SEO (search engine optimization) improves the visibility of your website in search engine results.
According to HubSpot’s marketing research, SEO is also useful for increasing businesses’ conversion rates.
With the right SEO plan in place, your content will rise in the SERPs (search engine results pages), helping your business get more attention from potential customers.
Once your content has more attention from the right customers you are already a step closer to closing a sale and increasing conversions.
But before any of that can happen, you need to give your website SEO a boost. In this article, we will share actionable tips on how you can boost your website’s SEO in 2023.
What is SEO Or Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, refers to the steps you take to raise your website’s rank in organic search results on Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines.
People use these search engines to look for goods and services businesses offer.
The ultimate goal of SEO is to increase the number of visitors to a website who are likely to make a purchase or become repeat visitors.
The higher your rankings in search results, the greater the chance that one of your pages will be seen and visited.
Why Is SEO Important?
When your content is at the top of search engine rankings, it gives you more credibility.
Top ranking websites appear more credible and get the most clicks as well.
Customers today prefer to do their own research instead of talking to sales representatives.
SEO can help your website tell them about your great offers, brand-new goods and services, and unique benefits right when they’re looking for a solution.
Having this information available on Google’s first page helps shorten the time it takes to make a purchase, which leads to more sales and a better return on investment (ROI).
Tips And Techniques To Improve SEO
SEO is a crucial aspect of marketing that helps enhance the site’s exposure for search queries. To understand the value of SEO, you need to know what its most important parts are and how they work together.
Here are some vital tips to improve SEO and start growing organically:
Align Your Content With Search Intent
Make sure that the information on your website is relevant to what people are looking for at all times.
The searcher’s goal or purpose in doing a search is what we call “search intent“. For example, if the user enters the keyword “buy bitcoin”, it’s obvious that the user’s search intent is to purchase some cryptocurrency.
If your content does not correspond to the user’s search, they might not stick around for long, resulting in a high bounce rate.
The three basic types of search intent are informative, transactional, and navigational.
Informational Intent
With an informational intent, people want to learn more about a certain product, topic, or location. The information presented must answer the queriesof the target audience.
When creating content with informational intent, keywords like “who,” “what,” “why,” “how,” and “when” can significantly improve your page’s visibility.
Navigational Intent
The navigational intent of a user is their desire to find a particular page.
This sort of search intent is used when the user has a clear idea of the information they need. They can conduct a search using the site’s name or any other relevant keyword.
Make sure your name is used well in your content to get the most out of navigational intent. Use relevant keywords in the meta description to boost your search engine rankings.
Transactional Intent
This type of search intent demonstrates that consumers are prepared to take some sort of action, be it making a purchase, scheduling an appointment, or downloading content.
Create a strong call to action in your article to attract more readers.
Once your content aligns with your user’s search intent, your website will be able to deliver what the target audience needs and hence offer a better user experience, which also happens to be an important ranking factor. Talking about UX being a ranking factor…
2. Improve Your Page Speed
There is no denying that page speed is a major element in search engine rankings as well as a website’s user experience. Google may give a higher ranking to faster-loading pages in search results.
Site performance is a crucial component in Google search rankings since Google favors providing users with helpful information as quickly as possible.
Google spends only a limited amount of time on each page when it crawls, indexes, analyses, and ranks websites.
Google has an analysis tool called PageSpeed Insights that may be used to determine how quickly your website loads. Simply type your website’s address into the text box and hit the “Analyze” button to see how it stacks up.
Screenshot from PageSpeed Insights, February 2023
Google PageSpeed will analyze your site’s performance across several devices and provide in-depth reports.
If your score is lower than 49, your page load time is unacceptable. There are a few things you can do to increase your page speed.
Screenshot from kinsta.com, February 2023
Code optimization
Examine your code and get rid of any superfluous lines, comments, libraries, processes, or whitespace. Also minify your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.
Condense the data
Large files should be compressed and delivered on demand. Compressing files can reduce the overall size of various files and web pages, which in turn speeds up their loading times.
Examine your image quality
Focus on providing high-quality images in the suitable format, size, and resolution to ramp up the user experience.Furthermore, images on your landing page or service page should be compressed for speed optimization.
Reduce redirects
Poor redirection practices can negatively impact your site’s crawl and speed as well as the user experience. So, make sure to only employ valid links and to only redirect readers when it is actually required.
