According to recent studies, over 3.5 billion searches are conducted on Google every single day. With an overwhelming amount of content on the internet, having an authoritative, well-optimized website is more important than ever before for businesses who want to get noticed online.
In this comprehensive guide, we'll be exploring [number] proven strategies and tips to boost your website's search engine rankings in [year].
Page speed has become a critical ranking factor in recent years. Google has stated site speed is incorporated into their ranking algorithm, and a site's mobile page load time is now a small ranking factor.
Optimizing your website to load as fast as possible should be a priority in your SEO strategy. Here are some ways to improve site speed:
There are many free tools like GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights that analyze your site and provide an overall performance score and suggestions for improvements.
One law firm client we worked with had a WordPress site that took over 12 seconds to fully load on mobile. After implementing the optimizations above, we improved their speed score from a "C" to an "A" grade and cut their load time down to 1.5 seconds - resulting in a 400% increase in organic traffic within 3 months.
Your website's information architecture - how content is structured, organized, and interlinked - has an impact on SEO. An optimized site architecture makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site.
Here are some best practices for site architecture:
Proper site architecture enhances the search engine's understanding of your content. Well-structured sites tend to rank higher for a wider variety of relevant keyword phrases.
We redesigned a dental clinic's website, originally structured like:
example.com/treatments/dental-implants
example.com/treatments/invisalign
example.com/treatments/teeth-whitening
We split each treatment into its own page:
example.com/dental-implants
example.com/invisalign
example.com/teeth-whitening
This change, along with interlinking these pages and adding links in their main navigation, helped increase their search visibility and traffic for treatment-specific keywords.
Identifying the keywords and phrases your ideal customers are searching for, then optimizing specific pages around those terms is key for SEO success.
To properly optimize a page:
Optimizing your pages for keyword intent and search behavior will directly improve rankings. Always optimize pages based on topics, not individual keywords.
We helped an ecommerce retailer optimize their product pages. We identified high-converting product keywords, then updated the page titles, H1s, content, and image alt text to include those terms.
For example, the 'Apple Watch Series 7' page was optimized for:
Title: Apple Watch Series 7 | Our Store
H1: Apple Watch Series 7
Content included mentions of "Apple Watch 7" and "new Apple Watch."
This boosted rankings for searches like "apple watch series 7" and "apple watch 7." Traffic from Google Search to their Apple Watch product pages increased by over 30%.
Backlinks remain one of the strongest ranking factors. Earning backlinks from reputable external websites helps boost your site's domain authority and search engine rankings.
Here are some effective ways to get quality backlinks:
Focus on acquiring backlinks from high authority sites in your industry. Domain metrics like trust, citation flow, and other link-based signals factor into search rankings.
We helped a client in the cryptocurrency space land guest posts on industry publications like CoinTelegraph, CoinDesk, and CryptoSlate by creating informative, data-driven posts.
Within 6 months they acquired over 200 referring domains, increased their domain authority from 34 to 67, and saw a 5x increase in organic keywords ranking on the first page of Google.
Having an active social media presence provides SEO value beyond just driving direct traffic and leads.
Here are some of the SEO benefits of social media:
The key is to share your blog content, videos, and other media on social consistently. Engage your followers. Utilize social to build your brand and expand your reach.
One yoga studio owner started sharing YouTube workout videos and Instagram Reels along with blog content on channels like Facebook and LinkedIn. In less than a year, they gained 15k+ social followers.
The social buzz and clicks their content received helped increase site traffic and search rankings. Their blog content now ranks for double the keywords compared to before having an active social presence.
YouTube is the #2 search engine behind Google. Optimizing your YouTube videos properly provides immense SEO value.
Tips for using YouTube for SEO:
Ranking YouTube videos drives traffic from both video search and Google universal search. YouTube is owned by Google so there is a strong ranking benefit to hosting videos there.
We helped an accounting firm create an informative YouTube series on tax tips and strategies. By optimizing each video, their YouTube channel and videos ranked highly for searches like "small business tax deductions" - driving leads during tax season.
For brick-and-mortar businesses who depend on foot traffic, local SEO is crucial for bringing in more customers.
Some best practices for local SEO include:
By optimizing your local SEO factors, you will boost website visibility for local searches and help customers find your business on Google Maps and search.
A bike shop we worked with was struggling to rank for "bike shop Nashville" and related queries. We helped them update their Google My Business listing and focus on ranking locally with location-optimized content.
Within a couple months, their website ranked #1 for "bike shop Nashville" and related long-tail terms, driving a significant increase in local store visits and sales.
Proper local SEO optimization allows you to effectively compete on Google for local traffic against larger competitors.
Structured data markup enables you to enhance your website with code that makes your content machine-readable for search engines.
Implementing schema markup provides SEO benefits like:
Some important schemas to implement include product schema, review schema, FAQ schema, articles, local business, and more.
We added FAQ schema markup to a SaaS company's website FAQ page. This enabled a rich featured snippet to show up directly in the Google search results.
They saw a 65% increase in clicks from search for their FAQ content after adding markup. Google also indexes their FAQs much faster after implementing schema.
Leveraging schema is a powerful enhancement for SEO that improves CTR, search visibility, and discovery of your content.
Implementing proven SEO strategies like optimizing for speed and keywords, earning backlinks, leveraging social media, optimizing for local search, and markup can significantly improve your website's search engine rankings and website traffic.
SEO is an ongoing process, but following these essential best practices will put your website on the path to higher visibility and more search traffic. Focus on providing value to searchers through optimized content. Build authoritative backlinks. And use technical enhancements like structured data.
With the right long term SEO strategy, your website and online brand presence will become a magnet for your ideal customers in search engines like Google.
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