Marketing has always been a balancing act, and SEO ranking is no exception. You want to be seen by as many people as possible. On the other hand, you want to be seen by the right people.

If you’re like most marketers, you’re likely familiar with SEO basics such as keyword research and on-page optimization. However, there are many common opportunities for SEO ranking that many businesses overlook, of which 3 with huge potential have been covered here.

The common-sense things you’re doing for your SEO ranking now still have a chance of significant improvement by incorporating some of these lesser-known techniques.

Web Stories for SEO Ranking

Late last year, Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) format was rebranded into Web Stories.

Web Stories are tappable carousel displays in Google Discover, just like the stories format in social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

The immersive visual slideshow format creates an all-new opportunity for businesses, creators, and SEO professionals to engage their audience better and attract even more organic traffic. 

Google even released an official Web Stories plugin for WordPress for creating custom posts.

The best way to use Web Stories to improve your SEO ranking is to promote your content (especially blog content) through visual previews, including a CTA that triggers engagement.

Google designed the Web Stories format to be a more accessible medium for attracting mobile traffic via Google Discover. Content remains king, and Web Stories is a great content format to bring more eyes to your brand. 

Some of the best practices for creating engaging Web Stories, according to Google, are:

• Create an immersive experience by using full-screen, portrait videos 
• Keep the text concise and legible
• Use animations to make the experience more enjoyable 

Google Discover for SEO Ranking

Beyond Web Stories, Google Discover presents immense opportunities for audience engagement and attracting traffic. 

Google Discover is a personalized content feed that presents information to users based on their activity across all Google products, location settings, and topics they follow. 

You can monitor the traffic to your site from Discover through Google Search Console. Note, though, that you can’t perform a competitor analysis for Discover traffic. 

Here are some steps to take to give your website an edge in SEO ranking on Discover:

• Unlike SERPs, images are very prominent on Discover feeds. Use high-quality, optimized images that are sure to attract users right away. 
• Use the correct meta tags and descriptions. Use the tags to ‘describe’ your content so that the algorithm will ‘understand’ it and categorize it more appropriately. 
• Discover prioritizes news. So, although it also ranks evergreen content, you can attract more traffic by posting content covering current trending topics. Use Google Trends to find trending topics and events per audience location.
• Don’t ignore evergreen content too. Discover is a personalized feed, so you can still earn traffic on old content as long as they are relevant, which is what ‘evergreen’ means. 
• Google Discover displays content according to interest topics. Therefore, strive to attain expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EAT) in several topics to boost your traffic.
• Enhance your online brand presence by updating your site’s knowledge panel. Why? Users can follow your brand and receive its updates only if its knowledge panel is active. Google generates Knowledge panels automatically, but you can edit yours by first getting verified on Google.

Wikipedia for SEO Ranking

Wikipedia is a highly authoritative website. It’s the 13th most visited website globally with 75.10% traffic from search and over 700,000 sites linking to it.

Therefore, Wikipedia link building is a goldmine for boosting your site’s authoritativeness and ranking. But how do you do this? 

Even though Wikipedia is open-source, it has stringent policies and well-defined guidelines for contributors and editors posting information on any of the pages.

Therefore, before linking Wikipedia pages to your website, you must make sure that your website content is factual and thoroughly informative. 

One great SEO ranking opportunity in Wikipedia is to find broken links or pages that need a citation and replace them with working links from your website. See the exact steps below:

• First, go to the Wikipedia page for all articles with dead external links. 
• Search for topics relevant to your site or that you have written on before. Instead of scouring the page until you find a topic, search dead links related to your niche using the search string: site:wikipedia.org [keyword] + “dead link”.
• A tool such as Wikigrabber can help you to find Wikipedia pages that require a citation.
• For broken links, enter the link into the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine to see the previous content on that page. 

• That helps you to know what to improve upon to write more acceptable content.
• Once your post is ready, edit the Wikipedia article and include a link to your content. Then wait for the changes to get approved. Not all changes do; so, you can try again if yours doesn’t.

Conclusion 

If your business is growing, your SEO strategy should be, too.

As discussed, there are less well-known opportunities for ranking that can help your website get found in new ways. And often, these lesser-known opportunities may create the most significant gains for your SEO strategy.

Featured Image by Jan from Pixabay

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