Experts Edge with Craig Campbell: Website Ranking Strategy for 2021

Attention all publishers, bloggers, website owners, and digital conquerors! We’re looking at you!

It’s time to cut through the nonsense and get straight to the heart of onsite SEO. With 1.7 billion websites competing for attention every single day, how is your website standing out? 

Take control of your onsite SEO, with a sure-fire Website Ranking Guide for 2021 and beyond! Raw, uncensored, and instantly actionable. 

And, to ramp up right away, we’ve got Craig Campbell joining us. SEO specialist, international keynote speaker, and marketing machine. Craig’s breaking down 18 years of digital expertise to help you…

🏆 Take your website to page 1.

📈 Ace your optimization.

📣  Bring in higher onsite traffic, conversions, and click-throughs.

You can also check out the full interview right here

Over to you Craig!

Tell us about yourself and what you do?

I’ve been in the game for 18 years and counting. Starting out in web design and quickly pivoting to SEO and digital. In the early 2000’s I joined a few forums around website visibility tactics, and my interest grew massively from there. 

Fast forward a few years and I’m running my own digital agency, complete with clients, overheads, staff, and all the rest. 9 years down the line, I realized this wasn’t for me, so I closed up shop and went off on my own. 

Today, I spend my time training and consulting for companies, speaking at key events, and running affiliate campaigns. 

I buy and sell websites, changing their monetization methods, scaling them up, and optimizing them to max effect. 

16 hour agency days are now a thing of the past. I choose when and where I want to work!

Has Covid-19 affected the industry much? 

Yes and no. Personally, I didn’t have websites in any affected sectors (travel, etc.) 

In terms of consulting/training and affiliate work, we’re busier than ever. 

The silver lining might be that people realize the importance of digital communication, now more than ever. As unfortunate as the landscape has been for countless people and sectors, there’s strong potential for digital professionals to reassess, upskill and use this time to close the knowledge gap between them and their competitors (especially when it comes to SEO)

What makes a website “Google friendly” in 2021?

Well, straight off the bat, 3 elements have to be taken into account. These being…

Technical ⚙️ – Content✏️ – Link Building 🧱

With technical SEO, you’re looking at things like overall site speed, page loading times, and conversion rate optimization (CRO), i.e getting visitors to take specific actions on site. Things like signing up for a newsletter, downloading a gated article, clicking through to a paid offer, etc. And, as Google continues to develop, factors like mobile-friendliness will take more and more priority as well. 📱

Starting a WordPress site? Learn how to increase your page speed. Zoom! 💨 

Secondly, relevant, engaging, and informative content is a must for any website. This includes supporting pages, blog posts, FAQs, etc. Your content needs to be solving problems and answering questions to carry authority in the eyes of Google. 

Website link building

Link building, in essence, instills credibility

when it comes to search engines. As a website owner, you always want to be increasing the quality and volume of external sites linking back to your page. 

Keep in mind, these elements work hand in hand together. It’s all well and good having a super-fast site with top links, but if you don’t have strong content, your site isn’t going to rank (and vice versa).

One last thing? Don’t obsess over site speed. A 2 second loading time is great (1 second is better). But, attempting to shave off milliseconds won’t make much of a difference to your ranking. Focus on the quality of what’s on the site and keep refining. 

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Moving right along…

Can you expand on Inbound linking strategies? 

Inbound links point to your website from an external website. It’s like campaigning for votes coming through to your website. The more you have and the higher the quality, the better it looks for Google. 

With SEO, back in the day, it didn’t really matter where these links came from, but now the more authority they carry, the better. Your links need to be relevant to the niche you’re in. 

You want to be getting links from websites that carry consistent credibility, ranking potential, and traffic. So, how do you get them? Well, you need to put yourself out there.

Run webinars, write guest posts, speak at conferences and collaborate with other industry professionals. Reach out to other web owners and exchange quality ideas and get links in return. 

