For any website or blog, creating great content is just half of the equation because you need people to find the content. Creating and posting great content is not going to be effective if it does not rank. Also, you want visitors to see your content as soon as possible before the content gets stale or your competitors post similar content. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to get your content to rank quickly, and we are going to look at the most effective ones below.
Use Available Tools
In the world of SEO, there is a tool for everything you want to do and accomplish. The same goes for ranking content quickly. The main tool you should be using is the URL inspection tool provided by Google.
The tool is available in the new Search Console, and it is used to tell Google about the content that you want them to index and rank. To do this, you have to submit a link to Google using the link, and this will alert Google there is new content to index.
Understand that Google has a crawl queue because new pages and posts are being added to the internet all the time. When you use the URL inspection tool, you tell Google to add your content to the priority crawl queue. By doing so, they crawl your content faster, which means it gets indexed and ranked faster.
Ensure Your Sitemaps are Updated Regularly
A sitemap contains links to all the content on your website. Depending on your preferences, this can range from textual content and images to videos and audio. Having a sitemap and submitting it to search engines is the first thing you do when you start a new blog or website.
When you have URLs in your sitemap(s), that signals to search engines that they should crawl these URLs. You should set up your sitemap to update regularly as you add new content to the site. If you are using a content management system, this is rather easy to do as there are numerous tools for this.
If you have several sitemaps, you can add them to your robots.txt files to let crawlers know about existing URLs. You can also ping (alert) Google about new sitemaps. You do this by typing google.com/ping into a browser’s address bar and then adding a sitemap at the end. An example submission would look like this: google.com/ping?sitemap=https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.
Use Relevant Links
A link structure is crucial for helping Google and other search engines understand your content and other things like context and content importance/hierarchy.
Once you create new content, the bare minimum you should do is link to it from important pages on your website. These include the blog page or homepage, both of which should already be added to your sitemaps and therefore crawled and indexed.
If you do not do this, those pages will become orphan pages, risk being forgotten, and will have a lower probability of being ranked. Another thing people do not know is that Google will index your content faster if it has at least one line. A link from an important or high authority page on your website is great, but an external link is better.
When you do this, you tell search engines that you want them to crawl these pages, and this is why you have linked to them. The right links also tell search engines about quality signals and context so they can rank the content better.
Take Advantage of Older Content
Every website owner knows that they need to update older content from time to time. This refreshes it and makes it rank better since an update makes it more relevant. What you might not know is that your old content can help your new content rank quicker.
The way you do this is by going through your older posts to find ones where you can link to your new content. You should find the right pages to use for this. You can find these by searching your website or social media.
Search for the keyword on your site to find related content you can use or link building. The second way is by using a search engine. You do this by entering “site:yoursite.com keyword” on a search engine, making sure to substitute the URL and keyword for those you want to use.
This ensures all the pages you find are relevant to your keywords. This is also a great way of finding link-building opportunities.
Share on Social Media
Social media remains one of the most important tools for all types of marketers. Sharing new content is a great way of getting it to rank faster because studies show there is a direct link between social shares and impressions and how fast content ranks.
When doing this, it is best to use content aggregators like Reddit. These platforms generate internal links that Google crawls. These work well for new content because they are external signals that Google and other search engines consider when ranking content.
Target Queries that Require Freshness
Google is always looking for the freshest content on a subject. People need to know about things that are happening or will happen in the near future. Both of these scenarios allow you to create fresh content that Google will rank quickly.
A good example is “Restaurants open Independence Day Weekend 2022”. Google is looking for content that will help people find an open restaurant on this day and so content around that subject will rank faster.
Apart from things that will happen soon, you can also check older content to see how fresh it is. As content lives on a website, it becomes outdated and its relevance decreases. Use a date query on a search engine to find out how fresh content is and write new content around the subject.
Getting your content to rank quicker is something all marketers and website owners should aim for. Although there is a lot to know and understand, there are some basics that you should always follow. Basics like making it easier to crawl your content and link building will allow you to rank content faster even when things around you are changing.
