People like results. Speculation is a thing of the past. So, to commemorate the present and the future, I decided to ask 36 SEOs about their number one SEO trick that they have employed and achieved results from. Here’s what they had to say.

SEO Trick #1: Sustain Your SEO

Michael Klein, the SEO Account Manager at Be Found Online shared the following from his personal SEO experience:

The truth is, sustainable SEO has evolved beyond the old standard of tricks. Sure, you can probably still find a shortcut or two to increase rankings, but it’s generally going to be in the short term. Sustainable SEO for the long haul really relies on content, both creation and distribution. As always, find a way to create a sustainable content creation plan and promote the heck out of it!

SEO Trick #2: Use The Upcoming Year

Craig Streaman, a Freelance Digital Marketer, reminded us of a very interesting angle:

Most sites can get extra traction by promoting their product/content with the upcoming year. For example, “Best Dishwashers for 2017” is a great blog post to create now, to produce incremental traffic growth during the upcoming year.

SEO Trick #3: Synonyms + Internal Links

Leo Welder, Founder of ChooseWhat.com, share his tried and tested ranking technique:

Two of my top search phrases are synonyms, so I changed one of my website’s highest value pages and I only used one of the two synonyms on that page, then I took another high value page covering the same topic, but used the other synonym to describe the term. I also did the same work on the title tags, description tags and alt tags and created internal links to the pages with the targeted phrases as anchor texts. After that work, both pages started ranking much higher for each keyword.

SEO Trick #4: Geotagging

Bernard D. Lee, President of Charlotte Search Engine Consultants, shared one extremely overlooked SEO trick:

We are often surprised by how seldom companies are utilizing geotagging. Geotag.Online is a free site that geotags images with the Google coordinates of your business address. You then combine this with another free service, LSIGraph.com to create a number of related keywords to rename the additional images that you’d like to geotag. For local businesses this tactic can be done pretty quickly, it’s free and can impact your rankings within weeks. We’ve use this tactic for our local clients and its extremely powerful.

SEO Trick #5: Compress Images

Dalton K. Finney, Sr. SEO Analyst at Be Found Online, focused more on site speed:

Page load time is increasingly important to SEO success. Google considers it a ranking factor. And, users expect your page to be increasingly faster. A quick way to improve your page load time is by compressing large, high resolution images. Images are often the biggest culprit of a slow page load time. It’s even easier if you have a WordPress site! Use a plugin such as WP Smush. It’s easy to use and will show benefits quickly.

SEO Trick #6: Consolidation & 301 Redirects

Brett Bastello, the SEO Manager at Inseev Interactive, shared his effective SEO trick involving a few blog posts and 301 redirects:

When I have multiple blog posts covering a similar topic, I’ll take two or three of the lowest performing pieces, consolidate their content, and addend it onto the best performing piece to create a much more comprehensive and authoritative piece on the subject matter. Then, I’ll 301 redirect these low performing URLs to the new in-depth guide on the high performing URL, giving it a massive SEO boost. Finally, I’ll go out and promote this new ultimate guide with the intention of building backlinks.

SEO Trick #7: Streamline Your Keyword Targeting

Matt Sideris, the Digital Marketing Manager at Cashbacker, wants you to focus your keyword efforts:

Ensure that keyword targeting is as streamlined as possible to help Google determine which pages to rank for specific terms. A common issue is to target a term, or close variant on multiple pages which can lead to Google being confused as to which of the pages to rank, thus causing page switching in the SERPs and the results to bounce in and out. So always be specific, concise and effective with your page keyword targeting.

SEO Trick #8: Monitor HARO

Stoney G. deGeyter, CEO & Project Manager at PolePositionMarketing.com, is following HARO very closely:

Don’t tell anyone, but my secret SEO trick is to monitor HARO for branding and linking opportunities. You never know when someone needs help or feedback for an article covering a topic in your area of expertise. Well, actually, you do, because HARO will let you know! I often find something relevant once or twice a month. If your feedback is valuable it will often be included in the published article, which is usually accompanied with a link back to your website. And if not, it’s a way to get your company name in front of a whole new set of people who are also interested in the same topic. Also known as, potential customers!

SEO Trick #9: Mirroring Competitor Advantages

Richard Ortiz, an SEO Strategist at BAYADA Home Health Care, is obviously pretty good at using a competitor’s advantage and turning it into his own:

I am a huge fan of mirroring a competitor advantage, improving it, and adopting it as my own. When it comes to link building, I always put together a spreadsheet of my backlinks and my top 3 – 5 competitors. With a pivot table and a few added formulas, I can highlight which competitors share a backlink to the same domain and my website is missing. These turn out to be highly relevant link opportunities. There are a few tools out there that have this feature but I’ve found that you only need a spreadsheet and a backlink analysis tool.

