SEO Best Practices On How To Improve Search Performance

How are your SEO campaigns going lately?

Every year, SEO practices continue to evolve. You don’t stop with just having a thorough understanding of it or leaving things to your SEO services company. You also need to be updated with the SEO trends all the time or else you wouldn’t notice that your website rankings are already plummeting and you’d be at a loss trying to find out how to improve SEO for your website.

But don’t worry! You can always rely on trusted a SEO company to to give you an idea on how to boost your rankings.

Check out these 11 old but gold SEP techniques on how to improve your website’s SEO. 

11 best practices for SEO that will boost your rankings

Turn your website traffic into huge sales. Level up your SEO efforts with these great tools and tips that earn site engagements and conversions.

1. Search competitor audit
2. Keyword ranking and benchmark
3. Google Analytics health check
4. Indexability
5. Site architecture
6. Accessibility
7. Mobile usability
8. Structured data
9. Link profile
10. Core Web Vitals check
11. Sitewide E-A-T check

1. Search competitor audit

Sure, you may have a website that outranks search competitors right now. But in this aggressive market, we wouldn’t always win if our rivals are getting smarter and better. The best way to still be on top of your game is to always know your enemy. You can achieve this through a search competitor audit.

Never miss out on studying your competitors’ best practices. Know your them, run a competitive backlink analysis and check out the focus keywords they are ranking on. But don’t just spy, don’t forget to list down your observations and the next steps you can do to improve your own search performance.

To start on this, use the best SEO competitor analysis tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, SpyFu, and QuickSprout to see what they’re up to and how they’re leveling up against your performance.

2. Keyword ranking and benchmark

Keyword research in SEO is definitely crucial. If you’ve done your research, you are now one step ahead of ranking your website’s content in the search engines. 

But with large amounts of data research, you might wonder where to start on how to improve your SEO with all this information in your hands. This is where keyword ranking and benchmarking enters.

Check out the keyword ranking of your page’s content, and then compare it with your competitors’ keyword performance. Use this information to figure out the gaps in how you use your keywords in your content. 

Sample keywords. From this list, you can already map out pages and content that will help you build relevance in your niche or industry. For this example, using the keywords above will help in ranking for ‘answer the public’ as the focus keyword. Photo by Propelrr.

Another thing to look out for is your current search position in your focus keywords— how are you fairing? Is your website optimized for those keywords? Are you creating relevant content for those keywords? Run by our on-page seo checklist and start from there on where you should improve on.

Some of the great keyword research tools to give you the edge in keyword planning and ranking are Google Search Console, Moz Keyword Explorer, RankIQ, and KWFinder.

3. Google Analytics health check

Google Analytics can help you measure your website performance but also keep track and understand your customers’ behavior on your website. 

Using these insights, you can figure out how you can optimize your current SEO practices and techniques to provide users with top-notch user experience. But of course, there could be data quality issues every now and then so keeping your Google Analytics free of these issues is one of the best ways on how to improve your SEO. 

Make use of the Google Analytics Health Check tool. The tool covers a few but helpful categories, such as website search setup, tracking and data quality issues, website goal setup and more. With this tool, you have an amazing and time-saving way to keep track of your performance.

4. Indexability

If your goal is to figure out how to improve SEO for your business, crawlability and indexability should be included in your Technical SEO audit checklist. 

Web crawlers need to easily access your content, so that your web pages can be indexed to search engines. Crawlability and indexability issues, however, might stop web crawlers from accessing your web pages and only some of your pages will be indexed.

To avoid such issues, you need to observe good Technical SEO practices. Optimize your website’s structure, strengthen the structure of your links, and troubleshoot server errors and unsupported scripts.

To get started, you can check out our recommended Technical SEO audit tools that includes the best website crawler and indexing tools like ScreamingFrog, DeepCrawl, and more.

5. Site architecture

Website Architecture. This high-level view of website architecture maps out the processes of your website including and surrounding the online customer journey. Photo by Propelrr.

Website structure affects site crawlability, and it is only one of the elements that can affect SEO. There are other factors that you must consider when it comes to architecture, such as your URL structure, HTTPs, user-friendly navigation, website speed, and device compatibility. 

Looking at these factors, it can appear overwhelming. But keep this goal in mind: your website structure has to be aligned with your customers and your brand.

Discuss your branding and how it resonates with your customers with your website designer. Also, don’t be afraid to optimize your website’s design and other features if there is a need to do so. 

