Over the past two years, almost all businesses and users went online, and your business probably did too. There is an overwhelming number of websites, and only the ones that have readily embraced SEO will win the web.
Only 0.78% of Google visitors click on the 2nd page results. Therefore, it is no surprise that SEO and higher positions in organic search are top priority for 61% of marketers.
In this article, we have collected well-tested SEO optimization tips and tricks based on our own hard-won lessons and experience.
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What a Good SEO Strategy Bring to the Business?
Competitive Advantage
Two out of three online users looking for a product/service or a mere solution to a problem will click the first five results on the first pages they come across on Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Hence, those businesses - be it a blog or an online store - that embrace Search Engine Optimization are much more likely to reach their audience and outperform their KPIs on sales.
Positive User Experience
More than 51% of users use mobile for their online search. A proper SEO strategy takes into account both desktop and mobile versions of your website to make it neat and smooth for the maximum comfort of the visitors.
Moreover, in 2022, being mobile-friendly and meeting the requirements of different mobile devices is not just a SEO idea but a must-have, since mobile-first indexing was announced in 2018. From the SEO perspective, steps like ensuring that your website’s desktop and mobile versions have the same content, same meta title and description, and structured data available on both versions are keys to success.
Boosted Number of Leads
SEO helps you with lead generation. If your content is valuable and it’s getting referral traffic, there’s a higher probability that users will want to link to it. In turn, the growing number of natural backlinks will positively impact Google rankings.
This way, SEO helps businesses become more visible on SERP and bring a large target audience that will eventually turn into prospects.
A proper website markup with the call to action in place helps to get the contacts of your website visitors who will automatically turn into leads.
Thus, proper SEO optimization of your website can help you grow email list quickly.
Promotion of Your Product Through Social Media
A sustainable SEO strategy will gradually move your website up to top positions. As a bonus, your content will be optimized for exact search queries, so the user that finds your website will get exactly what they are looking for.
And if your content is expertly written and provides a real solution to a problem, users will be eager to share it with their networks, automatically promoting your product among a fresh and relevant audience.
Enhanced Trust in Your Brand
Given the overwhelming volume of content that bombards each of us, people are cautious about which companies they interact with, and moreover, the ones they buy from. Being in top positions in search results shows online users that your website is trusted by Google and that your brand is trustworthy.
As a rule, people trust organic results more than search ads. This belief comes from the notion that users make their own choice out of the organic results rather than accepting the promoted content.
Below I have covered some of the best SEO optimization tips that can help you to build your website authority and drive more organic traffic from search engines.
10 Best SEO Optimization Tips of 2023
1. Build Connection, Not Just Backlinks
Every SEO expert knows that quality backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors. If you do not invest in link building, you risk joining the astonishing 91% of websites that never get any organic traffic because they do not have backlinks.
To ensure that you build high-quality backlinks, the SEO tip is to start the development of your backlink strategy with the competitor backlink analysis. This will help you make data-driven choices based on the following insights: new and lost website backlinks, the geographical origin of the backlinks, the anchor used, and the pages with the biggest number of backlinks.
Remember the backlinks rule, as well as word count. Pieces of content in top positions in Google search contain around 2,500 words on average. However, for the last five years, the trend reveals that there is one more vital key to SEO, the content itself.
To achieve excellent results, backlinks should be placed in expert content, relevant to the audience. Focus on writing interviews, cooperating with influencers, bloggers, and reporters in your industry. If you add handy guidelines and educational content to raise awareness of the topic you provide, people will find it useful and share it.
Be sure to add visuals to the text. Images and videos are game-changing must-haves. For images, use charts with numbers, create infographics, roadmaps, and any kind of illustrations. For videos, video tutorials, webinars, and expert interviews that can complement or fully substitute text content will get much more engagement.