SEO Trick #10: The Seven Essential SEO Tricks

Jeremiah Rizzo, the Content Marketing Director at Theatre Solutions Inc., shared his essential list of top 7 SEO tricks with us:

1. Search your keyword in Google, grab their recommended keywords, then sprinkle them throughout your post. I’ve seen this help me rank for more than one keyword. 2. Use emotional words in the meta title to drive up click-through rates. 3. Go to Wikipedia, find an article on your topic, and add a piece of info and cite it. 4. Email your list, input a share to social media button sharing the post, and just ask them to click it (or offer an incentive). Drives up social signals. 5. Practice copywriting – write in a super conversational way, ask – would I read the next sentence if I were them? Improves duration, and increases your ranking signal. 6. Put a video at the top of the post, that will increase time on page, a ranking signal for how valid and useful your content is. 7. Read everything that Backlinko writes. It just works.

SEO Trick #11: Conduct Reddit AMAs

Brandon Schroth, the Marketing Coordinator of The Gantry Restaurant & Bar, shared an interesting technique for improving brand awareness:

One of my favorite marketing strategies for helping our restaurant stand out is conducting a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). This is a fantastic way to put the brand directly in front of its target audience. It provides people from all over the world the chance to ask direct questions to an expert. This can create the perfect environment for high user engagement that is contextually relevant. The best part about it? It’s fun! And it only takes about an hour of your time. We did a Reddit AMA a couple months ago where our culinary expert and Executive Chef Joel Bickford, was on hand to answer questions from everyone. The user engagement was phenomenal and we were able to get a ton of great exposure.

SEO Trick #12: Use Google My Business

Brian Gill, Founder & CEO of Gillware Data Recovery, was more focused on local SEO in his tip:

Google My Business is a really important tool that more local businesses should take advantage of. Local SEO is getting more competitive each and every day, especially with Google on the verge of implementing paid local ads. One of the main benefits is that It’s free to use, and it gives local businesses a way to manage their online presence by verifying and updating important information. It’s critical for helping customers find you easily. The best part? When optimized correctly, the page shows up above normal organic search results. Invest the time into creating and maintaining a Google My Business listing as well as the supporting local elements, and you’ll reap the benefits of higher placement and greater visibility for your brand.

SEO Trick #13: Use Majestic

Brandon Welch, Founder & CEO of Doxy.me, recommended using one of the best website auditing tools on the market:

My best marketing tip is definitely to use Majestic. SEO is really important for our brand and this platform includes tons of neat tools that really help our team do their job more efficiently. It’s extremely helpful for analyzing links and figuring out whether or not you should be approaching certain websites for link acquisition. One of their newest features is a tool called “Clique Hunter”. All you have to do is enter a few of your competitor’s websites and it will show you other sites that link to them, but haven’t actually linked to you yet. This is a very effective method of unearthing new opportunities for link building.

SEO Trick #14: Look For Dead Backlinks On Other Sites

Noel McCann, a Marketing Analyst at HomeSuite Inc., shared his quest for dead backlinks on the Internet:

Whenever I run into a dead link on a relevant page, I find the contact information for the site’s webmaster and send him or her an email. By reporting a dead link, I can communicate with webmasters without the awkwardness of sending a cold email. This strategy also helps webmasters maintain their respective sites, so they’re more willing to link to my company’s site to show their thanks.

SEO Trick #15: Use Airbnb For High Quality Backlinks

Staheen Adibi, a Senior Inbound Strategist at Iterate Marketing, told us how he gets backlinks from Airbnb:

Everyone should know about the power of gathering local reviews in order to boost the performance of a local business, but one of the most powerful optimizations I’ve found for a local link building is that Airbnb rooms have the

ability to create local guides. As of now these provide do-follow links (the most valuable kind) directly from a high authority site to your business and are usually duplicated across their foreign domains.

SEO Trick #16: Alt Tags & Long-Tail Keywords

Rebecca Harpain, Founder & Boss Lady of Dual Arrow Marketing, told us about her little SEO trick with image alt tags:

I like to utilize alt tags for long tail keywords. Instead of listing an alt tag for an image product A, I would give the alt tag a complete description, like Joe Schmo uses product A to help him with blank. He considers it easy to do x, y, and z thanks to product A, on sale now here at yoursite.com.

SEO Trick #17: Relevant Content & Backlinks To Credible Sources

David James, Founder of Business Growth Digital Marketing, shared a classic technique for improving your SEO:

The main thing that I aim to do is publish relevant content that is focused towards a keyword. I then place the content within a relevant category and build links to the page itself and category pages. I also link out to credible sources when I can. It seems to work fairly well.

