Imagine entering a question on Google and seeing your content pop up as the top response. This is every marketer’s and business owner’s dream, isn’t it?
What if I told you that you could achieve this by implementing a few tested-and-tried strategies?
An SEO strategy is your organization’s plan for ensuring that your content ranks on search engine results. Your goal in implementing effective SEO tactics is to maximize your chances of gaining organic traffic through search engine results.
The following are the proven SEO strategies you need to use to increase organic traffic:
- Prioritize search intent
- Revitalize your old content
- Consider user experience
- Take internal and external links seriously
- Have an FAQs section in your posts
- Boost your E.A.T
- Keywords matter in 2023
- Make good use of meta and title tags
- Conduct content audits regularly
- Optimize your images
- Take advantage of Google’s featured snippets
- Avoid outdated SEO strategies
This article discusses the above best SEO tips for 2023 in detail. The best thing about these strategies is that they are beginner-friendly and don’t require many resources.
So keep reading to find out 12 things you can do today to drive more traffic to your site.
12 SEO Strategies for 2023
1. Prioritize Search Intent
The number one factor that search engines consider in ranking content is whether or not it meets users’ needs. As such, you must write content that answers searchers’ questions.
In my experience, the best way to do this is by putting yourself in your reader’s shoes when creating content. According to Google, the highest-ranking sites are those that best answer searchers’ questions.
A common mistake that most content marketers make is including content that is remotely connected to their main topic and having it at the top of their articles.
Often, this takes the form of interesting facts about the topic, which may not be particularly useful to the searcher.
For instance, if your topic revolves around RV maintenance, you may be tempted to start your piece by giving a brief history of recreational vehicles.
However, this subsection will be highly irrelevant for users who need instant information about RV maintenance. Such users will often leave your page to find an article that better answers their questions.
One way to gauge whether you have met the searcher’s intent is to ask yourself whether any paragraph in your article can be featured on Google snippets.
If the answer is no, you need to rework your content to make it more helpful.
Additionally, structure your piece so that the most important and relevant content features at the beginning of your article, while more obscure and unrelated details are at the end of the piece.
That way, users will have found a comprehensive answer to their question by reading the first few paragraphs of the article. Then, if they are interested in more information, they can keep reading the rest of the article.
2. Revitalize Your Old Content
One of the lesser-known facts about search engines is that they generally don’t rank old content. So, if one of your posts ranked very highly last year, there is a good chance that its performance has dwindled over time.
Fortunately, you can easily revamp your old articles to enjoy great SEO benefits.
One of the best ways to do this is to fill content gaps in your pieces. You can use software like Google Search Console to identify content gaps in your past pieces.
The best tools will identify the sub-topics that users are interested in which are missing in your articles.
Adding this new information will go a long way in improving your rank.
Additionally, you want to ensure that your images are up to date.
For instance, if you have a Pinterest screenshot from 2014, no doubt it makes your post look ancient. You will need to recapture such an image using the new Pinterest layout to improve your rank.
You can also add infographics to old posts to revamp them. Because infographics are a relatively new feature, they can significantly affect your SEO rank.
Another way to revamp old content is by transforming some of your posts into videos. According to research, having videos on your site can improve your traffic by up to 41%. Talk about impactful changes!
3. Consider User Experience
A cardinal rule that you must follow for successful SEO is ensuring that you provide your users with a fantastic experience. Google uses three Core Web Vitals to rank a site’s UX:
- A site’s loading speed
- Its interactiveness and responsiveness
- Its stability
You want to ensure that your website meets all three criteria. One of the best ways to enhance your site’s loading speed and stability is by opting for cloud hosting rather than ordinary hosting.
Additionally, you want to optimize your website for mobile users. Why, you ask? Because people are using their smartphones more than their desktops to find information from search engines.
Google changed its ranking criterion in March 2021 to mobile-first indexing. Today, the search engine heavily considers a site’s mobile-friendliness when ranking it. The more mobile-friendly a site is, the higher it ranks.
You can make your website more mobile-friendly by:
- Having shorter paragraphs in your articles- they are more alluring on a smaller screen
- Testing your site’s UX design to ensure that it works well both on smartphones and desktops
- Uploading high-quality videos and images
4. Take Internal and External Links Seriously
One of the factors that Google considers in ranking websites is their authoritativeness. A site that incorporates internal and external links is more authoritative than one that doesn’t.
One of the best SEO hacks for 2023 is to choose contextual backlinks for your posts.
Adding irrelevant internal links won’t do your content any good because Google will simply disregard them.
However, used well, internal links can help boost organic traffic to your other pages, especially those with great content but fewer visitors.
Additionally, you can also have a Related Articles showcase in various sections of your post as an easy way to include internal links. This further helps boost traffic across multiple pages on your site and is great for SEO.
You must also be choosy with the external links you include in your posts. I recommend that you mostly link to relevant posts from leading and established websites. Some sites that Google ranks highly include:
- .edu, .gov, and .org websites- which are seen as educative and non-partisan
- Leading news websites like Forbes, the Huffington Post, and Inc Magazine
One of the best SEO tips is to request these authoritative sites to replace their broken links with your contextual links. They will likely indulge your request since a broken link does little for their SEO.
