We know that SEO can be a long game where you won’t see the fruits of your labour immediately, but we also know that we can make some quick wins too. Because of the necessity to play the long game, SEO is sometimes viewed as outdated or not as important as other aspects of digital marketing; but it is something that now more than ever, is important to pay attention to and get right.
So what can you do to create a winning SEO strategy in 2023? Well, there are a number of tools you can use. Link building, although tedious at times, is still considered one of the best tools available. Consider external AND internal link building.
When done properly, internal links span across your site but sometimes there will be pages that are favoured over others. In order to ensure nothing is neglected, it can be useful to visualise what and where you are linking on your site. Have a work-in-progress spreadsheet or a spider diagram. This could also help identify a gap in content.
As the saying goes “the only constant is change” and this is true of Google and their algorithms. With external link building, along with the linking domain’s relevance and overall SEO strength, content relevance is also important.
Google’s helpful content update aims to reward content where visitors feel they have had a satisfying experience and we can totally relate this to the type of content we want to link to or indeed, the type of content we want to link back to our site. This should be taken into consideration when also looking at the authority of a linking site.
Carrying on with the theme of helpful content, while positioning matters it isn’t enough to just rank number one on Google SERP but you need to also have a good CTR. What is considered good depends on your industry, but the motivation should be there to provide helpful, compelling information for your consumers and not fill your meta title and description with keywords.
Consider analysing PPC performance, what generates higher click through rates and can you emulate this in SEO with your headlines and meta tags? Streamline the information contained within your meta tags and provide a clear, strong CTA. It’s worth considering whether this opens a door to new content for your site or if you already have content, can it be optimised?
If you are running an eCommerce site, are you maximising your products’ structured data? And do you use your Merchant listings report on Search Console? If the answer isn’t a resounding yes, make it a focus going into 2023. If you don’t know where to start, have a conversation with us at Distribute Digital.
Another way to improve your site’s SEO performance is to make sure all your images have their alt tags. While this has the fantastic benefit of making your site’s content accessible for all internet users, search engines may interpret an alt tag to identify the purpose of an image. This can be a great way to increase your page relevance. It’s a task that once done, will be easy to keep on top of if you remember to add the alt tags each time you upload an image.
Additionally, look at search intent and have a bit of focus there. This includes keyword research with different intent types. Identify long tail keywords that are appropriate to your niche, and if you haven’t already, consider optimising for voice search when doing so. Users type differently to how they generally speak and you could be hitting a gold mine of keywords that have a good search volume but aren’t too competitive to rank for.
There are hundreds of factors that impact your search engine rankings, CTRs and on-site conversion rates. The team here at Distribute Digital have a fountain of knowledge, and if you’d like to utilise that knowledge to make your site perform the best it can get in touch to see how we can help.
