Search engine optimization is not an endeavor that any business leader should associate with the descriptors “fast” and “easy.” To be effective in the long term, SEO strategies require heroic amounts of research and months of effort, ideally from SEO professionals with years of experience in the field. So many digital marketing firms take advantage of white label SEO services because SEO is so important to the broader success of digital marketing campaigns and having access to dedicated SEO professionals is paramount for maintaining client satisfaction.
Still, there are a few tips and tricks in SEO that can be completed relatively quickly and with relatively little skill. Here are some of those tips and tricks that work to improve SEO in 2023:
Choose Easier Keywords
Some keywords are much more difficult to rank for, perhaps because so many other businesses are competing for them or else because Google more tightly regulates their results. It will take much more time and effort to breach the top few results for these keywords, so businesses looking for an easier SEO win might pursue ranking for keywords with a lower difficulty rating.
Add More Internal Links
Building external links takes time because it requires businesses to build relationships with other websites. In contrast, a company has complete control over the quantity (and quality) of the links on its own website. While waiting for a backlinking strategy to yield results, businesses can and should target specific pages with stronger internal links.
Answer FAQs
Frequently asked questions will draw a large number of web users to a business’s site because they help to address some of the most popular concerns users might have about a particular industry, product or service. Businesses should not be shy about adding any relevant FAQ to their FAQ page, and it might be wise to add a few FAQs to other pages around the site, like product pages or blogs.
Fix Dead Pages
Websites are dynamic; they should be constantly changing, adding and removing pages to ensure that site visitors are receiving the best possible user experience and gaining accurate information about the business. Unfortunately, that means that sometimes websites will delete outdated pages, which can eliminate the value of any number of backlinks. Fortunately, it is possible to preserve those backlinks by fixing dead pages to redirect to living pages on the site.
Refresh Outdated Content
Deleting pages when content becomes outdated is not ideal for the reason explained above: It eliminates valuable backlinks. Instead, business website should try to preserve all content pages, merely updating information as necessary. Regular content refreshing helps to maintain rankings as it demonstrates to Google that a site’s content is accurate and relevant to today’s users.
Improve Title Tags
Not only are title tags used as a ranking factor — meaning that Google considers their content when ranking search results — but users rely on titles tags displayed in search snippets to determine which page to visit. Every page needs a title tag, and the most optimized title tags are under 70 characters, are accurately descriptive of the page content, include a keyword variant and avoid clickbaitiness.
Check Core Web Vitals
Core web vitals include a handful of metrics that measure the user’s experience. They include site attributes like loading performance, interactivity, visual stability and more. In addition to serving as a minor ranking factor, core web vitals can encourage real site visitors to stay on the site longer and perhaps convert. Businesses can work with technical SEO providers to boost their core web vitals relatively quickly.
Consolidate Similar Pages
Google prefers long, comprehensive content over short snippets of information. Therefore, if a website includes two or more pages on a single issue, a business should consider combining those pages into one. This also helps to consolidate any authority gained through backlinks to improve the single page’s ranking power, even further improving its position within search results.
Shorten URLs
Not long ago, most URLs were a confusing and illegible jumble of characters. Today, a larger number of URLs are user-friendly, meaning they are mostly comprised of real words that are relevant to a page’s content. Businesses should try to keep their URLs short and to the point, which will make their linking strategy easier to enact and appease web users and Google’s search spiders.
It is important that business leaders recognize that the best SEO strategies require at least a few weeks if not several months to have positive effects. Yet, with some of the above tips and tricks, businesses can move their SEO strategy along and begin achieving their ranking goals sooner.
