In this post, I'm going to cover growth hacking in principle and specifically one part of growth hacking, which is improving the ranking of a website.

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What is Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking was first invented by startups looking for a way to generate more reach for their business. Since startups often have very little capital available, they needed a strategy that would do just that.

Growth hacking is exactly this marketing strategy. The motto is "Achieve maximum growth with minimum expenses". Growth Hacking uses a lot of free tools, always works with the latest trends and involves a lot of creativity, as you always have to look for new ways to achieve the best possible results.

Also free is our Content Marketing Whitepaper, in which we explain step by step how you can increase your ranking and reputation through content. And here you can download it for free!

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Growth Hacking = Ranking Improvement?

Ranking a website at the top of the top 3 search results is definitely not easy. It requires patience and a lot of work.

Even before you have the website created, you should think about the ranking of the website. Among the most important ranking factors of Google are:

• Loading speed
• Backlinks
• Meta data (of each individual URL)
• Number of words
• Keywords

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Website loading speed

The first point is the loading speed, as you can pay attention to it while creating the website.

The loading speed of the website is of course also dependent on the hosting provider. I would always recommend a hosting provider that has its server location in the EU, as they have to follow strict guidelines and are usually the faster servers.

Of course, you can also contribute a lot to the loading speed of the website. The images on the website must be taken into account.

It is recommended to compress them and edit them in the best possible way so that the quality loss is only slight. This will significantly improve the loading speed.

Furthermore, you should definitely set up an SSL certificate, as this is enormously important for the security of the website.

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High quality keywords

"How do I find the right keywords?"

So much is discussed and written about this topic that most SEO novices have great difficulty keeping track of it all.

The first thing to do is to look at your competitors' websites and see what keywords they use and how high they rank for those keywords.

This can be easily found out by entering the keywords in the search bar and looking where the competition ranks. It is recommended to use a tool for the keyword search. A free tool is for example Ubersuggest.

Home page of the tool provider Ubersuggest

In this tool you can also enter the domain of the competition and you can see exactly for which keyword they rank and which keywords they use. In addition, you can also enter individual keywords in the tool and you will get accurate data that will help you choose useful keywords.

Lastly, you can simply ask friends and family what they would type into the search bar if they were looking for your product or service.

When it comes to creating landing pages, it is worth asking your own sales department about the most common terms used in customer conversations. These should then be taken into account when optimizing a website.

Many SEO novices choose keywords that are extremely often searched for, but are at least as highly contested. An example of this is the keyword "SEO". Since many different websites try to rank with this keyword, it is extremely difficult to become visible at all.

A healthy balance between search frequency and competition is recommended here.

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Meta data

Meta data is the short description of a website. This is very important for Google, as it provides the user with a mini-summary of the website.

Without a good meta description it will be very difficult to rank high with a website. It is also important to use the right keywords in the meta description, both in the title and in the description.

A tool that is very helpful for creating a meta description is the SERP Snippet Generator by Sistrix.

Home page of the SERP snippet generator from SISTRIX

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Backlinks

Building backlinks is one of the most important measures to rank a website high.

As soon as your website is linked on another website, Google sees this as a recommendation and automatically ranks your website higher.

To build backlinks, blogs are best recommended. Of course, you should not take just any blogs, but only those that fit your own product or service.

Many blogs are specifically looking for guest authors. Therefore, it makes sense to contact said blogs specifically and not beat around the bush.

If the article goes online on the corresponding blog, the result is a win-win situation: the owner of the blog gets a free article and avoids costs for freelancers or in-house writers, and you, the website owner, generate high-quality backlinks.

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Number of words and titles

The number of words on a website is often underestimated, as are the titles.

The number of words is very important for the Google algorithms, otherwise they often don't recognize what your website is about at all.

There is no exact, perfect number of words. However, I would recommend a minimum length of about 1000 words per page. However, websites that rank very highly also have around 2500 words per page.

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Conclusion

As you can see, it's not that easy to get a website to rank high. Especially if you are in an industry that is highly competitive.

If you have plenty of time and want to deal with it yourself, it's perfectly possible to do all the actions yourself.

However, I would always recommend hiring professionals, as they often know their way around better and are also informed about all updates. Especially in the field of search engine optimization, the rules of the game change again and again in short intervals, which is why it makes sense to think about a professional Growth Hacking Agency think about.

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