SEO Trick #18: Use Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer

Sean Hall, Owner of TekBoost, shared his experience with the Fresh Web Explorer of Moz:

One of my favorite tools for unearthing new SEO opportunities is the Fresh Web Explorer from Moz. This allows users to analyze mentions of their brand, competitors, or any other key terms that are of interest. Once a mention is found, outreach can be conducted to try and turn it into a link. I’ve seen great success from this tool, often times from sources that I never would have found without it. Also, there’s a ton of different search operators that allow users to hunt creatively.

SEO Trick #19: Use The CTR Magnet Technique

David Attard, Founder of CollectiveRay, shared a not-so-popular SEO trick concerning click-through rates:

One of the little known SEO secrets is the CTR magnet technique. This works best for articles where you are ranking in relatively high positions and need a boost over your competition. What you need to do is study the SERP titles competing against you and then create an article title which, besides being rich in keywords, is also bound to attract the attention of the user searching and scanning the search results. With a great title, your CTR while soar and Google will then boost your position further. A typical high CTR title contains a strong emotion (positive or negative), an odd number or a year, brackets, and a magnet phrases such as how-to, what is, boost, awesome and others. We’ve seen increases in traffic of up to 306% using this secret.

SEO Trick #20: Offer Discounts

Marisa South, General Manager of Vet & Pet Jobs, showed us the SEO side of offering discounts:

I’ve seen great SEO value and success with offering discounts for the services we provide. Our business is called Vet & Pet Jobs, and we’re a career website for employers and job seekers in the veterinary field. We target veterinary clinics and offer discounts to them if they place job ads on our site. Overall, it’s a great way to encourage other websites to link to your site, while also gaining exposure and leads.

SEO Trick #21: Know Your Website’s Location

Shannon Steffen, a Marketing SEO Strategist at Herzing University, said that people need to be aware of their hosting’s location:

Know where your website’s server is located. If it’s in Brazil and your target market is in the U.S., it will be almost impossible for you to reach it. Check with your web host to ensure that your server is located within your target market’s geographic location. If not, pay the extra money to move your server’s location. Google will thank you later.

SEO Trick #22: Create Easy-To-Understand & Educational Content

Daid Klein, the Director of Marketing & Communications at ClickTime, shared an SEO technique that works well for him and his company:

We create easy-to-understand, educational content on topics that our customers care about deeply. For example, we wanted to help businesses better understand the new overtime regulations that go into effect later this year. The rules can be confusing, so we built an online overtime guide, which we populated with relevant overtime keywords. This page now ranks third for overtime tracking and has helped many organizations prepare for the new rules.

SEO Trick #23: Remove Your Crap URLs From Google

Joe Goldstein from Navolutions, shared his favorite SEO trick:

Google “site:mydomain.com”, click through to the last page, and then click repeat the search with the omitted results included. Make a list of all the useless, outdated, empty, broken, and duplicate URLs that Google sees on your site. Delete those from your site, or add meta robots noindex tags to pages you just don’t want to show up on Google. That will help reclaim your authority for the pages you want to rank most.

SEO Trick #24: Use Google +1 Buttons

Andrew Lee Miller, an SEO & Startup Marketing Consultant at andrewleemiller.com, shared with us, a less popular but still effective SEO trick:

It’s a little known secret that if you place a Google +1 button on new pages and instruct employees, social media followers and friends to +1 the page en masse, you will quickly get it indexed within hours and not weeks. This has worked for me on several occasions and saves tons of time on getting rankings.

SEO Trick #25: Use Sub-Folders & Not Sub-Domains

Kaitlin McMichael, Founder of Kate Ideas Marketing, shared an SEO trick that all online companies should use:

Host blog content on a sub-folder, not a sub-domain. This year, I helped migrate several sub-domains to sub-folders on one domain. Year-over-year organic traffic is now over 2 times what it was compared to all the sub-domains’ traffic combined. Sub-domains are treated as separate websites, so when you put your blog or other content on a sub-domain, you are wasting the opportunity to build authority to your main domain. The best practice is to 301 redirect the sub-domain to a sub-folder. In other words, http://www.example.com/blog is much better than http://blog.example.com.

SEO Trick #26: Host Local Scholarships

Bryan Clayton, CEO of GreenPal, shared his favorite tactic for building up local domain authority:

What we do is post the $500 or $1,000 dollar scholarship in the state that we’re targeting and then reach out to local high schools and local universities to let them know about that scholarship and for them to link to the application page. They are usually willing to do this as it helps their students so it’s a win-win proposition. This is a great way to build up local links and high authority local links boosting your domain’s authority and establishing local singles at the same time at a relatively low cost.

SEO Trick #27: Title Tags & Meta Descriptions Adapted To AdWords Text Ads

Dave Hermansen from Store Coach Inc., shared a very interesting way of creating titles and descriptions:

When we are building a new website, we pay particular attention to title tags and meta descriptions because they definitely have an effect on click-through rates and may also influence search rankings. Since they have been split tested many times in order to get the best click-through rates, we look at the AdWords text ads that companies are using and construct our title tags and meta descriptions around the ad titles and descriptions that companies have already proven to work well.

