What are the best ways to improve your SEO?
From providing relevant content to projecting outcomes, here are 14 answers to the question, “What are some significant pieces of advice that you would give to a company looking to improve its SEO?”
- Ensure Your Content is Valuable to Your Audience
- Have a Well-Defined Review Generation Strategy
- Audit & Upgrade Your Content on a Weekly Basis
- Remember, Your Brand is Not Your Keywords
- Don’t Be Afraid to Target Longer-Tail Keywords
- Get Excited About Being Unique
- Research What Your SEO Needs Specifically
- Take a Well-Rounded Approach
- Develop Content Pillars for Important Topics
- Improve Search Intent Keywords From Customer Feedback
- Never Neglect UI/UX When Optimizing Your Website
- Don’t Underestimate Local Keywords
- Know Your Limits
- Forecast Your Potential Data
Ensure Your Content is Valuable to Your Audience
While it’s important to optimize your website for search engines, it’s equally important to make sure your content is valuable and relevant to your human audience.
By creating content that is helpful, informative, and engaging, you’ll not only attract more traffic to your website, but you’ll also build a loyal following and establish your brand as an authority in your industry.
Remember that ultimately, it’s people who will read and share your content, so it’s essential to prioritize their needs and preferences over search engine algorithms.
Ankit Prajapati, SEO Consultant, Ankit Prajapati
Have a Well-Defined Review Generation Strategy
Review generation will always be an evergreen strategy for SEO. Perform an audit to understand how your reviews compare to other online competitors.
Then, create a review strategy for each platform where potential customers will view them—this can include product pages, Google Business Profiles, Facebook pages, or third-party platforms.
Use reviews to generate more visibility in local search, showcase reviews in email drip campaigns, share reviews on social media profiles, and analyze reviews (both positive and negative) to inform larger business decisions. Be the best by showing you are the best.
Dalton Luka, SEO Consultant, Dalton Luka SEO
Audit & Upgrade Your Content on a Weekly Basis
If you’re looking to improve your website’s SEO and drive more traffic, my best advice is to audit your existing content on a weekly basis. By doing this, you can upgrade your content and better align it with your audience’s needs.
Failing to upgrade your existing content is a missed opportunity to improve your website’s performance and engage with your audience. Upgrading your content can make a significant impact on your SEO and attract more traffic, as well as build stronger relationships with your audience by delivering relevant, up-to-date information.
Many people in the SEO industry are always looking for quick fixes and new tricks to boost their traffic. But building content marketing campaigns from your upgrading existing content is often the most effective approach.
Othmane Bennis, SEO Strategist, Syntax Finance
Remember, Your Brand is Not Your Keywords
Knowing which search terms and phrases your customers will use to find your product or service is essential to your SEO success. Most brands fail at this; they use emotive brand language to refer to their products/services instead of the words the audience uses to describe what they need.
It’s the difference between “When you are looking for more than just a legal opinion” (emotive brand) versus “Corporate Lawyer London” (keywords). Once you cover this, provide value such as useful content about everything you do and every related topic—and don’t cut corners with ChatGPT on important subjects.
Victoria Olsina, SEO Consultant, Victoria Olsina
Don’t Be Afraid to Target Longer-Tail Keywords
The best advice I’d give to a company to improve its SEO is to not be afraid to target longer-tail keywords to get customers. When many businesses finish publishing their website, for example, a flower delivery website, the owner might imagine ranking for high-volume keywords like “flower delivery” or “online flower delivery.”
In reality, those terms are highly competitive and will not yield organic traffic to a medium-to-low domain-rank website. My advice is to create landing pages that attract buyers through bottom-of-funnel keywords that make sense of the size and UVP of the business.
For example, “cheap flower delivery Chicago” “same-day flower delivery Chicago” or even “buy flowers Chicago delivery” have enough search volume behind them to drive organic traffic and the keywords have purchase intent behind them. Once a customer reaches the landing page, ensure it’s optimized for conversions—make it easy to chat with customer service, make it easy to check out, etc.
Melysha Acharya, SEO Consultant, Really Affordable SEO
Get Excited About Being Unique
With ChatGPT and other AI content systems accessible to everyone, expect there to be a huge influx of content in the next couple of years. The barrier to entry to make a website or content at scale has never been lower.
If you’re a publisher and you’re stressed about that, don’t get excited! What will be even more important is creating unique content where you add value—from your expertise, your brand, your voice, and your nuances. Embrace how searchers will still want your advice and expertise!
