All marketers would love their pages to rank high and bring in tons of organic traffic. But search engine optimization is a long game. You have to stay on top of multiple ongoing tasks to even stand a chance at page-one rankings:

• Ensure that site security and architecture are up to date with Google’s latest guidelines
• Do keyword research and competitor research
• Create great content and optimize it for both keywords and search intent 
• Work on digital PR and earn backlinks on high-authority websites

All of that takes a ton of work, and it can take between four and twelve months to see results.

Most businesses need faster results and want to see increased sales, not just traffic. Using other sales channels like paid ads while working on your SEO is one option, but there’s an alternative — search engine positioning.

If you want to learn what it is and how it can help your business increase sales, you’ve come to the right place.

What is Search Engine Positioning?

Search engine positioning is a subcategory of SEO. The methods you’ll employ are basically the same, but the goals are different.

With search engine positioning, your goal is to make a specific page to dominate a specific keyword. So, instead of working broadly across the whole website, you focus your efforts on a couple of key pages. You try to dominate as much of the search engine results page as possible. 

If it’s an informational keyword and there’s a featured snippet, you need to aim to be in that place.

If there’s another Google feature, like a list of companies, you have to try to be on that list, too.

You certainly want your page to have the top search engine position for link results, and when it does, use rich results like these navigation links.

For keywords related to products, you’ll want to appear on the shopping feed at the top of the ranking for the keyword.

You’ll also want to be in the top three of the local pack results if the keyword is local in nature.

How do you accomplish all this? You perform all the regular SEO tasks like optimizing for keywords, adding structured data, and building links for a specific page to quickly promote it in the SERP.

Focus on your product or service pages, and optimize them for commercial and transactional keywords. This is a great choice for getting sales faster than doing SEO the regular way.

Search Engine Positioning VS. Search Engine Optimization

As you learned above, search engine positioning is a part of search engine optimization, but these two have slightly different scopes.

While SEP is focused on a few important pages, SEO is focused on the website as a whole. As a result, the scope of tasks you have to do for SEO is broader. It includes configuring website security, ensuring the whole website loads fast and displays correctly on multiple devices, and more.

When you have such a broad approach, the whole site goes up in rankings gradually. This is great for the long term, but not ideal if you need to make sales fast.

Here’s where search engine positioning comes in. With this approach, you focus on optimizing pages that are most critical for your making sales or earning leads.

Since search engine positioning has a much narrower scope. It deals with smaller changes over the course of a smaller time frame. So instead of improving website infrastructure or building hundreds of backlinks, it may take only a few adjustments to on-page optimization and a few additional links to see your page rank higher in under a month.

The arsenal of tools you’ll need for this is smaller as well. Often, you’ll employ a rank tracking tool and a keyword analytics tool at best.

However, to do search engine positioning effectively, you have to have a history of actively working on SEO. Your site as a whole has to have at least a couple of dozen pages that rank around the top 20, have a bit of traffic coming to the site, and have some good links leading to your site.

If you’re not a complete beginner in SEO, and Google already has an idea of what your site is about and that it’s trusted by other sites, you’re in the perfect position to start focusing on getting specific high-value pages to rank.

However, if your site went live a month ago and you don’t have a single backlink, it might be harder to get specific pages to rank as Google doesn’t yet have enough information about your site.

How Does Search Engine Positioning Work?

The goal of search engine positioning is to have specific pages of your site dominate specific keywords. This works by learning how to achieve high positions for specific keywords, and planning your strategy ahead.

Google determines which pages should be on top of SERP by multiple factors. Here are the most prominent ones:

• Which keywords are present on the page
• How many visitors engage with the page vs. bounce
• What websites link to the site and the page (and their quality)
• Does the page contain information suitable for the featured snippet
• Does the page load quickly and without errors
• Is the website secure
• Is the user close to the place of business (for local queries)

You can influence most of these factors.

To make search engine positioning work, you’ll have to do the following.

• Figure out what pages you want to focus on
• Find keywords suitable for optimization
• Confirm they have the right traffic potential
• Analyze the search intent
• Analyze SERP features
• Optimize for SERP features, keywords, and search intent

Below, you’ll learn more about all of these search engine positioning strategies.

