What is Search Engine Positioning and How Can You Benefit from It?
November 25, 2022
Search engine positioning or SEP, what is it and why it’s important?
There’s no doubt that Google is the number one search engine globally. It covers over 90% of all search queries on the web, and its influence is vast. Next after Google is Bing, with just a 5,2% market share, but even that amount is enormous. Both search engines process thousands of queries every second (to be exact, Google processes 63 000/sec).
Regardless of which search engine people use, their reason for searching remains the same. Basically, they are looking for valuable information or solutions to their problems. And if your business has solutions that users are looking for, search engines may show your website on the search engine results page (SERP).
But most likely, your website is not the only one ranking for specific keywords. Search engine positioning and getting your website to the top of Google is not as easy as it looks. As a matter of fact, the more competitors for a keyword, the harder it is to gain a favourable position. Today, the SERP is a “battlefield” where every website tries to rank as high as possible using various techniques, which we will discuss in this article.
Let’s begin!
What is Search Engine Positioning?
As you may have guessed, search engine positioning is optimising web pages to get higher search engine positions for specific keywords.
Also, don’t forget that a Google search today is not just a list of 10 links. As I have noted, there are many SERP features that help users get information faster and more conveniently. For example, if you search “how to cook a pie,” you will first see recipe cards and videos, followed by a search result snippet with links.
SERP features: https://moz.com/learn/seo/serp-features
Why is Search Engine Positioning Important?
According to multiple researches and studies related to search engine positioning, the first three positions in organic search receive approximately 75% of all clicks. And only a tiny portion of users, which amounts to 0.78%, click on something from the second page of the results. Without a doubt, the first page is the target of all organic traffic efforts.
Another interesting fact is that, on average, moving up one spot in search results can increase CTR by 30.8%. So the higher position you have, the more traffic you potentially get. This study clearly shows the importance of search engine positioning and why all companies are obsessed with promoting their pages in search engines.
How is Search Engine Positioning Different From SEO?
The difference between search engine positioning and SEO is that SEO focuses on broader things related to the whole website. That includes increasing page load time speed, structuring the sitemaps, mobile-friendliness, and other aspects. However, search engine positioning is a technique for promoting individual pages.
In other words, search engine positioning is a tactical action that brings a particular page to the top of search results. At the same time, SEO is more about technical best practices that help a website become indexed and optimised for search engines.
Now it’s time to learn what you can do to make your web pages rank as high as possible. Let’s get to the tactics.
How To Increase Your Search Engine Positioning?
These tips will help you position your pages in search engines and better understand the factors that matter.
Keep Your Content Up to Date
Google loves relevancy. Providing users with relevant information is essential for search engine positioning and Google’s #1 priority. Check your pages that are near the top 3 positions and re-optimise them. Pay attention to content relevance and UX too. Update statistics with new information, divide texts into logical paragraphs, and use more transition words to increase the readability. Furthermore, add additional headings and subheadings where necessary.
In other words, think about what is written and how it looks. Readers must have a good experience interacting with your content. Don’t forget that 80% of all users on the web are mobile users. Try to be concise and provide short answers without a long pre-story. Google values quickness in relaying information. Mobile devices have significantly changed the game’s rules on the Internet, including the length of text and the number of characters in meta tags.
Follow these instructions and think about what you can improve to make your page more user-friendly and search engine positioning more successful. Most importantly, do it from the perspective of the user.
Use Internal Linking
Internal linking is another crucial step that some bloggers ignore. It’s pretty easy to do, and it has a significant impact. The idea is to use authoritative pages with higher traffic to pass their authority to the page you want to boost. Consequently, it is necessary to place links from authoritative pages pointing to the page we want to strengthen.
An essential nuance of internal linking is that you must use the correct anchor texts and link to pages that explain the term. Don’t just pick a random keyword and link it with any page. This is important because anchor texts help search engines understand what your page is about.
Optimise for Organic Click Through Rate
Organic click-through rate (CTR) is another ranking factor that depends on your page’s usefulness and user experience. Google uses CTR to determine which results are more relevant to appear in the search. Does that mean that search engine users can affect the page rankings? Yes.
In 2014, Rand Fishkin did a great experiment in which he asked all his Twitter followers to search for “IMEC Lab” and click on his page in the search. After 3 hours, he managed to pull his page from position 7 to the first place of SERP for the given keyword.
Simply put, if people like your content and choose your page, it’s great for search engine positioning and this is a signal to Google that the page deserves attention. As a result, it will have better placement in the SERP. On the contrary, less clickable pages will decrease their position because people don’t want to see them at the top of search results. A pretty fair algorithm, isn’t it?
How to Increase Organic CTR?
To increase your organic CTR, you must make your search snippet look attractive and promising. A search snippet is generated information about your page that is presented in SERP. Typically it shows a meta title and meta description. Here is what you can do:
Check the top 10 results for given keywords and find some points that can help you to stand out from the competitors. Add your main keyword in the meta title and use “power words” there. Power words are the words that emphasise fast results and solutions or other valuable qualities.
When people search for something, they are often in a hurry and are more likely to click the snippet that offers them the fastest and easiest solution.
