There is a marketing theory call the “Blue Ocean Strategy” which argues that businesses achieve greater success by seeking “virgin” or unexplor market space, rather than battling the rest of their competitors: they compete in blue waters, rather than in bloody waters full of sharks.
This is an important principle of SEO. The more crowd the field, the harder it is to get notic. If you want to rank higher in the SERPs, it is in your best interest to look beyond what your competitors are doing and look for new topics that have not been explor.
Sites like Google Trends or BuzzSumo are your friend! To illustrate this point, below we compare the interest in the terms “content marketing 2018” and “content marketing 2019”. Obviously, everyone is talking about content marketing 2018… in 2018! – but there aren’t many index pages covering 2019 strategies, even though we’re well past the halfway point of the year. As 2019 approaches and the gap closes, more people are starting to talk about it.
Source: The Creative Momentum
Try Featur Snippets!
Everyone loves featur snippets – those handy text boxes that pop up when we search and provide quick answers to our questions without having to click a link. They’re becoming an especially important part of UX as convenience becomes the norm and mobile and voice searches grow and come to the fore. Below is an example snippet that captures… featur snippets!
Source: The Creative Momentum
Remove your zombie pages
We know, zombie links are a thing of the past. Very 2010. But your site is probably infest with them, even if you don’t realize it. Zombie pages are web pages that provide no real value in terms of traffic, authority, or web presence, most often appearing in the form of old or outdat content. Most often, they take the form of:
duplicate content
outdat blog posts
misplac press releases
product pages that no one buys
pages that should not be index (such as search results pages).
Every site has a few of these “zombie pages,” and they’re not always a big deal. But when your site has hundrs, or thousands, it can be detrimental to SEO. Zombie pages bloat your sitemap with phone number database numerous pages that Google considers low-quality because they don’t gain traffic or engagement.
Kill these pages, if possible – by setting results pages to “no bookyourlist index” and refactoring content as ne (such as combining three old blog posts into one piece of long-form content that supports engagement and encourages more time spent on the site).
Source: Matthew James Taylor
Organize your content into clusters
Topic clusters are a new SEO search headquarters location: canada tool that many sites haven’t us yet, which is a shame because search engines are changing their algorithms to favor content structur in this way.
Topic blocks involve changing the structure of your website to have single “pillar” pages that act as main hubs of information. From this hub, each subtopic (or cluster) has its own link page.