Search Engine Positioning Best Practices for Better Rankings

Search engine positioning will work great once you have done a bit of basic SEO work on the site. Here is what you have to do.

1. Analyze Existing Pages

Your main goal with search engine positioning is to have key pages rank high for certain keywords. Your first step is deciding which pages are the most important.

There are two ways to figure out where you begin.

The first is to select the pages that matter for your business. These could be:

• Sales landing pages
• Product, category, or service pages
• Lead magnets like resource pages or ebooks

Then, you can use an SEO tool to check how these pages are performing in the SERP and what keywords they already rank for.

The second approach is to start with analyzing search engine results. Run a website analysis to figure out what pages are already ranking in the top 20 for keywords you believe have a good traffic potential. Focus on the pages that answer a commercial or transactional intent.

To analyze your website, it’s best to use a combination of Google Search Console and an SEO tool. GSC can show you what keywords your pages rank for, which might give you some ideas on the terms you want to target. 

You can also use a paid SEO tool like Rank Tracker by SE Ranking. It can track your ranking history, compare your site to competitors, and show which pages are stuck on the second page of organic search. It can also monitor which keywords have SERP features like the featured snippet, and show where your pages have that place.

After conducting this analysis, you’ll end up with a list of pages you want to focus on and an approximate list of keywords.

2. Conduct Keyword Research and Create Targeted Content

The next step is to do in-depth keyword research and figure out which ones you should focus on.

Take the list of keywords from the research in the first step, and add a couple more keywords by using a Free Keyword Research Tool. Analyze the keyword list and find keywords that:

• Have high traffic potential
• Have low keyword difficulty
• Have a search intent that fits the page in question

Not all keywords will be a perfect match, with some having high competition or difficult, and some having little traffic potential. You can still target the high-difficulty and low-volume keywords, but for fast results you need to focus on the low-hanging fruit: keywords that are a great fit for the page, and ones that are easy to rank for.

Take the list of keywords that fit this description and analyze the search intent.

If it’s an informational keyword you want to focus on, do a search for that keyword and read through the top-ranking results. Note what topics they cover and how.  

For commercial and transactional keywords, note what information is shown about the products or services, what kind of schema markup they use (if any), and the pages’ conversion strategies.

With that knowledge, create quality content that is optimized for success.

Include the keyword in the most important places on the page:

• URL
• Title tag
• Meta description tag
• Header tags
• Image titles (if appropriate)

3. Audit Old Content Regularly

Once your focus page is ready, track its performance. Use Google Search Console to track these metrics:

• Total clicks
• Total impressions
• Average CTR
• Average position

You can also use an SEO tool to track the SERP features for your page.

If you don’t see an improvement in these metrics, experiment with the page content and optimization until you see results.

An important part of search engine positioning is updating old content. If your focus page that got great results ends up sitting unchanged for several months, it might start losing ranking as Google prefers fresh content.

For example, here are a few ideas of what you can update in an old informational piece.

• Remove outdated data sources and replace them with newer ones
• Check for ideas and practices that might have become outdated since the last review
• Add more actionable content, images, links, or comments from experts

These recurring updates will help your page rank higher and provide more value to the users.

4. Improve On-Page SEO

There’s a lot of on-page SEO work that has to be done before you focus on website search engine positioning. The basics include getting fast, secure hosting, improving page speeds, staying on top of technical SEO (XML sitemap, indexing, schema markup, mobile responsiveness, errors, redirects), maintaining intuitive navigation, and more.

There is plenty of on-page optimization to be done for SEP as well.

For starters, you have to optimize the title and meta description tags for keywords and conversion. Titles will be cut off at around 60 characters on desktop and even fewer on mobile platforms.

Make sure you put the information important to the users in those 60 characters – ideally at the start. Search engines read full title tags, so you can leave a keyword or name of your brand after the truncation mark.

Try to include the main keyword in the meta description tag, and make it click-worthy. But keep in mind that sometimes Google will ignore your custom meta description and serve a bit of text from the page instead, as in the example above.

