15 Techniques for Improving SEO Ranking for Ultimate Success

Your target audience is out there, and if they are not finding you, it’s time to get serious about improving SEO and ranking higher up on search engine results pages (SERPs). Here's how to improve your SEO performance.

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As a business or freelancer, your website will be an enormous part of your success. It is how your potential customers locate you and get to know who you are and what you offer.

The question is, though, how easily can they find you?

Your target audience is out there, and if they are not finding you, it’s time to get serious about improving SEO and ranking higher up on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Improve your SEO ranking, and you can see an incredible increase in traffic to your website and also to your bottom line.

    What does SEO mean?

    SEO is a strategy of steps to take to increase your positioning on search engine results pages (SERPs). These steps improve your visibility, rank you higher than your competitors, reach your target audience faster, and lead more traffic to your website or blog.

    As users search for answers to questions or to learn more about a particular subject, they enter keywords and phrases. The search engine then returns links to content that it ranks as more likely to meet that user’s needs based on the query. SEO can help your content show up in those query results and reach your intended audience.

    What is SEO Ranking?

    An SEO ranking is where a webpage or blog post shows up on the search engine results page in response to a user’s query. The search engine algorithm uses a variety of ranking factors to determine the positioning on the SERPs, including content relevance, backlink quality, readability, and more.

    The higher your SEO ranking, the more likely that your target audience will find you and click-through to your website or blog. With more traffic to your site, the better the chances of converting visitors into your customers.

    How Can I Make Improvements to My SEO in 2023?

    Maintaining or improving SEO rankings is an on-going need for every business and freelancer. To improve your SEO in 2023, start with an SEO Audit of your website. Learn everything you can from this audit and identify where to start.

    Often, you will only need to focus on making smaller changes or modifications to a webpage or other parts of the site. Yet, there are several direct and indirect techniques you can use to improve your ranking.

    15 Techniques to Improve SEO Ranking

    Ready to improve your SEO ranking in 2023? If so, consider the following list of techniques.

    1. Prioritize the user experience

    The user experience is, by far, one of the most critical factors for a good SEO strategy. Google is increasingly attentive to how content is produced on websites and how it is being delivered to users.

    The reason for this is because if your content is robotic and made just to please search engines, it probably won’t rank. All content should be produced from person to person naturally, delivering something that users really want to see and read.

    The latest algorithm created by Google in 2021 focuses on the experiences of the users on web pages, and now all the updates have been based on this algorithm.

    Try to understand more and more how the user experience (UX) can be directly connected to SEO, and your organic strategy will become better and better.

    2. Always be analyzing data

    Analyzing SEO data is essential for a successful strategy. Use this data as a basis for formation of your organic acquisition strategy.

    Pay attention to data on traffic and number of visits to each blog post. Know which pages do not make sense on your website and revise or remove them. Do content pruning or optimize content that is not being visited as much.

    By organizing and acting on the SEO data, you will be able to make your organic acquisition of customers even better.

    3. Create higher quality content relevant to your audience

    The top driver of higher SERP rankings is your content.

    Focus on creating more high-quality, authoritative, and fresh content geared toward your intended audience.

    This content can increase traffic to your website or blog, which, in turn, boosts the relevance and authority of your site. Search engines will recognize this, and you can move up in rankings.

    Strategies to help write content valuable to your intended audience (and to search engine rankings) include:

    • Build content around a keyword phrase your intended audience searches on frequently.
    • Create content using related keywords and phrases to those most searched queries, which may be found under the “Searches related to” section of a Google results page.
    • Build content around low-competition keyword phrases, such as those you might find in the “People also ask” sections on SERPs.

    4. Revisit older content and update and optimize as needed

    Don’t forget about the content already on your website.

    Updating and optimizing existing content is a quick way to improve the relevancy of your site. Start with a content audit to identify what to focus on first.

    While the content may still be beneficial and not need revising, evaluate it for targeted keywords. Also, check to see if any images, infographics, or videos need to be updated.

    Ensure Google indexes your updated content by going to Google Search Console, entering the URL of the updated content, and clicking on the “Request Indexing” button.

    5. Increase the readability of your site

    By increasing the readability of your content, you can impress both your audience and search engine algorithms.

    Readability is a measurement of how easy your content is to read. Elements that factor into this measurement include text legibility, complexity, and even the actual formatting. A key characteristic of readable content is that it is also scannable.

    You can measure the readability of your content with the Flesch-Kincaid and Flesch Reading Ease formulas. Help is available online, including with tools such as Yoast SEO, SEMrush, Readable, Grammarly, and Hemmingway.

    Readability improves the reader experience, alerts search engines that the content is of higher quality according to the number of readers, and can help boost you up in SEO rankings.

    6. Create a robust linking strategy

    Your linking strategy is a key component of your SEO success and needs to include plans for both internal and external links.

    Within your content, link to external authoritative, relevant, and reputable sources. By doing so, you can increase your own credibility and authority, which are two factors search engine algorithms pick up on.

