Keep the URL the same 

3. Add FAQ page schema & table of contents 

An FAQ page can be a helpful source of information for your readers. It can give information on your most popular customer questions, common concerns about your product or services, and provide further and deeper education on your industry. An FAQ page schema allows Google to know that you have an FAQ page by using structured data and code to increase your chances 

of being featured as a rich snippet. This can allow your customer’s questions to be answered directly from the search results page.

Another great tip for your content is to have a table of contents available for readers. This helps divide up your content into sections and makes it easy for readers to navigate to the right sections. If you publish long-form content posts, then it’s especially helpful to your user experience. This markup schema can also help your table of contents appear as a featured snippet. 

Tips for adding FAQ page schemas and table of contents 

Adding an FAQ page schema or table of contents to your website pages and blog posts isn’t difficult. For people who use WordPress, you can use the Yoast plugin to create a new post, add a new block to the post, and include either a structured data block or a table of contents block. If you don’t have Yoast, you can add the HTML markup directly into the code on your website so that Google understands what you are communicating. 

4. Put in place powerful SEO tools 

In today’s modern business world, it’s important to have the right tools on your side to complete your tasks and optimize your performance. Without the right digital tools, you will likely find yourself struggling to keep up with your competitors and take your SEO efforts to the next level. Often, businesses will rely on a tech stack of multiple tools that tackle different aspects of an SEO campaign or other areas of a digital marketing strategy. 

Tools to consider 

There is a wide range of different powerful SEO tools that you can use to improve your campaigns and get better results from your efforts. Here are a few helpful tools that can take your brand to the next level. 

• Teamwork for project management and organization 
• Ahrefs or SEMrush for keyword analytics 
• Google Search Console 
• Google Analytics 

5. Create optimized URLs for search engines 

URLs are another area of SEO that might often go unnoticed by beginners or those who are just starting to focus on SEO within their business. However, URLs are incredibly important to search engines and have a major impact on how your web pages are ranked. When you have an optimized URL, it’s easier for both search engine bots and your own audience to understand what the content of a page contains and how it can help them.

Example URLS 

When it comes to URLs, the simpler, the better. Here are a few examples of how you can improve your URLs and create a focused slug that doesn’t distract or confuse the reader. Here are some tips: 

• Take out extra words from the title 
• Leave in the primary keyword 
• Separate your words with hyphens 
• Don’t duplicate URLs 
• Standardize your URL naming convention 

6. Write 155 – 160 character meta descriptions that summarize the content 

A meta description is a short description that summarizes the content that is found on a specific page. The meta description is used to help search engines and readers understand what information is included on a page and give a deeper description than just the title tag. The meta description is displayed underneath the title and URL of a result on a search engine results page and is critical in helping you get clicks from the SERPs. 

A meta description is also an important SEO ranking factor. Without it, it’s unlikely that your pages will rank high on Google. The meta description you use should be between 155 and 160 characters in length. This is the perfect length for appearing in full but not being so short that it doesn’t capture the purpose of the page. 

What should be included in a meta description 

Because a meta description is so short, it’s important that you capture the right kind of information with the limited character count you have. Here are a few of the best practices for writing great meta descriptions. 

• Make the content of the meta description unique 
• Make it actionable or use a call to action 
• Use your target keyword 
• Avoid generic descriptions and online generators 
• Switch up your sentence formatting for more interest 
• Consider your customers and their mindset 

7. Run a technical SEO audit and fix glaring errors 

Technical SEO refers to back-end and behind-the-scenes SEO efforts that are used to help analyze the technical aspects of your website and make sure that your site maintenance is improving to help you grow. A technical SEO audit is a process that examines all the different

factors of technical SEO and tells you how well you are performing in those areas or if there are errors and mistakes that need to be addressed. A technical audit should be done regularly to ensure that you are making the right decision and fixing the problems that might occur. A technical audit is run using tools that help track things like crawl reports, sitemaps, load times, mobile-friendliness, metadata, and broken links. 

Without a regular technical SEO audit, you can be missing big things that aren’t obvious from looking at a page. The technical audit will examine intricate and unseen parts of your SEO strategy and help you create an actionable plan to address those issues and fix any errors that exist on the technical end of your website. 

Tips for running a technical audit 

Running and executing a technical audit can seem tricky, but with the help of the right SEO tool, it’s fairly simple to conduct. Here are a few tips that can help you understand how to run an SEO technical audit. 

• Crawl your entire website 
• Make a note of any crawlability and index issues 
• Look for on-page technical mistakes 
• Look at your images for any errors 
• Analyze your internal linking structure 
• Analyze your backlinks and external links to make sure they aren’t broken ● Run a site speed and performance check 
• Test your website on mobile to make sure it functions optimally 

8. Use your competitors as inspiration and beat them for keywords 

A competitor analysis is an audit that allows you to learn from the biggest competitors in your area or industry. The audit will take a look at your identified competitors and track their different SEO and marketing strategies to see how they are ranking, what keywords they rank for, what backlinks they are getting, and what their relative strengths and weaknesses are compared to your brand. 

A competitor SEO analysis can help you significantly when it comes to your keyword strategies. Using a competitor analysis report, you can see if they are ranking for keywords you are currently ranking for and how far away you are. You can see if they have slipped down the rankings or if there are keywords that they aren’t using that you could use in your own strategies.

Tips for beating your competitors 

Digital marketing is all about competition. In order to stay ahead of your closest competitors and make sure that you are taking over valuable digital real estate, it’s important for you to know the best tips and tricks to beat others in the field and come out on top. Here are a few of these best practices you can use after running a competitor SEO audit. 

• Look to see where they are getting backlinks and poach them away 
• Create evergreen content for relevant keywords 
• Create link-worthy resources 
• Correct your SEO errors 
• Build a better backlinking strategy 
• Use keywords that they are ranking low for 
• Repurpose your highest-performing content 
• Stay on top of SEO audits and analysis 
• Always monitor your competition and keep an eye on their marketing efforts