Pick the website architecture tool that best works for you. But for starters, you can check out Meta Forensics, Slickplan, Omnigraffle, and PowerMapper.

6. Accessibility

Testing your site’s accessibility is one of the effective methods to improve SEO rankings for your website. You should check if your content and website features are working perfectly across different web browsers or devices that your customers are using.

While there are many more ways to improve accessibility for SEO, here are a few important pointers for accessibility:

• Ensure good accessibility within your website.
• Provide clear website descriptions and labels.
• Add sitemaps, navigation instructions, and search bars so that users can easily find content on your website.

To assess your website’s accessibility, try using Google Lighthouse, Wave, Tenon, and Deque.

7. Mobile usability

In this generation, people of all ages already have access to mobile devices. Whether your products or services are for young adults or senior citizens, you have to make your website mobile-friendly for your users. If not, you might drive your potential and even loyal customers away.

Here are some things that you can do to build a mobile-friendly website: make structured data and metadata (e.g. meta tags, descriptions) and use mobile usability tools to check for mobile speed and accessibility issues.

Check out the usability tools of Applause, Swrve, Mobileum, Digital.ai, and Lookback to get an overview of your current performance before you optimize.

8. Structured data

By now, you must have realized that Google has its limitations. The search engine cannot present all the websites that may probably have the same or unique articles, videos, or images. This is why structuring data should be included in your list of great ways to improve SEO for your site so that your brand can appear on the relevant search queries.

Implement structured data on your website. Research on default web formats such as microformats and microdata. Be ready to check out tools that can help improve your data structuring. 

Example of a Search Feature that can be achieved with Structured Data. You can markup your website using product data schema to appear in Shopping Results or even show your product’s Title, Photo, and ratings! Photo by Propelrr.

Some tools that you can use are Google Rich Results Testing Tool, Google Structured Data Markup Helper, Merkle Structured Data Tool, and Rank Ranger.

9. Link profile

Links can, directly and indirectly, drive web traffic. And web traffic means more chances of getting conversions for your brand. Because of the significance of links, you must build a great link profile.

Your link profile includes the different types of links that direct to your site, the anchor texts of these links, and how you acquired these links. 

Sample backlink. Use ethical link building practices and as much as possible use proper and contextual anchor texts to your backlinks. Photo by Propelrr.

Always use ethical link building practices in acquiring these backlinks to improve the website’s SEO performance. Other than best practices, make sure to filter and prioritize links from reputable sources and use relevant and varied anchor texts. 

10. Core Web Vitals check

Have you heard of Core Web Vitals? Launched in 2020 by the Google Chrome team, Core Web Vitals are metrics for a website’s page speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. These metrics help Google ensure that your site is safe and secure for browsing and that it is also mobile-friendly.

One of the tips you can follow to have good Core Web Vitals that can also boost your website’s SEO is to start with the largest content that you have on your site. 

Run loading page checks on this content, and remove unnecessary buttons and texts for that web page. Also, do not forget to fix cumulative layout shifts for your website.

11. Sitewide E-A-T check

Evaluations will always be part of your methods on how to improve SEO for your website. But did you know that you are not the only one doing evaluations for your site? Search engines like Google do it, too, in the form of E-A-T. This acronym stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. 

To conduct a sitewide E-A-T check for your site, start by making your content easy to understand. Use simple headers or subheadings, write shorter paragraphs with simple terms, and organize phrases and sentences in bulleted and numbered lists. 

You can also check the complete Google E-A-T guidelines when optimizing your website.

Key takeaways

There you have it! You now have some new techniques to try for improving your SEO efforts. Some methods can work for you and some might be too overwhelming and you will need all the help you can get.

• Content will always be king. You probably know this already. You may have top-ranking keywords, great website design, and cool products and services. But if you have irrelevant, outdated, or redundant content, your SEO efforts may be ineffective and your customers’ needs would not be met. 
  
• Your edge lies in your competitors. Keeping your friends close and your enemies closer appear to be relevant advice in SEO campaigns as well. Looking at your own techniques alone is not enough. You have to look at how others do it, too, so that you can learn from their successes and find methods that work for you. 
  
• Be updated on SEO practices to keep and remove techniques that work. Your current SEO tools and methods may still be in good shape. But in this fast-paced digital world, SEO practices are bound to change. It is good to evaluate what practices you need to keep and to be open to adopting new methods that could be beneficial for your business. 

If you need topnotch and comprehensive advice for SEO, feel free to contact us for any questions or concerns. Looking forward to hearing from you.

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