DIY SEO: 9 Powerful Techniques To Rank in Google

Key Takeaways

in this video you're gonna learn nine powerful techniques to help get your site to the top of Google fast in fact one of my followers recently used these same techniques to rank number one for his target keyword the best part you don't need to hire an agency to execute any of these DIY SEO techniques i'm brian dean the founder of backlinko and today we're gonna reveal nine of my all-time favorite y hat SEO techniques stay tuned I'll be honest with you when I launched my first website I had no idea what I was doing so I hired a random SEO agency to SEO my site oh hey yeah can you SEO my site Thanks needless to say that agency did absolutely nothing that's when I decided to fire the agency and learn SEO myself through trial and error it took three long years but I eventually learned how to do SEO the right way thanks to my proven strategies I now reckon the top five for some super competitive keywords and inc.com recently called me one of the world's most sought-after SEO experts with that let's get into the actionable techniques starting with use these words in your title tag get more traffic last year SEO Pro Ross Hudgens decided to run an interesting SEO experiment Ross analyzed 7999 pages that ranked on the first page of Google so what did he find Ross discovered that top ranking pages tended to use these words in their title tags what's going on here Google up ranks websites they get a high organic click-through rate according to Ross certain terms tend to attract lots of clicks from Google searchers and because pages that use these terms in their title tag get more clicks they also get higher rankings now besides the terms that Ross found here are some others that I personally use to maximize my organic click-through rate I'll have another strategy that you can use to boost your again it click-through rate later in this video but for now let's jump right into DIY SEO tip number two find longtail keywords with searches related to exactly how to execute this technique first type a keyword into Google next scroll to the bottom of the search results until you hit the searches related to section this section is where Google shows you keywords that are similar to the one you just searched for and because these terms come straight from Google they can make great longtail keywords for you to target now it's time for technique number three which is to use these little-known sources of Awesome keyword ideas you've probably already used Google Suggest to find longtail keywords this is where you type a phrase into Google and see which keywords Google suggests now this tactic is pretty useful but there's one problem with this approach everyone and their mom knows about it that's why I recommend using untapped sources of suggested keywords I'm talking about places like YouTube Wikipedia Amazon and Bing for example let's say they were gonna write an article about the Paleo diet but you didn't have a keyword for that article instead of typing the phrase Paleo diet into Google you try YouTube and you get a whole new set of suggestions you can get even more awesome keyword ideas by doing this same thing in being that's all there is to it okay let's rock and roll with technique number four which is to reduce your bounce rate last year I analyzed 1 million google search results to figure out why certain pages ranked higher than others one of our findings was that pages with a low bounce rate tended to outrank pages with a high bounce rate in case you're wondering your bounce rate is the percentage of people that click on your site in Google search results and then click their back button now it's not clear if Google uses bounce rate as a direct ranking signal our finest could be the case of correlation not always equally causation for example pages with a low bounce rate might just have straight up better content and that's why Google ranks them so highly or it could be that Google uses bounce rate as a direct ranking signal either way I recommend improving pages on your site that have a high bounce rate it'll boost your conversions and will probably also help with your SEO okay let's move on to our fifth tip which is to optimize your click-through rate using AdWords ads look I already showed you how a higher CTR can help you get higher rankings and now it's time for me to reveal one of my all-time favorite ways to boost CTR Google Adwords in case you're not familiar with how Google AdWords works it's basically a big auction but unlike most auctions AdWords also takes into account in ads click-through rate if an ad has a really high CTR it gets a steep discount on every click now needless to say almost every ad that you see in Google is optimized to maximize clicks and when I realized that I could use these ads to write my title and description tags a light bulb went off with that let me walk you through the step-by-step process first search for your keyword in Google keep an eye out for AdWords ads that appear at the top and bottom of the first page if you notice any terms that the ads tend to use a lot sprinkle them into your title and description tag and you'll probably notice an increase in your CTR and traffic it's that easy now it's time for our first link building technique link roundups I can't believe we haven't talked about backlinks yet after all a Google employee recently said that backlinks are still one of Google's top 3 ranking signals and