SEO Trick #28: Target Your Audience Properly

Matthew Mercuri, a Digital Marketing Specialist at ERA Environmental Solutions, shared one of his best SEO tips for small businesses:

Most small businesses try to get awareness from random people. It doesn’t work. What you should be doing is interacting with people who you have already done business with. When your clients and customers get a follow on Twitter, they’re significantly more likely to follow you back. Moreover, you need to narrow down and eliminate the people most likely to ignore you on social media. Ashton Kutcher will not be your friend online, nor will Kim Kardashian. But, the local bakery owner will. Your sister, best friend and family will. You need to do whatever it takes to get a base. This base will allow you to successfully publish content while tapping into the network of that base. The people who go to your site are those that will help generate traffic and revenue. That traffic will then proliferate to others in an exponential fashion. This is what SEO is all about – starting with nothing and making something!

SEO Trick #29: Improve Your Google PageSpeed Insights Score

Scott Ruzal, a Marketing Professional & Director of Accounts at a marketing and advertising agency based in Edgewater, New Jersey, shared a speed SEO trick with us:

Many bloggers would be surprised by how significantly they can improve search rankings for all of their blog posts by improving their score in Google’s

PageSpeed Insights. For sites built using WordPress, Squarespace, or other website building platforms, improving search rankings can be as simple as installing a plugin to optimize image file sizes, leverage browser caching, or eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in your site’s header. Google and other search engines weigh these aspects of your site first and foremost in determining where your blog ranks among competitors.

SEO Trick #30: Optimize Speed & Mobile Experience

Brock Murray, Co-Founder & COO at seoplus+, shared his number one SEO tip:

Site speed is a huge priority for Google and it is continuing to become more and more important for your rankings. For example, the recent introduction of the AMP carousel, which prioritizes sites optimized for mobile when searching through a mobile device. It doesn’t matter how well-optimized or interesting your content is. If your site doesn’t load fast enough, users will leave and your rankings will suffer. With more and more customer searches coming from mobile, this should be a big SEO priority for your business.

SEO Trick #31: Add A Top Products Section

Andriy Starchenko, the SEM/SEO Manager at StickerYou, reminded us of the effectiveness of top product pages:

We’ve added a top products section on our blog, which included links to our top selling and most competitive products. This gave a boost of over 220 relevant links to those three product pages and helped us move up in rankings by 0.5 to 1 positions. Try it for your own e-commerce site, and you will see a boost, guaranteed!

SEO Trick #32: Localize Pages

Vicky Llerena, CEO of Social Vibes Media, told us more about localizing FAQ pages:

If you are trying to target several cities in your area, but your office or store front is based in one city, try creating internal pages within your website that contain a FAQ page for that particular city. More specifically, you might end up with ten internal FAQ pages but each page is unique because it contains the city name throughout that page. Google algorithms will connect the users’ search terms with your website’s search terms if the user initiates search from that particular city – it’s a match!

SEO Trick #33: Link Out TO Authority Sites & Find Broken Links

Ajao Boluwatife, Founder of Nigconnect Forum, shared the SEO technique that worked well for him:

Well, I have tried various SEO techniques but the ones that did the trick was linking to at least 3 authority sites in each post i created and backlink building by finding broken links in top websites using a broken links checker and contacting them providing them an alternative to use my website links in place of the broken links. My website isn’t highly ranked though, probably because it’s a month and some days old but my traffic has increased using those SEO techniques and it’s only a matter of time for my forum to hit the top.

SEO Trick #34: Ping Sites

Shane Martin, an SEO Architect at Incredible Marketing, shared his simple SEO trick:

To get blog posts ranked quickly I have compiled a large list of sites that get pinged each time a new post has been published. The list has grown to well over 100 sites.

SEO Trick #35: Buy Expired Domains

AJ Saleem, Owner of Suprex Tutors Houston, shared his top SEO trick with us:

Buy expired competitor websites with strong domain authority. Simply purchasing a website with strong domain authority and linking to your website boosts your website’s rank immediately.

SEO Trick #36: Consistent Content Refresh

Danyal Effendi, the Digital Marketing Manager of PureVPN, shared his best SEO trick for rankings increase:

Refreshing your content every 2 – 3 months helps you improve and maintain search rankings. Content including the relevant keywords, phrases that users search for and quality external links will increase your Domain Authority as well as ranking.

Summary

So there you have it guys. 36 SEO tricks that other marketers have used to achieve some results. Whether it’s rankings, awareness, exposure, etc you are striving for, I hope that you found something useful that will help you with your own search engine optimization.