Andy Killworth, Senior Audience Growth Strategist and SEO Strategist, 10up
Research What Your SEO Needs Specifically
Improving SEO depends on the business and its SEO needs. SEO has so many aspects: On-page, Off-page, and Technical SEO. However, Technical SEO is often overlooked, even though it offers quick returns on SEO performance and User Experience.
In 2023, websites need optimization for mobile for faster load times. Besides speed, using structured data to generate rich results can improve click-through-rate and boost organic traffic.
Structured data or schema markup helps search engines to understand data better. Add schema to your FAQs for Voice Searches and optimize your images for Visual Searches.
Mashiat Maswood, SEO Strategist, VERB Interactive
Take a Well-Rounded Approach
Whether you’re a startup or a well-established brand, taking a holistic approach to quality content and accessibility will be vital in improving organic search acquisition. As the saying goes, “Content is King,” but it’s of little use if it’s not accessible, and that is where we deploy technical SEO optimizations.
From internal link optimization to resolving JavaScript rendering issues, if search engines can’t see your content, it will never attract new users. And, by extension, content found and indexed by search engines is useless if it’s not accessible to humans. Take a step back and assess the bigger picture when planning your next SEO strategy.
Sally Raymer, SEO Consultant, SEO in Motion
Develop Content Pillars for Important Topics
My best advice for businesses looking to improve their SEO is to determine how content can nurture and drive conversions, as this is the true end goal.
We do this by creating content pillars for topics that are important both for educating your audience and promoting what you sell, then organizing those topics into a keyword map that clusters keywords by search volume and search intent.
When you choose keywords that help your audience and describe your products, then create content for that, you bring relevant traffic to your audience, increasing your chances of generating conversions.
Adriana Stein, CEO and Founder, AS Marketing
Improve Search Intent Keywords From Customer Feedback
If you only check for traditional metrics like “keyword difficulty” and “volume,” you’ll end up with a similar list from all your competitors, potentially making it hard for a small/startup website to rank.
However, if you focus on using what your customers say in their sales calls or meetings, you’ll find unique “long tail” keywords that very few companies are using but generating highly qualified leads and traffic.
Understanding the search intent behind keywords is essential. Implementing this allows companies to better understand their target audience, address their needs, and satisfy them through their products or services.
Alwin Torres, SEO Consultant, XYZ Advantage
Never Neglect UI /UX When Optimizing Your Website
Always remember that people want to navigate your site easily. You will probably lose a potential client if they can’t find what they need when they land on your website.
Your mindset should always optimize your website for readers, not for Google. Overall, website navigation and website design play a critical role in SEO, as these two can create a valuable user experience that converts site visitors into sales.
Lady Allyson Dulnuan, Head of SEO, MSP Launchpad
Don’t Underestimate Local Keywords
Using local terms can help you get to the first page of search results faster because they are less competitive.
Even if your business has a national or international scope, you can try going local for the major regions you want to target.
By ranking for local keywords, you can better reach your target audience and attract more potential customers interested in your business.
Karla Reyes, Content Marketing Coordinator, Tiendanube
Know Your Limits
With SEO, businesses should know the limitations of the content management system (CMS) they’re using for their website. Many CMSs have different functionalities for SEO, and some of these can negatively impact a website’s SEO rankings.
These can include having limited capabilities for making on-page optimizations, generating unnecessary URLs and code, creating duplicate content, or sending the wrong signals to Google.
Being aware of these limitations will allow businesses to research solutions, such as custom code or third-party tools, to overcome these limitations and properly optimize their website for better SEO performance.
Lauren Galvez, SEO Consultant, Lauren Galvez
Forecast Your Potential Data
Although SEO forecasting is never 100% accurate, it can help you understand the efforts that are the highest priority to get the most out of your strategy. You can forecast your potential revenue by considering keyword search volume, site conversion rates, top converting pages, seasonality, and lead-to-sale rates.
There are many approaches and models for SEO forecasting, but the following are two of the most popular ones, such as keyword forecasting, which uses the monthly search volume a keyword gets and the average CTR based on each ranking position. With this method, you would multiply the estimated search volume by the CTR. The other approach is statistical forecasting, and this method uses historical data and linear regression to predict traffic based on past site performance and growth tendencies.
Do research around SEO forecasting and leverage all the tools for modeling that are accessible out there in case you are not very good at math, like me!
Fernanda Alva, SEO Strategist, Watkins Wellness
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