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    Make the anchor text for your links descriptive also, and use your targeted keywords or phrases whenever possible.

    Inbound links (or backlinks) are also beneficial to SEO. These are links that occur as a result of another website linking back to your site. To gain these inbound links, create high-quality content that is shareable and look for opportunities to guest post.

    Google looks at inbound links as another indicator that your website contains quality content and will take you more seriously. You don’t need a ton of these, as the search engine looks at the quality of each moreso than how many you have on your site.

    7. Regularly check for broken links

    To improve the user experience even more, regularly check both your outbound and inbound links to ensure they are still working properly. You may find an inbound link from another website is broken or an external link in your content isn’t functioning as intended.

    Broken links can annoy your readers, reduce trust, and affect dwell time (thus, increasing the chances of visitors bouncing off your website completely). Visitors to your content can also be suspicious that your site is unattended, outdated, or inactive. All of these can affect the user experience and your SEO rankings.

    8. Vary content types

    Offering different content types can attract a wider audience and increase traffic to your website. It can also boost dwell time, causing visitors to spend more time on your site, which can directly impact your SEO ranking.

    If you’re unsure where to start, consider your existing content. How can you repurpose it into another format? For example, turn a popular video into an informative blog post, or vice versa.

    Content types that are beneficial to SEO include:

    • How-to guides
    • Authoritative blog posts
    • Long-form content
    • Detailed Lists / Listicles
    • Videos
    • Interactive content
    • Infographics

    9. Strive for the featured snippet

    A snippet is what Google puts at the top of a search engine results page to provide a partial or full answer to a specific query. This featured snippet is pulled from one of the top 10 results appearing on that first page.

    Strive for your content to be the featured snippet.

    To do so, find a keyword phrase you are currently ranking for on a SERP.

    Look at the featured snippet appearing on that results page and notice its structure. The structure type will usually be a definition, list, or table.

    Examine your ranking content and make sure it is formatted to fit into one of the snippet format types.

    For example, to strive for a list-based snippet, be sure you use consistent subheadings (h2, h3s) with descriptive phrases for each section.

    10. Add alt tags

    For every video and image on your website or blog, include alt tags.

    These alternative text descriptions help search engines understand what that image is and to index it appropriately.

    The original purpose for alt tags is to provide a description of images for visitors who cannot see them. It is also what shows if an image fails to load for some reason.

    To increase the effectiveness of these tags, be as specific as possible in your description, keep it short, include your keyword or phrase, and be unique.

    11. Include meta titles and meta descriptions

    Include both meta titles and meta descriptions to help the search engines gain a clearer understanding of your content and to entice viewers to click over to your website.

    Make each one short, unique, and descriptive while also including your most important keyword or phrase.

    While these have less of a direct impact on your SEO, they can boost user engagement with your content and website, making them an indirect SEO factor.

    12. Consider adding an FAQs section

    As a person learns about a topic or subject, it can lead to additional questions and interests. Yet, it is impossible to address all of these potential questions and related interests in the content of just one webpage, article, or blog post.

    So, if you can anticipate what these will be, you can benefit your SEO by adding an FAQs section at the bottom that utilizes long-tail keywords. With these included, search engines will recognize the long tail keywords, and you can now rank when people are searching on those topics as well.

    13. Concentrate on improving your local SEO (if relevant)

    Local SEO is essential to those who serve specific geographical areas. It helps you appear at the top of local search results.

    A major goal is to rank in what is referred to as the “Local Pack.” This pack of three local businesses shows up at the top of SERPS, along with a Google map.

    To help optimize your local SEO and boost your chances of ranking higher, here are a few tips:

    • Claim or create your Google My Business Profile, then optimize it.
    • Make sure you have consistent online directory citations (name, contact information, etc.) across the web.
    • Optimize your website and blog content for local keywords
    • Respond to Customer Reviews

    14. Make your website more mobile-friendly

    With more people conducting searches on mobile devices today, it’s no wonder that you need to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Not only will this provide a better user experience for your target audience, but it can also affect your SEO.

    Google now uses mobile-first indexing, and this means that its algorithms primarily focus on how your content is displayed for mobile devices and use this to index and rank your pages.

    15. Monitor webpage loading speeds

    If your webpage loading speed is overly slow, it will impact your visitors and also Google rankings. Visitors are more likely to abandon your site, and Google is more likely to notice.

    In other words, how fast or slow your website loads will directly and indirectly impact your rankings.

    Monitor and test how fast your webpages load and make improvements on those that prove to be too slow.

    Things that can help speed up load times include reducing the file size of your webpage, compressing images on your site, and re-evaluating any plug-ins and themes.

    Create Higher Quality Content to Boost SEO with the Help of WriterAccess

    Determining the best ways to boost SEO and improve your ranking on SERPs is time-consuming and often intense. To increase your effectiveness, focus on the areas you can and outsource the others. WriterAccess provides you with SEO writers who understand how to write high-quality content to improve the customer experience and get you noticed by search engines. Start working with us today by signing up for a free trial.

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