Here are some of the Power Words you can use in your meta title:
● Fast
● Right now
● Easy
● Simple
● Quick
● Today
● Step-by-step
If you want to point to quality you can use these Power Words:
● Proven
● In-depth
● Increase
● Discover
● New
● Benefit
● Help
● Success
● Goal
● Opportunity
Generally, improve your meta tags and offer solutions that people want. Additionally, think about what would be more important to you if you searched for specific keywords. Think about what makes a user turn to search and what problems might be behind their query.
What are Short, Long, and Last Click
However, getting visitors to your page is not the last optimisation point; there is more. There has been no official confirmation of this from Google, but many SEO experts will tell you that it is true (perhaps some will say it is not). The idea is that behavioural factors are also seen as a ranking factor. Here’s what’s important, in our opinion:
● Dwell time
● Actions on the page (сlicks, scrolls, video watches)
● Bounce rate
Suppose people go to your website from the search results, and after one second, they go back to the SERP. That means they didn’t find the answers they were looking for, and your page was irrelevant to the search. In the SEO industry, we call it a “Short Click,” which increases a page’s bounce rate and is a bad signal for search engines and furthermore, search engine positioning.
When people spend some time on your page (dwell time) and then return to search, they found some value, but not what they need. We call that a “Long Click,” and it is quite a good signal for most search engines and search engine positioning in general.
The best thing that can happen is that the user spent some time interacting with your page and then stopped further searching. That means the user got all the answers, and the search engine marks that page as potentially the best answer to the query. We call this the “Last Click,” and it’s an excellent signal for search engines.
How to Get More Long and Last Clicks
To succeed in search engine positioning, and to keep your users on the page, you have to provide valuable information corresponding to the keyword you’re targeting. In addition, your content should be presented in a user-friendly format, and the texts should be readable. To not repeat the good practices we have already discussed, I will share five easy tricks that marketers do to increase dwell time:
- Dilute the content of the page with videos. These days, people prefer video over text. And sometimes, it’s easier and faster to explain terms with an embedded video on your page.
- Avoid long intros on your blog posts. As previously mentioned, Google loves the quick relaying of information. And some visitors will exit your page if they don’t find an answer in the first 30 seconds.
- Enable comments to increase dwell time. Sometimes it helps to win some dwell time in Blogs and In-depth articles.
- Add the section “people also read” and offer related topics right next to the article the user reads.
- Add multimedia and interactive elements. If appropriate, things like infographics, polls, and quizzes can also increase time on the page.
Improve Your Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are part of the Google Search Console report that shows your page performance based on Chrome data. It shows how people interact with your website. It’s not a ranking signal, but it can give insight into your website’s user experience. Which we already know affects dwell time and long/short clicks and vital for search engine positioning.
User experience is closely related to SEO. If your visitors have to wait 20 seconds for a page to load fully, they will probably leave and increase your bounce rate even if your content is excellent. So try to keep your website technically optimised well and mobile-friendly. Also, you can use Google page speed insight to quickly analyse your website and provide you with technical weaknesses you can improve.
Search Engine Positioning Tools
Here are some tools you might need for search engine positioning and monitoring the results. We will begin with free tools…
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a fantastic free tool that we think every SEO professional should use. It helps to see your current positions in the SERP and tracks your organic keywords. Additionally, you can submit your site maps and check how your website is represented in organic searches. By the way, it had a different name some years ago, so the old school SEOs may still call it “Google Webmaster Tools.”
Google Trends
Google trends provides valuable information about search trends, which is very helpful in search engine positioning. It includes information about which regions are searching for particular keywords and compares it with other areas or keywords.
We at MotherLink use Google Trends in our keyword research to identify trending topics and use growing keywords. Suppose you write an article for a keyword that’s disappearing. In that case, it may ultimately result in no searches and organic traffic dropping noticeably.
MotherLink platform
MotherLink platform is an indispensable tool if you’re paying attention for search engine positioning. By using MotherLink, you will have a selection of over 50 000 high authority domains, ready for publishing and promoting your brand and individual pages of your website. Regardless of your business niche or website language, MotherLink is a all-in-one solution for all your PR, content marketing and link building.
Answer the Public
Answer the Public is another free tool that can help you select the topic for your blog post or YouTube videos. It’s super easy to use, and it gives you the names for your headings and subheadings. Using this tool, you can review actual topics and answer the question that search engine users need.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most powerful tools for SEO and Content Marketing. It’s paid, but it’s worth it. Ahrefs provides quite accurate data about keywords and content on competitors’ websites, when working on search engine positioning. You can use it in your keyword research or if you need a quick SEO audit for your website. Additionally, they have a great web browser extension that provides valuable information about websites in the SERP in real-time.
Majestic
Majestic is a good tool for checking the number of backlinks a website has. It provides valuable metrics such as trust flow, number of referring domains, and external backlinks, which is very handy when link building.
SpyFu
Last but not least is SpyFu which is excellent for SEO analysis, and there is a free version. In the paid version, you will find interesting features that can help you understand SEM strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. You can see how many organic keywords they have, how many monthly clicks they get, and who their paid and organic competitors are. Plus, what campaigns they are running in Google Ads. The last one is a beast feature and is very helpful when working on search engine positioning.
What Have You Learned About Search Engine Positioning?
You’ve learned that search engine positioning works alongside SEO. Using the tips, tools, and methodologies we have shared, you’ll be able to take a critical look at single or multiple pages and optimise them. That means you’ll improve old content, increase user time on your website, and soar up the SERPs.
Whatever your goals, what we’ve shared is tried and tested, so why wait? Bookmark this article and give them a try!
