SEO Best Practices: 15 ways to boost your rankings
The world of digital moves fast – but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be slacking on SEO best practices. Although new facets are introduced on the daily, the basics stay roughly the same, so whether you’re a seasoned SEO or new to the online marketing game, getting the foundations is key.
In this guide, our team of in-house experts will touch on all things SEO, from its overarching benefits to keywords, title tags to technical tweaks.
Let’s get into it.
What are SEO best practices, anyway?
In a nutshell, SEO best practices are tried, tested and trusted strategies digital marketers use to enhance a website’s visibility in search engine results – without relying on paid advertising.
Deploying these techniques can help to improve your brand’s overall online presence and boost organic traffic from search engines.
Here’s fifteen of our favourites…
Content writing
Target the right keywords- If you ask any SEO, they’ll usually say that keyword research is the foundation of every single one of their strategies. You can use SEO tools to help you easily spot relevant keywords that people are searching for, and then target them throughout your content.
Create high-quality content- Any content you produce should be informative, helpful, and engaging for your target audience – aiming to create pieces that offer real value to users.
Optimised title tags and meta descriptions– These snippets of text are the ones that your users are first greeted with, appearing in search engine results pages (SERPs). To make a good first impression, ensure they are clear, concise, and include your target keywords.
Header tags should also be used to structure your content and improve readability – also offering an opportunity to include your target keywords.
Techical fixes
Image optimisation- Images can also be optimised for SEO, which often means including descriptive filenames and alt text, which is another golden opportunity for keyword inclusion.
Backlinks- As the name suggests, backlinks are links from other websites to your own, operating like ‘sign posts’. Focusing on obtaining high-quality websites can improve your website’s ranking in search results, as it shows that you are a worthy and credible source.
Smart linking- On the flip side, ensuring you have a strong internal link profile can help improve your website’s SEO and user experience, making it easier for your users to navigate subpages and topics.
Mobile-friendly UX- With more and more people surfing the web on their mobile, it’s key to ensure your UX and overall design is suitable for smaller screens – so your audience can scroll easily!
Fix loading speeds- A slow loading website is a one-way ticket to bounce town. This can obviously hurt your SEO efforts, so make sure your website is optimised for speed so your audience doesn’t become frustrated and click ‘X’.
Submit your site- Search engine crawlers will have the budget to index your website – but it can take time. To speed things up, you can directly submit your website to search engines like Google and Bing to help them index your content, helping you get seen much quicker.
Track those metrics- Use SEO analytics tools to track your website’s performance in search results. By picking and choosing suitable metrics – such as organic traffic, page views, keywords – you can see what’s working and what’s not, so you can pivot strategy as and when needed.
User-focused approaches
Get that promotion- If you’re creating great content, don’t just expect Google to do all the heavy lifting. Use a double-pronged approach by shouting about great blogs, guides and videos across your social media, in forums, and other online communities where your audience resides.
Refreshing content- Google loves freshly-squeezed (or produced) content, so update your website regularly with new information, insights and data to stay relevant. It’s part of their E-A-T guidelines, these days.
A user-experience focus- SEO is important, but it’s not the only thing that matters – shocker, we know. It’s also about how your audience interacts with your content, so make it as easy as possible to follow CTA’s or get the information they need. Positive experiences only!
Play the long game- SEO is not for impatient people. In fact, it takes much longer and plenty of effort to see results when compared to Paid Social, for example. However, it is much more scalable and satisfying in the long-run – paying dividends over time.
Need some help? We’ve got you covered.
We know that SEO best practices can be tricky to get down, especially when they span different factions such as content and technical SEO. However, if you follow some of the tips outlined in this guide, you should be able to reap the rewards across rankings and SERPS.
But for a little more help, why not turn to our in-house experts?
Our team has top-notch expertise in custom content planning, with SEO strategy development that sets the stage for your brand’s digital success. Together, we’ll build a strong SEO foundation to elevate your online presence.
To get key insights into your existing SEO position – or to get your content journey started – get in touch with us today!
