Are you frustrated by the lack of results, even after trying multiple SEO agencies to improve your organic rankings? Well, in our experience, you are not the only one. Search engine optimization is a complex process, which requires smart decision making at every step. From keyword research to implementation of technical SEO bits, you need to know which things to pick and which ones to let go.
Most SEO agencies come to you with promises of improved rankings, and then blame the implementation process if things do not go as planned. Which ultimately leads to a hole in your pocket and a sour taste for further SEO. In today’s post we cover the most important bits you need to cover to successfully rank your website. These consolidated points come from years of research and agency experience. So, let’s get started.
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Stay Ahead in 2024 with These 8 Best SEO Practices
1 - Improve User Experience
In June 2021, Google issued a core update which made the user experience or UX a ranking factor. Named the Core Web Vitals, this update started laying emphasis on how easy it was for users to interact with your website. It had three main things under the purview:
- Website load speeds
- Website stability
- Interactiveness and responsiveness
Now, if your SEO agency has been optimizing for keywords but not taking care of the UX, it would indeed cause problems in rankings. We say that based on several case studies, wherein bad UI and UX impacted a client’s website despite having good keyword density, internal links, and content.
2 - Optimize for Mobile
Starting in March 2021, Google has switched to 100% mobile first indexing. Which means your website must offer a smooth experience on all types of mobile devices and screen sizes. This is important because mobile traffic constitutes more than half of all website traffic nowadays. In many industries, the number of mobile users is over 70% of total users compared to desktop users.
In turn, optimizing your website for almost a mobile app like experience will not only help in meeting Google’s core web vitals requirements but also improve user engagement rates. As part of our SEO checks and to-do, we assess and improve core web vitals using state-of-the-art programming for our client websites.
Also Read: How to pass website core web vitals check?
3 - Utilize internal linking
Despite being one of the cornerstones of SEO, internal linking is perhaps the most overlooked aspect by novice SEO planners. Tests have shown that simply adding internal links in your articles and blogs without any content update can improve positions on Google search.
Internal links help users in exploring content in a more meaningful way. Users can click on keywords and keyphrases to learn more about them without having to search again (internally or externally). If you are looking for the king of internal linking, look no further than Wikipedia.
However, it’s important to understand two simple things when providing internal links:
- The anchor text used for the link should be relevant to the linked page at it helps Google understand the context.
- Using too many internal links is not advisable as it prevents search engines from understanding the site structure and relevance of the content.
4 - Enable contextual SEO
Every business or service or website caters to a certain niche and every niche has its own set of contextual terms. Optimizing for these terms is the best way to put your website in front of users.
For example, a contactor is an electrically controlled switch used for switching an electrical power circuit. But contactors have different use cases and types depending on the industry. A home electrical company like Havells, offering contactors to the general public, is totally different from a firm like Amphenol, manufacturing an aerospace contactor.
That’s where contextual SEO becomes relevant. Optimizing for generic terms without understanding your target audience and the overall sentiment behind a search term can result in delayed and non-performing results. Which is another common mistake made by SEO agencies.
Most often the agencies will create a keyword list based on volume rather than quality. But in doing that, they defeat the purpose of doing SEO in the first place. Because even if your website starts ranking for the most generic of terms, it will not translate into any business.
For context, just imagine yourself as a provider of aerospace grade contactor products. Since this is a very niche business, only an informed audience is going to search for your products. So, will it help if you ranked for the term ‘contactor’ or would you rather rank for a product or specification based keyword like ‘MIL-DTL-38999’?
5 - Work on your E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness. Google has clarified that E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor but simply instructions for content quality. However, the framework has an indirect impact on SEO because it defines the standards for what Google and other search engines look for in your content. By complying with E-E-A-T guidelines, you are automatically making your website more searchable and engaging, two parameters which matter the most when it comes to ranking on Google.
To comply with E-E-A-T, make sure that your content,
- Offers valuable information and contains engaging elements such as infographics, call to action buttons, and quality internal and external links.
- Has a veritable backlinks profile from high-authority domains.
For getting high-authority backlinks, your agency needs to have an expert off-page SEO team in place, who can constantly discover relevant websites and create these backlinks.
6 - Transform your blogs into videos
With the advent of YouTube and video shorts, more people prefer to watch a video instead of reading a thousand words. Converting your most popular blog posts into videos and embedding them on the page can boost your traffic by up to 40%.
Articles with embedded video content get more exposure in SERPs. Ranking video content in the SERP has shown increases of up to 157% in organic traffic for publishers.
With the availability of advanced AI tools, converting your blogs into videos has become relatively easy and cost effective. Has any of your SEO partners suggested that yet?
7 - Keep updating your content
Existing content is the most overlooked part of your SEO efforts. Every new SEO agency you hire will focus on creating new content requirements, instead of first planning to optimize the existing web pages. Sometimes all you need is to run a page level content gap analysis to transform good content into great content.
Freshness of the content is a ranking factor, given that the content meets Google’s quality standards. Moreover, you can optimize your content for long tail keywords voice search when updating a very old article. These strategies can be easily worked into optimizing old blogs by adding new content and updating the publish date.
Afterwards, make sure that your sitemap is crawled and the new content gets indexed. Want to know more about sitemaps?
Read our in-depth article on sitemaps here. What are Sitemaps and their importance in SEO?
8 - Do not ignore technical on-page SEO
SEO implementations are time sensitive, and technical SEO more so. The faster you shore up your technical SEO, the faster you can expect results. But we have seen that most of the time, either the SEO agency is not equipped to handle development related SEO tasks, or the client has a separate team for development, which creates an operational bottleneck.
Technical SEO tasks like,
- Page title and description updates
- URL slug improvements
- Internal linking
- Schema code implementations
- Language tag updates
- Image resizing and alt tags, and
- Readability optimizations
Require expert SEO and development teams who can work hand in hand to ensure the monthly tasks are executed as planned. Most SEO plans fail to deliver within timelines because of the gap between planning and execution of simple tasks.
Read more:- The Crucial Role of Technical SEO
Looking for a new SEO partner?
That concludes our SEO tips for the day. Now, if you have any questions regarding search engine optimization or are looking for some high-quality SEO services, drop us an email at info@digitalobsession.in.