2. Follow the ‘Human First’ Rule
The most widespread SEO idea (and headache) is trying to please both search engines and readers. In practice, a SEO writer’s challenge is balancing between using keywords from keyword research while keeping the text relevant for readers.
Much to everyone's relief, the above-mentioned mindset is outdated. The fresh new approach puts the reader first and does not involve tedious efforts to manipulate search engines. In other words, forget about SEO. At least while creating your content.
The content has to be centered around real people and their needs. Step-by-step guidelines, the beloved “Top 10 tips to…” and other pieces of useful content wrapped in a concise way will be appreciated by readers and rewarded by search engines.
3. Meet Search Intent and User Behavior
Understanding what users are searching for - be it an answer to a particular question or the desire to delve deeper into a topic of interest - has always been one of the keys to outperforming in SEO.
By analysing search intent, businesses can provide meticulous content that users crave. At the very start of the content production, forget about lead magnets and your products, and focus on what your audience needs. Also, investigate what type of content users prefer (text, video, etc,).
Analysis of a user’s on-site journey also plays a vital role for SEO strategy as it reveals the user's behavior and the interconnection between topics and keywords within their primary search intent.
To meet search intent, analyze the search queries and create content that exactly answers the questions of the users. Involving industry experts and thought leaders to ensure you provide best-in-class information is a must.
4. Focus on Core Web Vital factors
Core Web Vital factors are a set of page metrics related to user experience on the page.
In 2021, Core Web Vitals supplemented current page experience factors, such as HTTPs, mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, and others.
The Core Web Vital factors are:
- First Input Delay (FID)
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
How to meet the Core Web Vital factors requirement? If you have already invested in a compliant AMP-version of your website (if not, make sure to read the next items about becoming mobile-friendly), then you can skip the requirement as mobile configured pages have a green light in terms of Core Web Vital factors.
To improve existing optimization with regard to Core Web Vitals, eliminate any bottlenecks on your website that may lead to poor page experiences. For example, heavy visuals and/or embedded elements can negatively affect Web Vitals, so try to avoid them. Another option is to activate lazy loading in your website’s UX so that the images are being loaded right when a user scrolls the content without jeopardizing the website’s overall speed score.
Also, quite obvious at first sight, but a crucial tip is compressing and optimizing images and videos. Fortunately, today there are plenty of tools like tinyjpg.com that allow resizing without losing on quality. Or if you want a tool that does it all automatically, go for Shortpixel.
With Shortpixel, you're not required to compress your images manually. Plus, it automatically convert your images (PNG/JPEG) into WEBP format, which is the latest and modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression to your images.
Another important tip is using proper dimensions for images and videos, so be sure to indicate width and length for all visual elements in the CSS file.
5. Get Mobile-Friendly
The forecasts say that around 70% of visitors will be accessing the internet via mobile devices by 2025.
No wonder that since 2019, Google has considered mobile-friendliness a number one ranking factor for all new websites. And since March 2021 all websites are indexed according to the mobile-first rule. To put it simply, Google crawlers are indexing only mobile versions of websites.
So, make sure to switch from desktop to mobile indexing in Google Search Console.
Plus, make sure that the theme you're using on your WordPress website are mobile-friendly. Most modern day themes like GeneratePress, Astra or Kadence are built to provide amazing web experience on mobile devices.
6. Video, Video, Video
As of 2022, video is expected to make up to 82% of all internet content. Videos are also 50 times more likely to get top ranking than texts.
To make your videos visible and gain a higher ranking in 2022, embrace video structured data such as Clip markup and Seek markup. The mission of both is to create key moment video clips that will appear in search results.
Clip markup helps to configure a video with timestamps and labels to improve navigation for the key moment’s feature. In other words, instead of relying on Google’s automatic choice of what video parts to show, you indicate the timestamps and labels that you have selected.
Seek markup’s mission is to explain to Google how your URL is structured so that it can automatically lead users to a specific moment of your video by providing an exact link to it.
