It's the dawn of a new year — and, hopefully, the dawn of a new strategy 🌅
After putting so much effort into creating quality content, it's completely normal to want to rip your hair out when Google isn't playing ball and stops it from ranking in the search engine results page.
Sound familiar? If you're going crazier than Tyson in the ring with Holyfield because Google is acting up, hit the play button below to tune into episode three of The Strategist Playbook for tips on how to get your content to rank.
Tips and advice from the pros
In this week's episode, Marketing Strategist, Sam, has roped in Senior SEO Specialist and champagne connoisseur, Anthony, to offer their recommendations.
Anthony's first bit of advice when content doesn't rank is to make sure the page has been submitted on the sitemap. He recommends checking in Google Search Console for this as you can see if Google flags any indexing issues and spot any other red flags.
After that, make sure your content is mobile-friendly. Doing tests here for mobile-friendliness is crucial, as it might appear to be okay but could still fail.
Next comes the technical checks. Here, dig into the code and see whether the content is hidden. There might also be menus that are hidden in Javascript. For example, Google will say it can crawl and index Javascript, but in reality, it does struggle.
For instance, we can think a page is great, but Google might disagree. Yes, it's getting better at crawling through images and identifying what they are, for instance, but it isn't perfect. The key is making it easy for Google and readers.
Anthony's final bit of advice comes down to internal linking. This is important as it's a huge sign of trust. If you aren't linking to important pages, then Google knows you don't value it, so Google won't value it either or get it to rank.
Not ranking? Or not ranking high enough?
Sam approaches it the opposite way. The final thing he'd do is what Anthony would do first — the technical stuff. Instead, Sam looks at the value of the content and if it's good enough before working backwards from there.
They also go on to explain the difference between not ranking and not ranking high enough. If your content isn't ranking at all, use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to help you. If you're ranking 70, then technically, the content has been crawled and it's ranking, so it's a content issue.
Interested in hearing their thoughts? Hit play below to find out more.
What else?
The guys go on to discuss another struggle — subdomains. At the seven-minute mark, Anthony goes through domain authority (DA), how it can be manipulated and why you shouldn't always take it at face value.
They believe it's important, but only when you use DA alongside other metrics.
Finally, they finish with content-specific talking points, such as content quality, length, format and rules.
Want to gain similar valuable insights? Check out the rest of our podcast content
The Strategist Playbook is just one of many new podcasts we release from Digital 22 Studios. Whether it's marketing strategy you want help with, or even something more specialised such as SEO, content marketing, design and much more, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel below.