Add the main keyword to your page’s H1 (usually the page title), and add supporting keywords to H2-4 on the page, and sprinkle them across the text.

An important part of on-page optimization to boost a specific page is internal linking. An internal link strategy that prioritizes a specific page signals to Google that the page is important, and it might affect ranking. Link to it from the home page, other product or service pages, and several blog posts that have gathered a lot of external links.

6. Combine Different Off- Strategies

You should already be doing off-site SEO as a part of your broader strategy. It also helps SEP to an extent. To boost a specific page even more, build links directly to it from both external and internal sources. 

This is typically easiest if the page in question is a quality blog post. You can do guest blogging and link back to the post, and ask other site owners to link to it as a resource. If it has great content, people will link to it.

With product pages, you can search for articles that review the best products in your niche or product guides (such as “best/top” or comparison articles). Share your product link with the writers or editors of those articles, and offer to send an item for review for a potential feature in their content.

With service pages, it can be harder to earn links because many editors are reluctant to link to promotional pages for a specific business. But you can still try to get a few links to it via guest blogging or link insertion.

What you can do to supplement those links is to share your content on social media to spark a discussion, or work with industry influencers to get it promoted beyond your network. 

For B2C companies, you can find influencers who cover your niche and do sponsored content with them. In B2B marketing, you can either try to find a relevant industry influencer or get links by participating in podcasts and webinars.

For internal links and any other links that you create yourself and have control over the anchor text, make that anchor descriptive, and try to add a keyword if possible.

7. Boost Core Web Vitals Score

Core Web Vitals are a set of web standards that include fast loading and proper display of the website. They affect the ranking of your site.

You’ll have to work on them site-wide to have the best results, but it’s a good practice to check how the pages that you’re focusing on perform in that regard.

You can do this by using the Lighthouse tool in Chrome, or a tool like GTMetrix. It will give the site a rating and show exactly what to fix to improve performance.

On individual pages, the problems are often large image or video files that slow down loading or JavaScript loading before the page.

8. Optimize for SERP Features

If there are SERP features like the Featured Snippet (also known as “position zero”) for your target keyword, you need to get your page ranking for them as well to dominate the SERP.

For the Featured Snippet, you’ll want to have a part of the page that matches the format of the target snippet. 

For example, if it’s the “people also ask” panel, you will want to have the target question as a heading, and the first sentence or two below the heading must provide a clear, concise answer. If the snippet shows a bullet list, have a bullet list on the page. If it shows a definition, write a definition that fits the term.

To get featured on the shopping list, create product listings in the Merchant Center and optimize them by adding the target keyword to the product title and description.

Benefits of Search Engine Positioning for Small & Medium Businesses

Including search engine positioning in your overall strategy requires some management of resources and shifting the focus of your team. Is it worth the effort, though?

There are three main benefits that can make this shift worthwhile.

Increase targeted traffic. Traffic that comes to your website can be widely varied. People who visit top-of-the-funnel informational pages are most likely not ready for a purchase, and you’ll have to try to retain and convert them to make a sale.

When you specifically focus on improving the search ranking of pages that can bring finely targeted conversion-ready traffic, like landing pages and link magnets, you’ll end up making more sales with the same amount of effort.

Become an industry leader. When you improve your business’s online visibility for the most important keywords, you will grow user trust and brand awareness. This is because when users search for something related to your services, they always see your brand at the top of search engine results pages.

This puts your brand on the list of industry leaders that will be front-of-mind when these users are ready to make a purchase.

Gain a competitive edge. Put simply, ranking higher than your competitors in SERPs means you get more targeted traffic, leads, sales, and money. This helps your company grow faster and be better than competition in other areas as well.

In Closing

Search engine positioning is a strategy that, if used wisely, can improve your company’s bottom line dramatically. To implement it effectively, you’ll have to work on general SEO for some time and have several pages of your site rank consistently in the top 20.

If that’s where your business is at, you can try to focus on the pages and keywords that can provide the best ROI.

Follow the tips from this guide, and do position tracking across the pages that you focus on. If you don’t see results in a month or two, experiment more, and work on general SEO.