Search engine optimization (SEO) can be quite rewarding for your business when you get it right. You can increase your site traffic, generate more leads, improve conversions, and boost your sales.
If you’re new to SEO or just want to refresh your knowledge, this article is for you. We’ve rounded up some of the most important SEO tips that actually work to boost your traffic and rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Let’s dive right in!
SEO tips to help you rank high
Focus on User Search Intent
User search intent has been considered a cornerstone of modern SEO. It means that you consider and understand what the users search for and what they want to achieve.
Maybe they want to buy a product, understand a concept, find something, or go somewhere.
So, what you’d want to do is to create content that can satisfy those needs and provide an excellent user experience.
How do you do that?
When conducting keyword research, incorporate user search intent terms. You can also use question queries to support the user intent. You can use this to guide your content creation process. You might even be able to rank for featured snippets.
You have to ensure that you meet the user intent for search engines to rank you. Your content should drive site visitors to the right pages that are helpful.
Create Great Content that Builds Your Expertise
If you’re a new business with a newly launched website, it can be quite challenging to compete with other sites that have been around for a while. After all, SEO results may take time to happen.
So, what you can do is to make sure that you’re off with a great start to drive organic search—quality content.
You need to create content that demonstrates your expertise in the industry or your niche.
For example, if you’re a business that sells fitness products, you can write content that can help people stay fit and healthy. They shouldn’t be about your products alone. Instead, they should be educational and informational, giving your target audience helpful guidance.
Your content will help you establish authority and credibility and be a pillar of your SEO efforts.
Use Keywords In The Right Places
Placing the keywords you want to rank for in the right places is also important for your SEO strategy. It’s as essential as using them in the first place. It will help search engines know that your content will help achieve the user’s search goal.
Try to include your keywords in the following:
- Page title
- URL
- First 100 words of your content
- Meta description
- Subheaders
- Image alt text
- Page Content
Likewise, having your keywords in these places allows users to know what your content has to offer at first glance.
Don’t overdo it, though! It’s still important to ensure that the thoughts flow smoothly and those relevant keywords are placed naturally.
Use Related Keywords
Aside from your target keyword, you must also add related keywords to your content. These are synonyms of the main keyword or other terms that refer to it.
For example, if your main keyword is “55-gallon drums,” its related terms include “barrels,” “plastic barrels,” and “steel drums.”
Search engines like Google go beyond simple keywords to understand the topic of your content. That’s why it’s helpful in SEO to include variations of the main keyword on your page.
You can find related terms to your target keyword on Google search and look at “Related searches” at the bottom of the search results page.
Go Beyond Exact Match Keywords
Many newbies on SEO make the mistake of using exact match keywords, making the content weird to read at times, particularly when using long-tail keywords.
With SEO today, you don’t have to use exact match terms. Search engines can understand the concepts and relationships between words, so don’t be afraid to add that preposition, article, or conjunction.
It’s still important to ensure proper grammar and sentence construction. Your content should sound natural.
Make Users Stay On Your Site Longer
How long site visitors stay on your page can influence SEO performance too. Their session duration indicates how engaged they are, which suggests the quality and value of your page.
If website visitors leave quickly, it can affect your bounce rate, which suggests that your content doesn’t help users achieve their goals.
How do you keep users on your site longer?
There are a few things you can do, starting with the formatting. You must ensure excellent readability because when your content is easy to read, users will be more inclined to stick around until the end of the content.
You should use subheadings and bullets to make your blog content “skimmable” and easy on the eyes.
Adding multimedia elements, like images and videos, can also increase user session time. They can make your content more engaging and interesting.
Improve Your Site Speed and Optimize for Mobile
Site speed is a Google ranking factor. If your website’s loading speed is slow, it can hurt your search engine rankings. We have such a short attention span, so people will exit quickly and never return if your site doesn’t load within 8 seconds.
So, it’s essential to improve page speed, especially on mobile devices, because more people are using their phones to browse the web.
Prioritize mobile-first indexing and ensure that your site is optimized for mobile. Your web design must be responsive and simplified. Compress your images and avoid too many redirects.
Some factors that can slow down your page speed are:
- Third-party scripts
- JavaScript issues
- Flash content
- Unclean code
- Too many ads
- Caching issues
Pages that load slowly don’t deliver a positive user experience. Your bounce rate will increase, and search engines will read your site as unhelpful.
Update Old Posts That Aren’t Performing Well
Another great SEO tip is to check if you have a bunch of blog posts that don’t perform well, it’s time to give them some updates. They probably have outdated SEO tactics or unoptimized formats, so even when the content is good, they’re not ranking as expected.
Giving them some upgrades might help improve your SEO rankings. What can you do?
A few steps you can take to update old posts:
- Add more external links to authority sites in your niche
- Add internal links to new content
- Break down the content into sections, with subheadings and bullet points
- Create a new title
- Add meta descriptions
- Add new images and videos
- Update the target keywords
However, remember to keep your URL the same to avoid duplicate content, 404 errors, and broken links. These could affect how Google indexes your site.
Optimize Your Images
Optimizing your images can help search engines understand what’s on your pages, as well as drive more traffic to your site.
Because search engines can’t tell what your images are about, they rely on alt texts when crawling your site. So, you must add image alt attributes before posting your content.
An alt text should be descriptive and short, as well as relevant to your content. As Google has moved to more visual search, adding alt text to describe your photos can help you rank for Google Images.
It’s also important to compress all your images, so they won’t slow down your site’s loading speed.
Earn Quality Backlinks
Having a link-building strategy is a crucial SEO tip to follow. When you have more backlinks, your domain authority improves, which helps you rank higher on SERPs.
How can you earn quality and relevant links?
If you tend to publish many visual contents, chances are some people might have used them. Ideally, they should link back to you, but that doesn’t always happen.
You can search for your visual assets on Google to see who has used them and request the publishers to add a link back to your site.
Another method to earn backlinks is journalist outreach. You can use SEO tools and platforms like Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and Sourcery to access media coverage opportunities.
What these platforms do is connect you with journalists seeking expert insights. You can answer their queries based on your expertise, experience, and profession. When they quote you or use your answers, they give credit to you along with a link to your site.
Other link-building strategies you can explore:
- Guest post blogging
- Broken link building
- Link reclamation
- Content syndication
- Paid promotion for linkable assets
Wrapping Up SEO Tips
SEO is continually evolving as search engines update their algorithm continuously. That’s why it’s important to keep up with the latest trends and use updated SEO tips.
Whether you’re a beginner in SEO or a seasoned expert, we hope you find value in these SEO tips!
