Every site owner with aspirations wants to rank highly in Google for relevant keywords. The search giant is the world’s largest generator of traffic, after all, and sends high-quality leads on a steady basis without needing the direct funding of PPC advertising or influencer marketing. This is why the SEO industry has become so vast. SEO, standing for search engine optimization, seeks to uncover and exploit the inner workings of Google’s ranking algorithms.
Look around for SEO tips and you’ll find a seemingly-endless ocean of everything from articles to infographics, most of which say the same things. This makes standing out a major challenge. If you’re using the same tactics as everyone else, it’s notably difficult to establish an edge. In this post, then, we’re going to look at four SEO tactics that may not be unfamiliar but certainly are underused. Implement them well and you have a chance to set yourself apart. Let’s begin.
Make your content more valuable
There are some tactics that are so essential, so obvious, that they rarely get used. Indeed, the SEO industry is rife with agencies that will fixate so strongly on finding tricks that they’ll miss the clear value in simply trying to make better content. If you’re not ranking well, the first thing to check is whether your content actually deserves to rank well. If it does, you can ignore this step — but there’s an excellent chance that it doesn’t, in which case you need to take action.
Put yourself in the shoes of a typical visitor to your site. How do you rate what you find? Is there clear value on the offer? Is the advice significant and easy to understand? If it isn’t clear that a lot of work has gone into the copy, how can you expect anyone to care? It’s not as though there’s a shortage of adequate blog posts out there. It’s at the point where they can be spooled out through AI generators and serve as acceptable filler.
Before you delve into SEO proper, then, compare the pages you want to rank well to their competitors in the search results. Where are they lacking? Consider employing the skyscraper method of aiming to include everything the top results get right before adding on enough to make your pages undeniably better. Do this while ensuring that the core vitals stay healthy and you’ll come away with an excellent foundation.
Cater to international searchers
Given that you’re reading this post, there’s an excellent chance that you produce your content in English. It’s a strong choice regardless of your origin because the language is so popular around the world, but it’s far from the only choice you could make — and sticking entirely to one language is a good way to waste the global potential of your content.
It’s becoming increasingly common to see multilingual sites, but it’s still surprisingly rare. It’s likely that many website owners overestimate the challenge involved in translating and localizing their content. In actuality, there are many services capable of automating much of that process. Just look at the options for the world’s most widely-used CMS: there are myriad WordPress translate plugins (most notably the Weglot translation plugin for WordPress) that can breeze through most of the work. All that’s left is to check and edit the results (rather less arduous).
So if you feel that your content is truly worth people’s time, why not ready it for fresh audiences? In addition to ranking in foreign-language Google searches (every visit helps), you can build up your brand’s reputation around the world, leading to more favorable comments.
Take creative risks on social media
Read branded posts on Twitter and Facebook and you’ll largely see innocuous mediocrity. It’s easy to understand why, of course: companies are desperately afraid of getting the wrong kind of attention and having their reputations ruined, yet they crave social media attention all the same. The result is a half-hearted effort to stand out without actually standing out at all.
I won’t tell you that all publicity is good publicity because that’s transparently nonsensical. But I will tell you that mild to moderate social media controversy is often a good thing. It all comes down to the topics about which you express controversial opinions. Politics? Religion? Definitely not. Anything else is fair game. If you have something to say, say it. Being boring is always bad.
And if you have an interesting creative idea, don’t leave it in development on an indefinite basis. Try it and see what happens. It might not work, sure, but that’s alright. And if it does work, you can suddenly achieve incredible ROI on a low-budget project. The added interest in your brand will bring visitors to your site, leading Google to rank it more prominently.
Aim to win featured snippets
A fair amount has been written concerning featured snippets due to their rise in prominence, but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s targeting them. Why? Harkening back to the first tip we covered, it pertains to the effort involved. People want quick fixes, and it takes time to overhaul content to focus on answering key questions.
If you’re willing to put in that time, there’s a lot to gain from playing to top queries (Ahrefs has a great guide on this). If you secure a featured snippet, you gain pole position on the page, overshadowing even the top result (which may well be from a far bigger and more prominent website). It’s also great for your rankings, in general, to build around those central queries.
Wrapping up, this list of underused SEO tips is far from exhaustive, but it does give you somewhere to start if you’re feeling that your existing SEO strategy isn’t bearing fruit. Try implementing some or all of them, and see how you fare.