Remember, it’s the quality of the link that counts. Anyone can go out and buy Buzzfeed links for $10 apiece. But the web is saturated with these already, and the only way to stand out from the competition is with unique, relevant, and quality links from industry experts in your niche.

What’s the best way to rank with a new website? 

How do you reach profitability with a new site in the shortest time frame? Well, I wouldn’t start from scratch. I’d rather secure an aged domain name with existing backlinks. These domains come with a degree of trust/authority, as well as some foundational backlinks that you can build on from and refine without having to start from square one. 

I tend to not register fresh domains and rather go after established ones that I can purchase from the existing holder, or on auction. 

This gives you a starting point to work with. From there, add a strong content strategy into the mix, secure additional backlinks, and host paid advertising. With any luck and a bit of skill, you’ll be generating profits within two to three months after that. 

How do seasoned publishers take their website to page 1?

At the end of the day, there’s always something more you can do to increase your ranking. A strong SEO strategy can get you to the top end of page 1. However, to hop that extra inch higher (from 3 to 2, or 2 to 1) it becomes less about technical strategy, and more about the overall audience engagement/click-throughs your competitor is getting. 

At this point, if you’re neck and neck with the site above you, you could look at ramping up your paid advertising to reach more traffic. For ad placement tips and strategies, check out the Successful Publisher Guide right here

Other ways include bulking up your email list, driving push notifications, or bringing your existing social media audience through to the site. The idea is to take any audience potential you have on multiple different platforms and condense them onto your site to bolster up your ranking one or two final notches. 

Competitor analysis is also vital. At this level, you need to know EXACTLY what your competitors are doing well so that you can mimic and refine your tactics to draw in the same traffic volumes. 

Look into tools like Page Optimizer Pro. Software like this and others will give you a blueprint of what you should be looking out for and changing on your website. 

If your competition has 1200 words on a given page and you have, say 800, no matter how solid your links, the page won’t rank for the same type of quality. Also, listen to Google. Pay attention and you’ll see what ranks in the top 10 search results.

Keyword research guidelines/strategy?

Any decent site ranks for a whole bunch of different keywords, (upwards of 400 in certain cases), so if you only have 20 keywords that you’re going after, you’ll need to up your game. Look at semantically related keywords, add subheadings and enhance your content quality/scope so that you can squeeze as much juice out of a page as possible. 

When it comes to research, you’ve got the tools at your disposal. Use tools like SEMRush to get the information you need. Try out their Keyword Gap Analysis Tool to see what you and your competitors are ranking for respectively. And, add what you’re missing!

It’s important to audit your site once in a while and compare it to the sites that appear in the top ten search results (in your given niche and/or category). Analyze every piece of content running through that tool and find the suggestions you need in terms of sub-headings, keywords, meta-descriptions, and more. 

Pro tip? Wrap your FAQs in schema tags for your site to rank higher in SERPs. 

Tools like SEMRush and others basically give you a to-do list that you can tick off as you go. Follow this and your ranking increases exponentially. Invest a bit of money and get the tools you need to succeed. 

Other tools include GTMetrix for a page speed evaluation and SEOoptimer for a free site audit.

For around $40, you can also get Page Optimizer Pro for advanced optimization and ranking. 

When your site is primed and ready to monetize,

Any final thoughts? 

SEO hasn’t changed that much since the earlier days. The type and quality of links/content evolve from year to year, but the fundamentals stay the same. 

Keep your finger on the pulse of any new industry updates, stay consistent and embrace new trends as they arise. Keep an open mind when running your SEO strategy and always get the basics right and build on them constantly. 

All the best with your site optimization tactics for 2021 and beyond! 

Reach out to Craig for a personalized consultation. Stay up to date with the latest SEO trends and strategies on YouTube, or shoot the breeze with him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

That’s it from us. Thanks to Craig and catch you on the next Experts Edge. Feel free to leave any comments, questions, or queries in the box below, and let us know if there’s anything we missed. 

Bye for now!