3. Focus On Getting Featured Snippets
A featured snippet is a Google Search functionality that offers an overview or response to the search question, as shown in the screenshot below.
Screenshot from Mangools.com, February 2023
Featured snippets are more noticeable, and hence more clickable, to users. They already give plenty of information on a topic, so the reader wants to click on that webpage to explore more valuable content. This is why having your content highlighted in a featured snippet can increase your website’s organic CTR.
The use of featured snippets can also help lend credibility to your website. Searchers will have faith that the site contains accurate and up-to-date information, further increasing the likelihood that they will click through to it.
Targeting featured snippets is possible by:
Researching Keywords
Start by conducting keyword research for queries that your consumers are asking. You can conduct keyword research by utilizing resources such as SEMrush, AnswerThePublic, and Quora.
Check if the keywords you’re targeting are already producing featured snippets in the SERPs. If so, choose them and incorporate them where it makes sense in the content.
With the help of these keywords, try to provide an answer even better than your competitors’.
Examine your competitors’ SEO strategies
Determine which terms your competitors are using to achieve featured snippet ranking and incorporate those terms into your own SEO strategy.
Recognizing the goals of a search
Predict what customers would type into a search engine, and then answer their questions in as much depth and relevancy as possible. If you know what people are looking for, you can tailor your content to meet their needs.
If you want to know which search queries and keywords are most likely to yield featured snippets, you’ll need to do some research. The chosen keywords can be incorporated into your article.
4. Earn Backlinks
You can link a new website to an authoritative website via backlinks.
Getting quality inbound links is an important aspect of off-page SEO and helps increase your site’s visibility.
When you have other credible websites linking to your site, search engines are more likely to rank your website higher.
Try and acquire inbound links organically from reputable sources. But before you get backlinks from a site , check whether it is authoritative or not using a Website Authority Checker like the one in the image below.
One way of acquiring more backlinks, especially when you are just starting out, is to collaborate with the bloggers in your niche (people who have their web-based blogs, not social ones) and ask them to create content that links back to your website.
Another option is to reach out to popular blogs yourself and offer to write a guest post. Many websites will let you link back to your own website, helping you grow your backlink profile.
These are some other suggestions for attracting inbound links:
- Make sure your content is fully up-to-date. Focus on creating top-notch content that will persuade other users to link to it.
- Find any broken links with content comparable to your own and propose replacing them with more valuable content.
- Making guest blog posts for specific markets and sharing them is a great way to show off your knowledge and get high-quality links. Start with publications that are specifically relevant to your niche. If your blog piece is approved, you can expect to receive a backlink.
5. Perform Technical SEO Audit
Technical Audit is the process of figuring out if a website meets the technical standards of modern search engines so that it can rank higher in organic search results.
It helps in finding issues with your website’s performance and implementing solutions.
Crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture are all crucial parts of technical SEO.
During a technical SEO analysis, elements like a website’s load time, the number of clicks required to reach a specific page, and the number of broken links are all taken into account.
Page Speed
With the help of technical SEO, you can figure out which parts of your site are slowing it down.
You might want to think about optimizing your code and images, as reducing the size of some files could speed up your site.
Broken Links
Having a number of broken links might slow down and degrade the performance of your website.
For instance, you might send visitors to slow-loading or non-functioning pages. This may detract from the user experience.
Using technical SEO tactics can help you repair or remove broken links, offer an enhanced user experience and enjoy better SEO score.
Broken links can be fixed or completely removed by using technical SEO techniques.
Crawlability
The term “crawlability” refers to the ease with which search engines can index a website.
Search engines browse the content of your website using bots or crawlers. Crawling is facilitated by a well-organized system of internal links.
Technical SEO can improve your site’s crawlability for search engines.
A Robots.txt file could also tell the bot how to move through your site’s content during its crawl.
Conclusion
SEO packs powerful strategies to help you break down barriers between you and your customers and help your business grow online.
However, it is important to remember that there are no shortcuts or hacks when it comes to SEO success.
During search engine optimization, you have to work hard to make your site easier to find, more interesting, more profitable, more authoritative, and more likely to sell.
As the digital space gets more competitive in 2023, the tips we have shared above might help keep your website up-to-date with the latest ranking factors, potentially helping it find visibility in the crowded online space.
