Best SEO practices, also known as white hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization), are tasks or methods like crawling, indexing, linking, and understanding user intent that can help your website rank on the search results page.
These ethical SEO practices allow online businesses and website owners to increase their search visibility.
If you are not ranking on the search results page, your business is next to invisible to Google and your customers.
Let’s dive into the best and latest SEO practices you can follow to boost your business website ranking on Google.
The 7 Best SEO Practices For Your Business
HubSpot research shows that 75% of users do not scroll past the first page of SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
With that, businesses have to update their SEO strategies along with Google’s changing SEO ranking factors to reach their target audience.
Here are our seven best SEO practices to help you rank on page 1 of SERP.
1. Target Opportunity Keywords
It’s no secret that keywords are essential for traffic as they tell search engines about the content of your webpage.
Most businesses stick to the old SEO rule book and directly target high-volume keywords, already dominated by a few high-authority websites.
Now, there are two problems when you target high-volume keywords:
- It can take more than a year to appear on page 1 of SERP.
- Your content becomes similar to other websites in your niche.
Further, low-volume keywords might be less in demand, and targeting them can decrease your customer reach. At the same time, it can help you reach those fewer prospects more quicker.
Thus, find your opportunity keyword.
Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko, suggests that opportunity keywords are those keywords that are related to your niche, but enough content about them is not available on SERPs.
For example, if you are selling travel accessories on your website through affiliate marketing and trying to rank for ‘best travel accessories’ keyword on the SERP for one of your blogs. You may find several websites dominating the top ranks for that keyword.
If you research ‘best travel accessories for women’ or ‘men’ or ‘babies’, you will find these keywords are less competitive, and comprehensive content is unavailable for these topics. Consequently, this becomes your opportunity keyword.
Similarly, there are opportunity keywords in every business. You can use the SEM rush keyword Gap tool or Google Console to understand which keywords people are searching for and analyze the content gap to find your target keywords.
2. Optimize Your Keyword For SEO
Once you have the target keywords, the next step is to place them in the right places in your content, meta title, URL, and web pages. In our industry, this is called keyword placement strategies.
Google crawls your websites to extract the most helpful information for the user, and your keywords can help Google and your audience find what they are looking for quickly.
Where should you place keywords?
Title Tags: Users will only click on your website if they find the keywords in the title. Start your title tag with your target keyword.
If you see the top search results for ‘how to write a blog’, the top-ranking searches start with the main keyword.
URL: Optimise your URL with your target keywords.
For instance, if you search ‘how to wake up early’, the first result’s URL contains the main keyword, which can convince users to click on the post.
Alt text: Google wants its search engine to be accessible to everyone. Adding your keywords to the alt text improves Google’s visual search and allows those with visual impairment to understand your image.
Early in the content: Google bots crawl the first 100 words of your content to find search relevancy. Place your related keywords in the introduction and the first subheading to ensure your content aligns with the user intent and gets clicks.
3. Create Unique Content With Visual Appeal
Google might not crawl your website for ranking if your webpage repurposes the already available content on SERP.
Instead, you need fresh content for the keywords you are targeting.
To find unique content, you can create something different or publish better content than what is already available. Either tweak the tone of voice, perspective, or varying language metrics that help elaborate in lesser words.
Let’s say your business provides health supplements, and one of the blogs you want to rank for is, ‘how to eat healthy’.
When you search ‘how to eat healthy’ on Google, most results provide a listicle with a few tips to eat healthily.
As a business owner, this is an opportunity for you to create a comprehensive guide on ‘how to eat healthy’ by providing readers with healthy eating benefits and recommending items from your website.
Google will rank you higher if you publish a better-detailed guide than existing ones, address the reader’s worry, and have authoritative links to back data.
If you cannot create something entirely different, produce better content.
Here’s an example of how to do that:
When you search ‘the best hiking trails in the US’, the top searches display results like 10 best hikes in the US or 20 best hikes in the US.
Overall, there are more than 1000 hiking trails in the US, and if someone is writing about hiking trails, maybe they can create a complete guide with ‘top 100 hiking trails in the US’ and explain them briefly.
The guide has the potential to rank because it talks about more than 100 trails and is a thorough post on hiking trails.
Another way to make your content stand out is to use posters, banners, infographics, and data visualization images, like graphs and pie charts.
Businesses can create an opportunity by finding content loopholes through SERP analysis.
4. Focus on On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO is the practice of optimizing web page content for users and search engines. It allows your webpage to become more accessible to the audience and Google bots.
Here is how to scale your on-page SEO metrics:
- Internal links: These links allow you to interlink related pages of your website together.
For example: If you publish a content piece about the benefits of tennis shoes, and you already have an article about the best tennis shoes on your website. You can interlink them to make it easy for the reader to access information in one place.
- Optimizing URLs, meta, and title tags: Google bots will search for relevant keywords in all your tags.
Therefore, enrich your tags with keywords and make them short.
