4 Best SEO Practices To Improve Your Business’s Rankings

According to HubSpot, 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results, which means that if your website isn’t ranking in Google’s top 10 results for your target keywords, your prospective customers might as well deem it non-existent.

Fortunately, there are plenty of actionable SEO practices and techniques that will help you boost your business’s rankings. However, it’s essential to realize that first, you have to tackle all the basics to create the foundation before you move to more advanced keyword research or start developing link-building strategies.

The latter can be particularly challenging in specific yet highly-saturated markets – for instance, when getting backlinks for the CBD niche, you’ll most likely need to work with a professional agency.

But first things first – below, we share several of the best SEO practices you can implement right now to give your growing business that much-needed boost in the SERPs. Here’s what you should do:

Focus On Quality Content

While it might seem counterintuitive, search engines appreciate human-oriented content the most. This must be the content that helps target audiences identify their pain points and provides solutions, educates them on the related subjects, and provides industry insights – and does so not only in an informational but also engaging way.

To create valuable content for your audience, you must always keep the user’s search intent in mind and ensure your content is aligned with it. There are four common types of search intent:

• informational,
• navigational,
• commercial,
• transactional.

Depending on their intent, users might look for information, a specific website, or product, only explore their options or be already willing to purchase something.

By understanding their intent, you can provide them with precisely what they’re searching for. Apart from the user’s intent, you should also remember to avoid creating duplicate content, as it brings little to no extra value to readers.

This rule applies to every type of content placed on your website – from title tags and meta descriptions to landing and product pages to image alt texts.

Use Keywords Smartly

Another best SEO practice is to be particularly smart about the keywords you want to target for.

Once you’ve conducted keyword research and determined what search terms your target audience uses when looking for topics relevant to your business line, you can match them with what you anticipate to be your prospects’ search intent and distribute these keywords into your content accordingly.

Here are some of the best techniques you can use to optimize your website with keywords:

1. Avoid keyword stuffing. This practice implies loading your website with as many keywords as possible to the point that your content starts to sound unnatural.
   
   Not only will it harm user experience and lower your credibility in readers’ eyes, but it’s also ineffective – Google’s algorithms know how to identify keywords irrelevant to the content.
   
   
2. Stick to one primary keyword per page, but avoid using the same keyword for several different pages on your website.
   
   
3. Remember to insert the target keyword into the headline, headings, and throughout the text.
   
   
4. Consider adding long-tail keywords to your content. Such keywords are longer and more specific keyword phrases that will get a smaller number of guests, but there’s a high likelihood that they will be closer to the point of purchase.

Pay Attention To Local SEO

Local SEO refers to optimizing websites for particular locations, which is an especially important SEO practice for brick-and-mortar or location-dependent small businesses.

You want to know your prospects know there’s something they’re already interested in their area.

Here are a few simple ways to make the most out of your local SEO efforts:

1. Create and verify your Google My Business account, and use Google Posts within it.
   
   
2. Ensure your business name, address, and phone number are correct and consistent online.
   
   
3. Optimize online directories and citations and ensure they’re consistent across four main data aggregation platforms – Express Update, Neustar Localeze, Foursquare, and Factual.
   
   
4. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly, as over 60% of Google’s US organic search traffic originates from mobile devices. 

Optimize The Website’s Loading Speed

Speaking of mobile search rankings, another crucial thing to take into consideration is your pages’ loading speed. If it takes too long for a website to load, no one will wait for it.

Users will just leave your page frustrated and move to another website with a similar offer.

To check your website’s loading speed, you can use the PageSpeed Insights tool that will provide you with recommendations from Google, along with a detailed report on how to improve. 

However, in order to improve your pages’ loading speed, you can also use these simple tips:

• compress images to reduce the page’s size,
• switch to lightweight themes,
• use lazy loading – an optimization technique that delays the loading of page objects until they’re actually needed.

Takeaway

As you can see, there is a multitude of techniques and practices to boost your ranking in the SERPs before diving into more specific and resource-demanding methods.

For instance, investing your time in creating valuable content benefits both your potential customers and your business, allowing you to build an online presence but also become authoritative in your business niche.

But remember – SEO won’t provide you with results overnight. Optimization requires lots of small yet consistent changes and a pinch of patience, but it’s always worth the effort.