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SEO has a bad reputation as one of the most difficult parts of marketing to be successful.

We won't say that SEO is easy, but we also don't want you to believe that increasing your SEO rankings is so unattainable. When it comes to your SEO strategy, you can pursue a long-term, super complex strategy that will land you as the first search result for a search term.

And you can pursue a short-term SEO strategy that will only help you improve your rankings. It doesn't have to be overly complex and most of it can be done in a matter of hours.

We'll focus on the latter in this article and show you the small ways you can improve your SEO ranking. These are all tasks that you can do in a few hours of work and that can make a big difference in the future.

Quick Tip: Use these tips for your new content so you don’t have to add it later.

Here are 5 little ways to improve your SEO ranking.

# 1: Structure your content for readability

Part of the SEO ranking factor of a website page is the page duration, including how long the visitor has spent on this page. There are several ways to ensure that visitors don't bounce off your page (we'll talk more about that later). One of the most important options is to make your content reader friendly.

For example, in all of our DigitalMarketer articles, you'll notice that we have headings, bold text, italic text, emojis, images, and bullets. Our goal is to get you to read our content, not see a text wall and walk in the other direction.

Here's an example from our article (case study) of how DigitalMarketer reduced our cost per conversion by over 50% in less than 7 days.

To make our content reader friendly, we use:

• H2, H3 and H4 headers
• Bold and italic to break up long sections of text or to emphasize a particular sentence
• Emojis to add color and familiarity to our content
• Images as good as possible so you can see what we're talking about instead of just reading about it
• Bullets to clarify our point of view without adding unnecessary filler words

All of this helps our website visitors to get to an article, a sales page or a landing page and scan them to determine whether the content is the one they want. If the answer is yes, stay for a while and read what we have to say.

In addition to making our content easier to read for people, it also helps Google bots determine SEO rankings. If we use keywords in our headers, we can show Google that it is the keyword we want to rank for. This should not be confused with filling your headers with your keywords to ensure that your content feels unnatural and high-turnover.

You can use the structure of this article as a blueprint for your own article. You can also check our sales and landing pages to see how we've structured them to be human and Google Bot friendly.

# 2: correct your broken links

That may not sound like a big deal, but if your content is full of broken links that lead to 404 pages, your readers and Google will be disappointed with you.

On the reader side, you end up with a poor user experience if you want to click through to read or view other content that you have told them about and the links are broken regularly. For someone new to your brand and in the engagement phase of the customer value journey, they will subconsciously judge that you may not be absolutely trustworthy.

At this stage, you want your leads to see you as someone who always keeps their promises. 404 pages don't tell them that.

On the Google bot page, 404 pages indicate that your website visitors come to your page and leave it immediately. This is because every time a visitor sees a 404 page, it jumps off that page in a matter of seconds. Since there is no content for them, they have no reason to stay with them.

This tells Google that your website is not offering the value a visitor is hoping for and your credibility will decrease. If your credibility declines, Google will favor other websites with similar content that don't have high bounce rates.

There are two types of broken backlinks that you want to fix:

1. Internal backlinks from one page of your website to another
2. Outbound backlinks from another website to your website

# 3: Don't skip your meta description

While your meta description has nothing to do with your SEO ranking for the content you entered, it does affect whether people click your content or not. You can improve your SEO ranking by having a killer meta description that makes people feel that it is IMPOSSIBLE not to click on your article.

Your meta description is the excerpt under the title of your page or your contribution to Google. For example, here is the website's meta description for our annual Traffic & Conversion Summit.

The meta description is the section entitled "The Premier Gathering of Digital Marketers on Planet Earth!". The goal of this meta description is to arouse curiosity in the person who was looking for our summit to click and learn more. What does a first-class meeting of digital marketers look like? Well, you have to click to find out.

A meta description can refer to a landing or sales page of your website or to a blog post. When writing a meta description for a blog post, you want to make sure you show what the reader will learn and plant a seed of curiosity so that they are motivated to find out.

For example, here is an example of a meta description in our article: How to attract your ideal customer::

Attracting your ideal customer doesn't have to be stunning. With the help of 1 tool you can successfully win and convert your dream customers.

The title of the article and the first sentence in the meta description tell the reader that he will learn how to attract his ideal customer and it will not be as difficult as he thought. The second sentence, in which the "1 tool" is mentioned, is a seed of curiosity that helps you to choose our article over the one mentioned in the search results below.

Use your meta description to attract additional attention and motivate searchers to choose your content over others.

# 4: Update and republish older content

Efficiency is the key to every part of your marketing strategy (from content to SEO to social networks). If your website already has blog posts, you don't necessarily have to write brand new content regularly. What about the post from a year ago that worked well, but page views are getting lower month by month?

Instead of leaving it in the purgatory of the blog post, bring it back to the front.

You can go through old blog posts to see what you can add to them, update the information, or just improve it and then republish it on a new date. To be clear, you don't even have to create a new post. You can simply change the post's publication date to republish it.

We do this regularly at DigitalMarketer with our detailed articles on everything you need to know. These are the ultimate guides to content marketing, digital advertising, customer acquisition, etc. As we are in an industry where strategies change fairly quickly, we are constantly updating them to make them valuable for the current moment.

By updating our guides for everything you need to know with strategies that are working right now, we are making them very valuable to our readers (they provide everything you need to know on the subject from a single source).

By republishing, we are showing Google that this new information is not outdated old content from more than 1 year ago.

# 5: Prioritize your content

What happens when you read an interesting headline, click the link to learn more about the article, and instantly with a drop-down ad, an ad on the content page, ads that are distributed every few paragraphs of the article, and an ad to be bombarded comes from the bottom of the page?

We rarely think, "Wow, that's a great experience!" We hardly keep an eye before we click on our web browser again.

This website owner can say goodbye to the page duration and welcome an increased bounce rate.

While it is extremely tempting to place pop-ups, Google ads, or ads for your own products on your website, it is a dangerous SEO game. You end up losing more than your profit and this loss outstrips your SEO ranking.

The high bounce rate has a negative impact on your ranking, but it also has a negative impact on the way your website visitors see your brand. If they know you are going to bombard them with ads if they are just trying to read an article, how will they feel comfortable when they give you their credit card?

When you focus on your SEO strategy, you usually focus on the first three to four phases of the customer value journey. They focus on getting people to subscribe to your Tripwire or even convert them. If someone thinks your website page is a digital billboard, they won't believe that the emails you send them will be very different.

They will worry that you are only trying to make the sale and will not help them solve their problem.

Guess what that does with your clickthrough rate. Yes, you guessed it. 📉

Always prioritize your content first so that you can build a trustworthy relationship with your new website visitor. This increases your page duration (and your SEO ranking) and your chances of turning this visitor into a lead.

As promised, these are all quick ways to improve your SEO ranking – without having to spend hours and hours (or dollars and dollars) getting the results you want.

And remember, these aren't just tips you can use on your current website. You can also use them when creating all of your future content so that you are the most efficient SEO marketer.

And who doesn't like the sound?