now I'm going to show you one of my all-time favorite link building strategies link roundups link roundups our weekly or monthly blog posts that link out to the best content that recently came out so if you publish high quality content on your site you have a good chance of getting your content included in a roundup here's an example of a backlink that I got from a link roundup using the process that I'm about to share with you ok let's get into the steps first you need to find link roundups in your industry all you need to do is search in google using these search strings and you should find at least a handful of roundups that are a good fit for your site the last step is to reach out to the person that runs the link roundup let them know that they run a great roundup and that your content might be a good fit here's a real life example of an email that I recently sent and if your content is a good fit usually have no problem adding a link to your site in that week's roundup the best part not only do you get a link but your links anchor text is usually the title of your article that way your anchor text includes your target keyword but it's not spammy exact match anchor text which Google doesn't like and while we're talking about links let's cover another white hat link building technique resource page link building this strategy is similar to link roundups with one major difference like League roundups resource pages link out to awesome content on a given topic but unlike link roundups resource pages include the all-time best content on that topic here's an example of a resource page and now it's time for me to show you how to build links from resource pages first use these search strings to find resource pages in your niche when you find a page where your link would make sense send the site owner this script obviously this is a bit of a numbers game but if your content is amazing most people have no problem adding your link to their resource page speaking of amazing content it's time for do-it-yourself SEO technique number 8 publish in-depth content last year one of my readers Emil Shore reached out to me he emailed to tell me about a piece of content that he published that quickly hit the number one spot for his target keyword how did he do it he published an incredibly in-depth piece of content in my big search engine ranking factor study found data to back this up we found that long in-depth content tended to rank best in Google so in practical terms what does this mean it means the article is like five tips for X or four word ways to do Y simply don't work any more to write today your content needs to cover everything there is to know about your topic for example last year I wanted to write a post about SEO tools now my original idea was to list my 12 favorite tools now this post would have been okay but it wouldn't have been the type of in-depth content that ranks on Google's first page that's when I decided to review every single SEO tool on the market it took over 70 hours but in the end I had a piece of very in-depth content content that now ranks in the top five for my target keyword so the hard work paid off now it's time for our last DIY SEO technique pay attention to SERP features you probably notice that Google is adding more stuff to the search results instead of just 10 blue links Google's results to now have knowledge graphs Rich Snippets video results and yes more ads than ever before why is this important well most people choose a keyword based on two things search volume and competition on the first page but they don't consider that Google's and new SERP features can steal clicks away from the organic results for example let's take the keyword weight loss as you can see Google displays ads at the top of the page News results and a people also asked box and because of these new search features according to a href only 44% of people searching for that term click on an organic result bottom line do your best to target keywords that don't have a lot of surfers that way you won't rank for a keyword that ends up getting very few organic clicks I know that I said I'd only cover 9 tips in this video but I want to throw in a bonus SEO tip for you and that's to tap into multi media so should you use videos images and charts in your content let's look at the data skyward research discovered that articles that contained at least one image got an average of 94 percent more traffic than articles without an image and our ranking factors study discovered that image rich content tends to rank best in Google bottom line make sure that your content contains at least one piece of multimedia like an image or video industry studies show that this can help you rank higher in Google if you liked this video make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel right now that way you won't miss out an actionable SEO videos like this one just click on the subscribe button also if you want exclusive SEO techniques that I only share with subscribers head of our backlink accom and sign up for the newsletter it's free now I want to turn it over to you which technique for today's video are you gonna use first are you gonna try publishing in-depth content or build backlinks from link roundups let me know by leaving a comment below right now yeah when he sees you come around he's gonna be like that bastard causation correlation oh I'm still wearing a hat oh this guy actionable so it's gonna be like ding you know