Links don't matter that much for ranking in the Featured Snippet when you already rank on page one of Google. How do your competitors rank? Pick out a keyword for which you want to optimize your site. Check out the top 20 search results: Are your competitors somewhere in there? What is your ranking for this keyword? This information should help you to find a good niche for you and your keywords, where your competitors are not operating. It may also be that you find keywords for which it is worth joining the competition. Search engines use links to discover when new webpages have been created and to help determine how well a page should rank in their results. SEO isn’t just for large companies. As a small business or local business, there is actually a lot you can do to achieve local goals yourself. Many of these things relate to focus.

Market Segmentation

You want to give the user the exact information that they searched for and entice them to explore your site with easy-to-understand navigation to create a seamless, satisfying experience for a new customer. Search Engine Optimization is a very hot topic on the World Wide Web. After-all, everybody wants to rank higher and come up on the first page of Google search and get more traffic. The sheer apparent complexity of SEO is enough to turn some people away entirely. Content marketing is now part of a successful SEO strategy. Google has refined what it considers good content in recent years. It it now almost impossible to get away with any gimmicky content-based tactics, such as high quantity content without quality and substance. Search engines prefer those who produced the best, most valuable content, spawning the adoption of content marketing among SEOs — and content is still king today.

How are you supposed to audit your content?

SEO has matured. It is a serious business, and most brands invest a lot of time and effort into it. RankBrain analyzes keywords against searches to let Google know what type of end results a web user is looking for. Google can then use that data to rank the relevancy of webpages concerning those keywords. When determining the value of a keyword topic it’s important to understand what it will take to drive traffic for that keyword. Would you like to make it easier for search engines to understand what keyword(s) your blog should rank for?

Consistent doesn't mean identical.

If you’re not blessed with excellent writing skills, outsource this job to somebody who is. With 75 percent of companies currently increasing their content marketing budget, it’s apparent that content can no longer be treated as a part-time job. Outsourcing content creation to dedicated writers allows for consistent, high quality publishing, fresh perspectives, insight into best practices and better leveraging of resources. Gaining backlinks is tough, as it involves convincing a website to share your website with their audience. It’s a hustle to pitch your proposition to these websites, which usually is a guest post, sponsored link or asking if they would link to a resource on your site. One part of SEO many have heard of is keyword research. After all, every time we use a search engine, we’re using a keyword (the name is a misnomer, most keywords have more than one word in them!) Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant, commented: "Google’s robots, or “spiders,” crawl the Internet by “clicking” one link after another after another. They discover new pages and websites as part of that crawl, and store the content of each of those pages in a giant database."

Anchor text links from a variety of different domains correlate with higher rankings in Google

Your website loading speed is one of the most important rankings factors in Google. No one likes slow websites, and neither does Google. To rank locally it is critical to set up a Google My Business Account. Once you have signed up and submitted your business details you will be sent a post card in order to verify the account. You should be selective and ensure you pick the most relevant categories to your business, add photos and write up a unique description. One of the biggest challenges websites face today when trying to bring in and retain customers is the user experience on the site. SEO is very simple, and unless you’re a very large company it’s probably not worth hiring somebody else to do.