All marketers want their sites to rank well and generate lots of organic traffic. But search engine optimization is a lengthy process. You need to keep an eye on several ongoing tasks to have any chance of ranking on page one:
- Ensure that the security and architecture of your website comply with the latest Google guidelines
- Carry out keyword research and competition analyses
- Create great content and optimize it for both keywords and search intent
- Work on your digital PR and earn backlinks on high authority websites.
All of this involves a lot of work and it can take between four and twelve months for results to become visible.
Most companies need faster results and want not only traffic, but also higher sales. One option is to use other sales channels such as paid ads while working on your SEO. However, there is also an alternative: search engine positioning.
If you want to find out what it is and how it can help your company increase sales, you've come to the right place.
What is search engine positioning?
Search engine positioning is a subcategory of search engine optimization (SEO). The methods you use are basically the same, but the goals are different.
With search engine positioning, your goal is to optimize a specific page for a specific keyword. So instead of working broadly across the entire website, you focus on a few key pages. You try to dominate as much of the search results page as possible.
If it is an informative keyword and there is a featured snippet, you should try to appear there.
If there is another Google feature, such as a list of businesses, you must try to appear in that list as well.
Of course, you want your site to appear at the top of the search engine link results. If this is the case, use rich results like these navigation links.
For product-related keywords, you want to appear at the top of the rankings for the keyword in the shopping feed.
You should also appear in the first three results of the Local Pack if the keyword is locally relevant.
How do you achieve all this? You perform all the usual SEO tasks, such as optimizing for keywords, adding structured data and building links for a specific page to promote it quickly in the SERP.
Focus on your product or service pages and optimize them for commercial and transactional keywords. This is a good choice to achieve sales faster than with conventional SEO measures.
Search engine positioning versus search engine optimization
As you learned above, search engine positioning is a part of search engine optimization, but these two terms have slightly different meanings.
While SEP focuses on a few important pages, SEO focuses on the website as a whole. Therefore, the scope of tasks you need to complete for SEO is larger. This includes configuring website security, ensuring that the entire website loads quickly and displays correctly on multiple devices, and much more.
If you take such a broad approach, the entire website will gradually rise in the rankings. This is great in the long term, but not ideal if you need to generate sales quickly.
This is where search engine positioning comes into play. With this approach, you focus on optimizing the pages that are most important for your sales or lead generation.
Since search engine positioning has a much narrower scope, it deals with smaller changes in a shorter time frame. So instead of improving website infrastructure or building hundreds of backlinks, just a few tweaks to on-page optimization and a few extra links may be enough to move your site up in the rankings within a month.
The arsenal of tools you need for this is also smaller. Often, you will at best use a rank tracking tool and a keyword analysis tool.
However, to do search engine positioning effectively, you need to have experience in actively working with SEO. Your website as a whole must have at least a few dozen pages that rank in the top 20, drive some traffic to the website and have some good links to your website.
If you're not a complete beginner to SEO and Google already has an idea of what your website is about and that it's trusted by other websites, you're in the perfect position to focus on ranking certain high-quality pages.
However, if your website only went live a month ago and you don't have a single backlink, it might be more difficult to rank certain pages because Google doesn't have enough information about your website yet.
How does search engine positioning work?
The goal of search engine positioning is to have certain pages of your website dominate certain keywords. This works by learning how to achieve high positions for certain keywords and planning your strategy in advance.
Google uses several factors to determine which pages should appear at the top of the SERPs. Here are the most important factors:
- Which keywords are present on the page?
- How many visitors interact with the page compared to the bounce rate?
- Which websites link to the website and the page (and what is their quality)?
- Does the page contain information that is suitable for the featured snippet?
- Does the page load quickly and without errors?
- Is the website secure?
- Is the user in the vicinity of the company location (for local search queries)?
You can influence most of these factors.
For search engine optimization to work, you need to do the following.
- Find out which pages you want to focus on
- Find suitable keywords for optimization
- Make sure they have the right traffic potential
- Analyze the search intention
- Analyze SERP features
- Optimize for SERP features, keywords and search intent
You can find out more about all these search engine positioning strategies below.
