7 SEO Tips to Improve Your Ranking

Tricia Lim

No matter how established your business may be, SEO has an enormous impact on the success of your business. Your SEO strategy determines how easily your target audience can find you. This is essential because research shows that 75% of internet users don’t even look past the first page of search results.

What is SEO?

We all know what happens when you type in a search query and hit enter into a search engine, right? You get a list of results relating to your search terms. This list of pages appears as a result of search engine optimization.

SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, is the practice of increasing your website traffic and optimizing the effectiveness of your content for search engines. This helps you to rank higher than other sites that target the same search terms. It basically helps you to gain brand exposure through non-paid search engine results (also known as organic search).

Just like how we might take people for granted, when it comes to SEO, people are just as important as the search engine themselves. In fact, it’s about understanding these 4 key things:

What people are searching for online
What answers they’re seeking
What words they’re using
What type of content they wish to consume

Knowing the answers to these questions will allow you to connect to the people who are searching online for the solutions you offer.

If you’re unfamiliar with SEO and how to get started, here are 7 simple tips to improve your SEO game.

1. Improve your page loading speed

Page speed is a critical factor in SEO and for user experience. It’s important for a few reasons:

If it is too slow, Google will recognise this and it will affect your ranking.
A slow page will negatively impact your visitors’ engagement and experience with your website, which results in a poor Google ranking too.

According to research, 40% of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. And 79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with site performance say they’re less likely to purchase from the same site again.

of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load

of shoppers who are dissatisfied with site performance say they're less likely to purchase from the same site again

Source: Think with Google

I’m sure you can relate to the frustration of waiting for a web page to load and ultimately giving up browsing. Slow page speed also reflects poorly on the site and the trust that users have in that business.

Google PageSpeed Insights is a free SEO tool that scores your desktop and mobile page speed on a scale of zero to 100, with 100 being the fastest. It gives you a breakdown of how you can improve your overall site performance.

Source: Semrush

One of the ways you can improve your site speed is by checking your website theme and plugins. We suggest that you remove anything that can slow down your site. For example, if you’re using WordPress, consider deactivating plugins that you don’t need or use.

If your server response time is slow, you want to consider upgrading your web hosting provider to one that is more reliable for better server performance!

Here are some of the best web hosting providers out there:

2. Develop a link building strategy

Source: Moz

Backlinks (inbound links or external links) refer to links on one website pointing to another website. It’s good SEO practice to link out to other websites that offer relevant and valuable content. The importance of having a link building strategy for your website is this: it helps the readers. They also act as indicators of quality content which other websites depend on.

If a website has many backlinks, search engines like Google and Bing would view them as having quality and reliable content that has the support of others. The more backlinks a site has, the higher it can rank on SERPs (search engine results pages).

Why are backlinks important?

It can improve your rankings: they showcase your authority and trustworthiness in your industry, giving search engines incentive to rank you well on search pages.
Backlinks boost your credibility; when established sources back up your contethis works when you have established sources backing up your content.
It can redirect interested readers to your site, which will introduce your brand to new audiences who could turn into customers.

3. Create high quality content

With SEO in mind, it’s important to remember that the content that you produce should be written for your target audience and not solely to rank well on search engines. Content and SEO goes hand in hand.

At the end of the day, they are the ones who will be reading your content and have the buying power to spend on your product/services. To drive more traffic to your website and increase its popularity, you need to give visitors a reason to keep coming back. Your content needs to be high quality, recent, and relevant. If you have an older piece of content that’s good, it’s best to update it every now and then to keep it fresh and relevant.

Here’s a bonus tip: create content that will help someone. Perhaps your content focuses on something a customer in your niche or industry would highly appreciate. Funnily when you put users first, you’ll begin to write helpful content that search engines reward because it follows users and their experiences. At the same time, this will help you enhance their user experience and build trust with your target audience.

So, if you’re not creating awesome copy for your web pages, it’s hight time you start! This is one of many SEO mistakes you should be avoiding.

4. Use keywords appropriately

Source: Backlinko

Keywords matter when it comes to SEO and ranking well on search engines. You want to include words people will search for throughout your content. However,do so sparingly. Use them naturally in your sentences and content, even in your header tags and image captions. There’s also long-tail keywords, which are usually three to four word phrases that we use to search. For example, “best korean restaurant near me” rather than “korean restaurant”.

If you’re looking for great tools to help you with keyword research, you can check out our other blog on the best digital marketing tools experts use here.

5. Optimise your page title and meta description

One of the first sections people see when Google presents us our search results is your page title and meta description. They might decide whether to click or skip your page based on these alone. So, you’ve got to make those words count.

Here are a few tips to remember:

Keep your page title catchy and click-worthy because you only have 65 characters to write your headline
Include your target keyword at the front of your title
Be transparent, your title should entice but not mislead your readers once they’ve clicked on your page link
Be clear in communicating what they can expect from your page and what makes your unique
Meta descriptions act as a snippet for your page, so it needs to be descriptive, unique, and short.
Keep your meta descriptions under 160 characters

If you’re a WordPress user, you can install the Yoast SEO plugin to help you in your keywords, title naming and meta description. It’s also great at fixing duplicate meta descriptions on your site.

6. Use short and simple URL structure

While your meta descriptions need to be descriptive, your URL doesn’t. In SEO, search engines consider the readability of your URL structure. If your users find your URL hard to read, chances are search engines may be confused too.

For example, while title tags are optimised for SEO and click rates, the URL doesn’t have to include all the words. The best practice for a clean and readable URL structure is to keep it short and focus the keywords at the front.

7. Publish fresh content regularly

According to the Content Marketing Institute, producing unique and engaging content is a challenge for most marketers. (I can definitely attest to this). No matter what kind of marketer you are, we need to be disciplined when it comes to content creation.

Content creation is challenging for a few reasons. For one, good quality content needs to be relevant, fresh, and engaging. Thankfully we have tools to help us schedule content in advance and maintain consistency in our publishing.

Final thoughts

If you want your site to succeed, you need SEO. Though it takes constant learning, experimentation and creativity to nail it right, the results are worth it.

To recap, here are the 7 SEO tips:

Improve your page loading speed
Develop a link building strategy
Create high quality content
Using keywords appropriately
Optimise your page title and meta description
Use short and simple URL structure
Publish fresh content regularly

These tips will help you produce the results you want to conquer the SERPs, no matter your experience level.

If you’re interested in knowing more about the available SEO tools out there, Digital has curated an in-depth list of the best SEO software.

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