You’ve seen tons of articles and resources on how to boost your search ranking and get to the top. You’ve even implemented those ideas and managed to achieve a top three ranking in search results.
That’s fantastic!
However, you might have a hard time finding resources that will guide you on how to remain at that position.
So I’d like to provide a few effective tips you can use to maintain your top three search ranking position.
Keep Creating Fresh Content
Since the Google Caffeine update, content freshness has become one of the most important ranking factors. The update was launched to ensure that the search engine can improve the efficiency with which it crawls and stores data. It has also managed to provide much fresher results in searches.
At the same time, it brought about a need for webmasters and website owners to ensure that their site always has fresh content.
That’s why if you wish to maintain your top three position in search results, your content should always remain fresh. This involves creating new pages and blog posts, updating your old content with new information and new keywords, and more.
According to Moz, changes to core content is more important than making insignificant changes to other aspects of the page such as comments, date/time tags, and JavaScript.
Before updating your page content or creating new pages, you should also conduct thorough keyword research. For this, you can use the Google Keyword Planner, which you’re likely already familiar with. Look for keywords that are trending at the moment and use them to replace the ones you’ve been using if they’re no longer popular.
Keep an Eye on Your Competitors
It’s not enough that you keep making an internal effort to maintain your top three search ranking. You need to realize that your competitors are trying to get ahead of you at all times. So even if you keep updating your content every now and then, there will come a day your competitors will beat you in rankings if you don’t keep an eye on what they’re doing.
And for this, I highly recommend Ubersuggest by Neil Patel. The tool gives you a highly detailed look at sites that are ranking organically for specific keywords. This way, you can find out which of your competitors are trying to rank for the keywords that you’re ranking on top for. And you can then take preventative measures to try and retain your position for said keywords.
Additionally, the tool also helps you determine which of your competitors are investing in pay-per-click campaigns. This report is highly useful for understanding which competitors you should watch out for and when you should start your own campaign.
Ubersuggest has a competitive overview section, which showcases a list of all your competitors along with their ad copy. So you can see just how tough the competition is and determine a way to beat them with a better ad copy. What I really like about this tool is that despite being highly comprehensive, it is accessible for free.
Maintain Good Social Signals
Social signals have been considered among the top search ranking factors by Backlinko. Although social shares and engagement may not have a direct impact on your ranking, Backlinko suggests that they improve your website’s overall authority. In addition to this, they indirectly affect your ranking by driving more traffic and helping you gain quality backlinks.
So the obvious point here is that you need to continue maintaining good social signals if you wish to remain in the top three position in search results. First of all, you need to be active as possible on social media. There’s a good chance you already have a posting schedule. But there’s no harm in experimenting with your posting frequency and timing to see if there’s a way to further improve engagement.
Additionally, your posts and captions should always content a relevant keyword. This will ensure the visibility of said post with a relevant audience. And with a relevant audience noticing your content, you could improve the chances of driving clicks and shares. This will, in turn, help you ensure that your position always remains in the top three even when there are competitors trying to get ahead of you.
You can further improve your social engagement with the help of social listening tools such as Sentione. This tool helps you keep track of social media mentions about your brand, so you can react and engage accordingly. You’ll also be able to keep track of conversations that contain certain keywords relevant to your product. The more engaged your audience is, the better your social signal.
Streamline Your Monitoring
One of the most important rules to maintaining your search ranking is that you should always remain alert. This means you need to keep track of everything that could have an impact on your ranking. And if there’s even a slight change in your performance, you should take immediate action to prevent your ranking from being affected.
However, monitoring everything can be time-consuming and challenging. I recommend using business dashboards like Zoho to make this job easier. Using the Zoho dashboard, you can track everything from keyword rankings and referring domains to SEO and SEM in real time. It even enables monitoring of projects, IT, sales, finances, and more.
When you have all your monitoring efforts accessible on one platform, things get much simpler and more efficient. You don’t have to keep switching between different tools to detect issues on time. You’ll be able to easily detect any performance drops before they can affect your search engine ranking. And you’ll be able to take timely and appropriate action.
Improve Site Usability
Site usability is another important ranking factor, according to the Backlinko report cited earlier. If you’ve managed to get to the top three search engine ranking, it’s likely that you’re already aware of this fact. People visiting your website should be able to have an experience that makes them want to stay.
This means your pages should load quickly and completely. And your visitors should be able to navigate effortlessly across your site. The goal is to make sure they stay for a while instead of just bouncing, because a high bounce rate could pull you down in ranking.
You can always use the Google PageSpeed Insights to keep track of how your site is performing in terms of load speed. In addition to analyzing your page speed, this tool also gives you recommendations on how you can optimize the load speed further.
And of course, you need to ensure that your website is easy to use and navigate for mobile visitors as well. This means you need to switch to a responsive design that will cater to the needs of visitors using different kinds of devices. Try the Mobile-Friendly Test to determine the responsiveness of your site.
But if you have to make any changes in the design, make sure you test them out. This is crucial because you never know if the change will make people want to stay or leave. For all you know, the new search bar may be very difficult to notice or your home button may not be visible enough. Test every single change you make to improve the usability of your site.
Continue Your Link-Building Efforts
Since you’ve been able to get a top three ranking in search results, it’s obvious that your link profile is already impressive. But if you want to maintain this ranking, you can’t just stop with your link-building efforts. You need to put in the even more effort than you did when you were still struggling to boost your ranking.
That’s because now that you’re in the top position, people will consider you as their top competitor. So they’re going to thoroughly analyze your link profile and try to get linkbacks from the same websites that are linking to you. This makes it crucial that you don’t slack off on your link-building efforts and even take it up a notch, if possible.
The Moz Open Site Explorer is an excellent tool to help you monitor and manage your link-building efforts. It gives you an in-depth insight into all the inbound links coming to your site, the domains linking to you, the anchor texts being used, etc. It even analyzes spam links so you can take measures to disavow them immediately.
What I really like about this tool is that it also provides you with some link opportunities. This is great because you get fresh ideas and inspiration on strengthening your link profile, so you can further improve your efforts.
Conclusion
These are some of the most essential and effective steps you should be taking to ensure that your website remains in the top three positions once you’ve earned it. Are you already implementing these tactics? And do you have any more suggestions that you’d like to share? Drop a comment below and let us know.