Best practices for better search engine rankings
Search engine positioning works brilliantly once you have carried out some basic SEO measures on your website. Find out what you need to do here.
1. analyze existing pages
Your main goal in search engine positioning is to have important pages rank high for specific keywords. The first step is to decide which pages are most important.
There are two ways to find out where you should start.
The first is to select the pages that are important for your company. These can be
- Sales landing pages
- Product, category or service pages
- Lead magnets such as resource pages or e-books
You can then use an SEO tool to check how these pages perform in the SERPs and which keywords they already rank for.
The second approach is to start analyzing search engine results. Perform a website analysis to find out which pages already rank in the top 20 for keywords that you believe have good traffic potential. Focus on the pages that fulfill a commercial or transactional intent.
To analyze your website, it's best to use a combination of the Google Search Console and an SEO tool. The GSC will show you which keywords your pages rank for, which can give you some ideas for terms you want to target.
You can also use a paid SEO tool such as Rank Tracker from SE Ranking. This allows you to track your ranking history, compare your website with the competition and see which pages are stuck on the second page of organic search. You can also monitor which keywords have SERP features such as featured snippets and see where your pages rank.
After this analysis, you will receive a list of pages you should focus on and an approximate list of keywords.
2. carry out keyword research and create targeted content
The next step is to carry out thorough keyword research and find out which keywords you should focus on.
Take the list of keywords from the research in the first step and add a few more keywords using a free keyword research tool. Analyze the keyword list and search for keywords that:
- have a high traffic potential
- have a low keyword difficulty
- have a search intention that matches the page in question
Not all keywords will be a perfect fit, as some have a high level of competition or difficulty and others have low traffic potential. You can still target the keywords with high difficulty and low volume, but for quick results you should focus on the „low hanging fruit“: Keywords that fit the site well and for which you can easily rank well.
Take the list of keywords that match this description and analyze the search intent.
If it's an informative keyword that you want to focus on, search for that keyword and read through the results with the highest rankings. Make a note of which topics are covered and how.
For commercial and transactional keywords, make a note of what information is displayed about the products or services, what schema markups are used (if any) and what conversion strategies the pages follow.
Use this knowledge to create high-quality content that is optimized for success.
Insert the keyword in the most important places on the page:
- URL
- Title tag
- Meta description tag
- Header tags
- Image title (if applicable)
3. regularly check old content
Once your focus page is ready, track its performance. Use Google Search Console to track the following metrics:
- Total number of clicks
- Total number of impressions
- Average click rate
- Average position
You can also use an SEO tool to track the SERP features for your site.
If you don't see an improvement in these metrics, experiment with page content and optimization until you see results.
An important part of search engine positioning is updating old content. If your focus page, which has achieved great results, remains unchanged for several months, it can lose ranking as Google prefers fresh content.
Here are some ideas of what you can update in an old information article.
- Remove outdated data sources and replace them with newer ones
- Look for ideas and practices that may have become outdated since the last review
- Add more actionable content, images, links or comments from experts.
These regular updates help your site to achieve a higher ranking and offer users greater added value.
4. improve the on-page SEO
Before you focus on positioning your website in search engines, you need to do a lot of on-page SEO work. The basics include a fast and secure hosting provider, improving page speed, optimizing technical SEO (XML sitemap, indexing, schema markup, mobile responsiveness, errors, redirects), maintaining intuitive navigation and much more.
There is also a lot of on-page optimization to be done for SEP.
First, you need to optimize the title and meta description tags for keywords and conversion. Titles are cut off at around 60 characters on desktop devices and even earlier on mobile platforms.
Make sure that you pack the information that is important to users into these 60 characters - ideally at the beginning. Search engines read full title tags, so you can leave a keyword or the name of your brand after the truncation mark.
Try to include the main keyword in the meta description tag and make it click-worthy. Note, however, that Google will sometimes ignore your custom meta description and display an excerpt from the text of the page instead, as in the example above.
