• by Nick Fettiplace , Op-Ed Contributor, September 9, 2015

I’ve been supporting search engine optimization (SEO) for 10 years. One of the questions that I am frequently asked is: "What quick things can I do to get to the top of Google?" Over the years my response to this question has changed.

In the early days the landscape was totally different. It was far less competitive, less saturated with content and users were far less sophisticated in what they demanded online. As such, a search engine’s challenges were considerably different than they are today, with approximately 3.2 billion users of the Internet today and around 3.3 billion average daily searches across Google alone.

About 10 years ago the "boxes that you had to tick" to demonstrate to a search engine that you were the right Web site to rank on page one for a particular set of keywords were far less complex and algorithms were considerably less sophisticated. Simple tactics and techniques could be overnight game-changers and formed the expectation that a handful of ‘quick, top-secret SEO techniques’ could transform a Web site’s performance. As the years have passed, this expectation has established an almost myth-like status…. “Pssst! I hear you work in SEO… Can you give me those secrets? You know the ones I mean… I overheard a guy at the gym talking about them!”

The bad news 

In case you didn’t know, "those" secrets don’t really exist -- certainly not in today’s SEO game. The annual organic ranking-factors report by Searchmetrics highlights approximately 50 of what are deemed to be the most influential signals currently at play, all contributing in varying amounts to how sites fare in the natural SERPs. If you really want to outperform your peers online, chances are that you will need to build a medium- to long-term strategy that addresses as many of these signals as possible. You will need to prove to search robots and users that your Web site and content really does deserve to be more visible than that of your competitors.

There's hope

There are a number of simple and impactful SEO tactics, which are often forgotten, that you can use to improve your Web site's overall performance and visibility. By no means are these the Holy Grail, but they will help your site to perform better and provide some valuable food for thought.

1.     Optimizing listings outside of the big search engines

There is no doubt that the big search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo account for a ton of search online. As such, they are often the first and only places that online marketers look when trying to secure traffic. However, there are alternative places that SEO can factor in -- and for certain industries, such as food, travel and automotive, these alternatives can have an extremely positive impact. Take, for example:

• Listing sites such asCarfax Used Cars, TripAdvisor, Realtor.com & Google+ Local
• App Stores such as Google PlayStore and iTunes
• Listing Apps such as Hotels.com, AirBnB and Yelp

Many of these sites have their own internal algorithms and optimizing toward them can aid the external search visibility of your own site plus provide vast amounts of referral traffic. Furthermore, the quality signals associated with ranking prominently on large authoritative sites are capable of influencing visibility and rankings across large search engines too.

2.     Leverage user-generated content

User Generated Content (UGC) is a force to be reckoned with! Getting customers, consumers and users involved in your content creation is a great way to scale SEO efforts, build out your site’s Information Architecture and generate trust-building consumer-focused content.

In an environment where "content is king," one of the most cost-effective and efficient ways of growing content across your brand’s digital assets is to incentivize others to do it for you!

How does this look in real terms?

• Q&A sections on your Web site
• Forums with relevant topics and conversations
• Surveys to build data sets that can be incorporated into rich media assets
• Customer feedback

Reviews are also great ways to use UGC in building brand authority and trust while contributing to your SEO campaign. Not only do reviews provide fresh, unique content which is keyword-rich, but by using schema code to mark up reviews you will also allow Google to present your reviews and ratings as Rich Snippets and within its Knowledge Graph.

Studies have shown that Rich Snippets and Knowledge Graph content can increase click-through rate (CTR) in search engines by up to 30%.

3. Using paid search to validate your keyword strategy

Within SEO campaigns you won’t necessarily know how profitable a keyword will be until you have invested the time and effort to rank for it. However, this process can be expedited with paid search tests.

Say you have a competitive keyword with 5,000 searches a month, and a much less competitive term getting 250 searches a month; intuition and sheer ambition will often prompt you to invest resource into establishing your site for keyword A. However, a quick paid-search test could show that keyword B produces twice the conversions as keyword A, even with such low search volume. This can then validate focusing your keyword strategy towards the lower volume, less competitive keyword in order to maximize revenue and increase conversions.

The point: insight is incredibly valuable and should be used to help structure and sculpt an informed SEO strategy. Paid search offers some great opportunities to gain this insight.