Short URLs rank better than long and complicated ones.
The meta description must include a summary of the focus of your article in about 140-160 characters.
The title tag should contain your primary keyword for Google to consider your page for ranking and clickable for the audience.
- User experience (UX): Improving your UX may increase interaction metrics on your website and give Google a reputable impression of your digital footprint.
If your site has broken links, unstructured content, many pop-up ads, and banner ads that can make it hard to read the content, users will start bouncing as soon as they visit your webpage.
This indicates to Google that your site is unsatisfying for users, and your ranking decreases.
- Page loading speed: Optimize your website’s loading speed, especially on mobile devices. The Google webmaster guidelines mention the importance of page speed.
Use the page speeds insight tool to check your site loading speed. The tool gives you specific suggestions like compressing images and using lightweight themes to boost your site speed.
Most people use mobile to search for information, so ensure your mobile loading speed is on par with your competitors.
Search intent: Search intent is understanding the user intention behind their query.
Why do they want to know what they want to know?
For example, if you look for how to use eye cream on Google. It does not show results from E-commerce websites, nor does it recommend you purchase eye cream. Instead, it offers relevant information from medical websites on how to apply eye cream.
Focusing on user intent allows you to produce content that is relevant to the user.
External links: These links help you bring authority to your content and website.
They direct users from your web page to another high-quality site for relevant data. Always use high-ranking domain page links which provide value to your content and boost your ranking.
5. Use FAQ or Review Schema
Google is pushing for zero-click search, which means it will give users rich snippets without clicking on a website for information.
Using schema does not help in SEO directly, but it can get you more clicks if your snippet appears on the SERP.
Most users directly ask questions and may not use keywords when searching for something.
For example, people might search for ‘Why is France famous?’ rather than ‘France famous’, and Google shows a snippet on the top directly answering the user question without clicking on a website.
If your content talks about hotels in France, you can include FAQs (Frequently asked questions) at the end of your article with questions such as ’why is France famous’ or famous food to eat in France’.
Now, whenever someone looks for questions directly, Google will crawl for information and pick snippets to answer the user. If your content has an almost exact version of the heading as the user’s search, it can appear as snippets on SERP.
Review schema allows you to display the rating of your business directly on the SERP, permitting users to decide their choice using the rating metric.
Search engines like Google and Bing are advancing their algorithm by using conversational language to understand user intent, and schema markup can help you match the audience’s search intent.
You can check if your schema setup is suitable for search engines using Google’s structured data testing tool.
6. Improve Your Core Web Vitals
Google considers the core web vitals of your page for ranking. These include:
- Loading of the page
- Interactivity
- Visual stability
According to Google, the core web vitals report shows your page’s performance based on real-time usage data.
Google measures it using three metrics:
A. LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) or Loading
LCP is how long it takes for a user to click on a link and to see the information on the screen.
It considers the loading speed from a user’s point of view.
You can improve LCP by increasing loading speed and making websites mobile-friendly.
Google also has its own LCP guidelines that can help you improve your core web vitals.
B. First Input Delay (FID) or Interaction
FID measures how long it takes for a user to interact with a website. For instance, clicking on the homepage or scrolling the page.
Typically, FID is the time a user takes to engage with or click on your content page to scroll down.
C. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) or Visual Stability
CLS shows the stability of the page when it loads. For example, if pictures and ads on your page move around when loading, it spoils the UX and affects your CLS score.
Your webpage should be stable when loading and help users navigate the content.
7. Build Backlinks
Backlinks or inbound links are links coming from other pages to your website.
Backlinks are one of the best SEO practices, and they affect your business in two ways:
- Increases the domain rank of your website, which improves SERP ranking
- Brings leads and customers
There are two ways to build organic backlinks:
- Ask why people in your industry use backlinks and build content around that topic.
- Use broken backlinks from other websites.
Here’s how you can do that:
For instance, consider your business sells online courses for children.
When you search how many children like to study online, you may find various websites quoting data from a third source. Here you can become the third source for these websites by surveying how children use online courses and providing them with the latest data.
Another way to build backlinks is to fill the data or visual gap by creating unique content or infographics and requesting high-ranking websites to use your unique data or graph to add value to their existing articles.
For broken links, search for high-ranking websites in your niche and check whether their backlinks are functional or not.
If a website has a broken link, request the website admin to use your link to replace the broken one.
According to SEM Rush, backlinks are still one of the top Google ranking factors, and businesses can optimize them to rank higher on SERP.
Verdict
Search engines are transforming the way they work. Google, Bing, and Amazon are optimizing for voice and zero-click search, which makes it easy for users to find relevant information but difficult for businesses to get customers.
Every industry has a content and product gap, and a business needs to find its USP (Unique Selling Point) to compete with top-ranking pages.
Once you follow SEO practices, update yourself with the latest SEO trends and regularly implement these SEO techniques to appear on the SERP and drive organic traffic.