Add the main keyword to the H1 tag of your page (usually the page title) and add supporting keywords to the H2-4 tags on the page and distribute them across the text.
An important part of on-page optimization to improve a particular page is internal linking. An internal linking strategy that prioritizes a specific page signals to Google that the page is important, which can affect rankings. Link to it from the homepage, other product or service pages and several blog posts that have collected a lot of external links.
5. combine different off-strategies
You should already be doing off-site SEO as part of your wider strategy. This also helps to some extent with SEP. To improve a particular page even more, create links to that page from both external and internal sources.
This is usually easiest if the page in question is a high-quality blog post. You can write guest posts and link to the post and ask other website owners to link to it as a source. If it has great content, others will link to it.
For product pages, you can search for articles that review the best products in your niche or product guides (e.g. „best/top“ or comparison articles). Share your product link with the authors or editors of these articles and offer to send them a product to review for possible publication in their content.
For service sites, it can be more difficult to get links as many editors are reluctant to link to promotional pages for a particular company. However, you can try to get some links via guest posts or inserting links.
To complement these links, you can share your content on social media to stimulate discussion or work with influencers in your industry to promote it beyond your network.
For B2C companies, you can find influencers that cover your niche and create sponsored content with them. For B2B marketing, you can either try to find a relevant industry influencer or get links by participating in podcasts and webinars.
For internal links and all other links that you create yourself and over whose anchor text you have control, make the anchor descriptive and try to add a keyword if possible.
6. improve the Core Web Vitals Score
Core Web Vitals are a set of web standards that include a fast loading time and the correct display of the website. They influence the ranking of your website.
To achieve the best results, you need to optimize them across the entire website. However, it is advisable to first check how the pages you are focusing on are performing in this regard.
You can use the Lighthouse tool in Chrome or a tool like GTMetrix to do this. It evaluates the website and shows exactly what needs to be improved in order to increase performance.
On individual pages, the problems are often large image or video files that slow down the loading or the loading of JavaScript before the page.
7. optimize for SERP functions
If there are SERP features such as the featured snippet (also known as „position zero“) for your target keyword, you need to rank your page for these features as well to dominate the SERP.
For the featured snippet, you should have a part of the page that corresponds to the format of the target snippet.
For example, if it's the „People also ask“ field, you should use the target question as the headline and provide a clear, concise answer under the headline in the first sentence or two. If the snippet contains a bulleted list, you should also have a bulleted list on the page. If it contains a definition, write a definition that matches the term.
To be included in the shopping list, create product listings in the Merchant Center and optimize them by adding the target keyword to the product title and product description.
Advantages of search engine positioning for small and medium-sized companies
Integrating search engine positioning into your overall strategy requires a certain amount of resource management and a shift in your team's focus. But is it worth the effort?
There are three main advantages that make this changeover worthwhile.
Increase targeted traffic. The traffic that comes to your website can be very different. People visiting informational pages at the top of the funnel are most likely not ready to buy yet, and you need to try to engage and convert them to make a sale.
If you focus specifically on improving the search rankings of pages that can bring in targeted, conversion-ready traffic, such as landing pages and link magnets, you'll generate more revenue with the same amount of effort.
Become an industry leader. If you improve your company's online visibility for the most important keywords, you will increase user trust and brand awareness. Because when users search for something related to your services, they will always see your brand at the top of the search engine results.
This will add your brand to the list of industry leaders that immediately come to mind for these users when they are ready to make a purchase.
Gain a competitive advantage. Simply put, ranking higher than your competitors in the SERPs means you get more targeted traffic, leads, sales and money. This helps your business grow faster and outperform the competition in other areas too.
At the end
Search engine positioning is a strategy that, if used wisely, can significantly increase your company's profits. To implement it effectively, you will need to spend some time working on general search engine optimization and permanently place several pages of your website in the top 20.
If your business is already at this stage, you can focus on the pages and keywords that generate the best ROI.
Follow the tips from this guide and perform position tracking for the pages you are focusing on. If you don't see results after a month or two, keep experimenting and working on overall SEO.