Both features will highlight your videos in Google search and attract users to watch them and boost the click-through rate.
7. Optimize for Voice Search
Voice assistants are reshaping the future of Google search. Around 55% of households will have smart speakers in 2022. 48% of owners of activated voice speakers expect to get tips and customized proposals from brands. Are you ready to meet this demand?
What do people who have activated speakers expect to get from brands?
To optimize your content for voice search, start with the 29-words rule. Research shows that Google provides answers to voice search with not more than 29 words. Hence, make your answers to the voice search queries concise in 30 words or even shorter.
Another tip for voice search optimization evolves from the previous one. It lies in providing short answers to the search queries starting with “who, what. when, etc.”question keywords and structuring the answers in the FAQ sections. Voice search results are twice more likely to come from FAQ pages, so investing in FAQ sections is a proven way to get optimized for voice search.
8. Optimize Content for Featured Snippets
Voice search is becoming more and more popular among users, and the top results from voice search belong to old good featured snippets. For seven years in a row, optimization for featured snippets has been key to SEO and should remain a top priority for 2022 and beyond.
Delivering the most relevant answer to the search query is the fastest way to get into a featured snippet. Direct answers to questions, numbered lists, concise word count (up to 58 words) and proven data will help you get into this so-called Number Zero position.
Here’s a quick checklist to help you out:
- Make competitors analysis - find the featured snippets they own.
- Based on the analysis, define the keywords you are going to target.
- Understand the search intent of your user
- Provide an answer to the search intent
- Optimize the content in featured snippet for search engines
- Let Google grasp what your page is related to by using schema markup tags
9. Tune in Local SEO
Over the past two years, online users have started to use the keywords “where to buy+near me” twice more often. This means that if your value proposition is targeted at local customers, you will definitely need local SEO.
Who needs local SEO? All those businesses that serve customers within a limited geographical area - bars, restaurants, delivery services, plumbers, etc.
Why is local SEO that important? 92% of citizens buy their daily items or services within a 20-minute walking distance from their current location.
How to make friends with local SEO?
- Make sure that your website is inappropriate local registries, optimized for mobile and local search.
- Use geo-related keywords. In addition to keywords and their modifiers related to your industry, add words that identify your geographical location, as well as the possible location of your users.
- Integrate with GPS navigation for smartphones
- Include Name, Address, and Phone (NAP)
- Complete your Google My Business profile to validate your business listing. Make sure that the indicated info in the My Business profile is consistent with other information on other external sites (business listings, etc.) where you have your business information shared.
10. Build a Perfect Match with Social Media and SEO
After years of disagreements as to whether social media signals are treated by Google as ranking factors, today's shared view is that they are definitely not. However, joint efforts in both SEO and social media can enhance each other. How? If you publish a decent and well-optimized content item, it is more likely to be shared by readers via their social networks. The bigger exposure it gets, the higher the chances that your content will get more backlinks, and that will improve your rankings.
How to combine social media and SEO into one strategy?
- Create useful and unique content with the reader in mind. Always.
- Add share buttons and make them visible
- Be bold and ask your readers to share the content
- Tag and/or quote your industry’s influencers to notify them that they are featured in your content item
Wrapping Up
Three main takeaways to base your SEO strategy on are:
- forget about SEO and create shared value for your target audience with great content
- make no excuses for not being mobile-friendly
- work hard on providing the smoothest user experience on your website
No matter what type of business you are and whether or not the web is your primary selling channel, following the best SEO optimization tips covered in this article will pay off with higher rankings and organic lead generation.
Thank you for your article! Good job. Only one note. I should argue about “core web vital factors” – their influence is much fewer than it was supposed.
This article has looked at some of the best SEO Optimization Tips you can always apply if you want to improve your SEO strategy and stay ahead of the competition. Choose a marketing strategy that works best for your business and execute it to improve your traffic and rankings. Thanks for sharing this post.
Thanks Nency