On the other hand, having your site featured on a leading site can do wonders for your rank. So don’t hesitate to reach out to these companies.
5. Have an FAQs Section in Your Posts
When creating content, you will likely not cover everything related to your topic. This could cause you to miss out on some essential keywords related to the topic.
A good way to cover yourself and still rank for related keywords is by having an FAQs section after every post.
I recommend going to the “People Also Ask” section of the top page on Google’s search results to find out the questions related to your topic. Then, craft direct answers to those questions, and include them in your article.
For all you know, you might even be featured on Google Snippets for your answers to those relevant questions!
6. Boost Your E.A.T
E.A.T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. These three qualities form part of Google’s critical quality rater guidelines. If Google considers your site to have E.A.T, your page will likely be ranked highly.
You can boost your site’s expertise rating by hiring experts to write your content. Be sure to include their biographies on the post as proof of their expertise.
To make your content authoritative, include quotes from leaders in your industry.
If you’re lucky, the expert you quote might share the post on their social media pages, which will drive more traffic to your site.
For trustworthiness, the best way to earn it is by having positive reviews of your products or content on your pages.
In addition, you can encourage your readers to interact with you by leaving comments on a chat box.
Here is an example of how to engage your readers from the Sunny Side Up Blog.
Moreover, encrypting your site makes it more trustworthy and can go a long way in improving your SEO rank.
7. Keywords Matter in 2023
Many SEO experts think that employing a keyword strategy for your SEO is outdated for 2023. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.
Sure, some keyword strategies that worked in the past may not make any difference to your SEO in 2023.
One that comes to mind instantly is cramming your articles with irrelevant keywords to boost SEO. This doesn’t work anymore.
But keywords still matter a great deal today. After all, they are the very words that users type on search engines and the very basis on which search engines determine which results to display first.
Using long-tail keywords effectively is one of the best SEO keyword tips. Long-tail keywords are longer than target keywords- usually at least three words long.
These longer keywords cater to a smaller audience, which means lesser competition for the top place on SERP.
Say, for instance, you are writing about buying real estate in the city. Rather than have real estate as your keyword, you can opt to use city real estate.
This makes your content more relevant to a specific audience.
Ultimately, you will rank higher for people looking for city apartments than a site whose keyword is real estate.
8. Make Good Use of Meta and Title Tags
Meta tags and title tags can also make a huge difference to your rank. Not only does Google consider them when ranking pages, but searchers also skim through them to determine whether your content is relevant to them.
Sample Meta Description
You must be concise when creating your meta and title tags. I recommend that you craft your tags from a user’s perspective rather than your own.
The better you can capture the user’s intent, the higher your click-through rate will be.
9. Conduct Content Audits Regularly
Audits are a great way to monitor your content’s performance and are the latest SEO techniques for 2023.
Conducting them allows you to identify your non-performing pages, isolate what their issues are, and fix those issues. This can give your website a major SEO boost.
The most effective way to conduct a content audit for your site is using software like Google Search Console and Ahrefs Audit Tool.
These tools will identify broken links and images on your site and suggest ways to improve them.
10. Optimize Your Images
Your site’s loading speed is one of the factors that Google considers in ranking a site. The images you include on your site affect its load time, so you need to optimize them for shorter load times.
You can use these SEO tips for small businesses to optimize your images:
- Select the right image format for your pages- PNG for simple images, JPEG for colorful ones
- Opt for the smallest image size that looks great on both desktops and smartphones
- Have strong alt text. That way, searchers can still know what images are about while they load.
11. Take Advantage of Google’s Featured Snippets
For Google to choose your content on its featured snippets, you must first rank on the first page of search engine results.
While appearing on the top page of search engine results is quite an achievement, getting featured on Google snippets is a sure way to rank Number 1 for your target keyword.
Sample Featured Google Snippet
The formula for creating snippet-worthy content is fairly simple. This makes it one of the best SEO tips for beginners.
First, in a section of your work, preferably near the start of your article, you must answer your topic question straightforwardly.
The more factual and helpful your answer is, the more likely you will get featured.
As I have already mentioned, one way to get featured on snippets is to have an FAQs section on your content. By its very nature, an FAQs section requires you to answer commonly asked questions about your target keyword concisely. This is precisely the content that makes it to Google’s snippets.
12. Avoid Outdated SEO Strategies
SEO as a digital marketing strategy keeps changing rapidly. As search engines become smarter, old practices become phased out and are instantly replaced by newer and more effective strategies.
The final facet of your SEO strategy is to avoid outdated SEO tips that no longer work. This saves you a ton of ineffective work and leaves you free to focus on advanced SEO techniques that work.
Some of the SEO strategies that may have worked five years ago but are no longer necessary today include:
- Populating your content with keywords, especially irrelevant keywords – your content could be flagged as spam
- Focusing on long-form content only
- Using LSI keywords
- Creating low-quality content to fill your site
Wrap Up: Boost Your Web Traffic
If you follow the SEO Strategies mentioned in this blog post, your organic traffic will see a significant boost come 2023.
Implementing these methods may take time and effort, but they’ll be worth it in the long run. If you need help getting started or want someone to manage your SEO for you, contact us today.
We have a team of experienced content creators and marketers who would love to help your website rank higher on Google. What are you waiting for? Let’s increase your organic traffic together!