Competition is always endemic to the field of SEO. Every website owner strives to get into the top few listings on the Google search results page. Few keywords they choose to target and work on them driving traffic to the tentative website landing page. Any page ranking on the top needs work to stay on top because other pages keep approaching the techniques to attain that top position on SERP.
So, the curve of staying at the top position is critical in SEO. You specifically need to keep monitoring the website’s performance.
Highlights:
- Around 68% of internet activities arise from search engines
- 75% of users never go-ahead from the front page
- 46% of Google searches are local
- About 70% to 80% of users are not interested in paid ads
- Google holds a market share of 94% as of 2022, making it the world’s biggest search engine.
- 61% of marketers consider top SERP ranking as their marketing priority
- Google receives over 9 billion searches per day
Content marketing has shown significant growth around this decade. Content marketing promotes organic search traffic. You will be amazed to know that leads from organic traffic are likely to convert 8 times more than paid leads. Different brands are growing their reach through different platforms in various countries.
If you are thinking of doing the same, then you need a strong SEO strategy for your website. Increasing visibility asks for many efforts and focuses on certain elements.
Let’s check out the top 15+ elements to focus on, to help you to stand out in the market in 2023.
1. Organic User Behavior
Search engines are focusing on how the user interacts with the website. People are always engaged with the platform where content is posted regularly.
Periodic website analysis and deep knowledge of Google algorithms can help you with user experience improvement of your website.
You can take these steps to maintain engaging user behavior for the audience from organic search, and make your site future-proof:
a. Run an Organic Search Performance Analysis:
- Analyze the count and location of the organic search visitors on the website.
- Compare your website with other competitors doing well in the same field.
- Check the rate of organic traffic conversion as compared to other channels.
Assess all the landing pages separately whether any page needs optimization or not. This way you can reach your desired audience easily.
b. Do Keyword Research.
For great organic traffic, you need to create an aura. Once the person gets into your aura, they will come up with your website and convert into a loyal customer. And for this, you have to do hard work on keyword research. From the very beginning of digital marketing, keywords are the key to successful SEO outcomes of the website. Before stuffing keywords into your content check the keyword. You need to make sure the keywords and entities you are using are relevant or not.
Deep keyword research includes the analysis of the keywords organically through search engines and along with tools also like Google keyword planner, SEMrush, Ahref, etc. while using tools you can consider a few factors like keyword difficulty and search volume. The ones with less difficulty and higher search volume are the most relevant keywords. While doing the organic search just put your primary keyword into the search bar and the quick suggestion from Google you will see are LSI keywords or you can use tools like keywordtool.io.
You need to understand human behavior also to find great keywords, this way you can clarify your intent to the search engines. So, the search engine will bring you the most relevant audience.
c. Revisit Site Navigation.
As a business owner, you need to facilitate a seamless path for your user from navigation to the purchase on your site. Analyze that path and perform testing, if you see any sort of lack then make a proper strategy for the same.
76% of consumers accept that website user experience matters for them while shopping. Smooth navigation can make you a winner in front of a service provider providing the same thing at a lower cost.
d. Optimize for Mobile.
Around 50 percent of the searches come from mobile. So, for a successful market image, you need a mobile-friendly website. People use mobile phones to do searches using the voice search feature. Try optimizing your website for voice search by using long-tail keywords in the content.
It’s difficult to create a website functional on all devices. As different devices have different functionality, browser preference, and screen size. There comes the concept of responsive website development. This type of development includes creating a website with freestyle elements like a robust content layout, highly-optimized images, etc.
2. Depth & Accuracy of Content
“Content is King”, every search engine works on this phrase. And this is true because the engagement of the audience with the website depends on the content. Content marketing has grown to an extent, where marketers and bloggers are just creating the best pieces of content, and they are receiving huge traffic.
Content creation works on the Google algorithms, where you need to put your confidence. Always write with grammar accuracy, high readability, and zero plagiarism. Try to cover all the sub-topics according to content type and word limit.
3. Structured Data
Structured data coins the markup that helps the search engines to understand the way to represent your website content of SERP. Always use the schema markup to structuralize your data like content and images to stay on the top in search results. Chances of getting listed in the featured snippet section of the Google search results increase with it.
4. Content Freshness
Fresh content goes with the content published recently. So you need to update your content regularly, this way your audience will get the latest updates and information. Your customers will visit your site frequently, and never lose engagement. You will not need to always blindly go with new topics, refreshing your content can get you organic traffic.
5. Mobile-Friendliness
As discussed above in the site optimization for mobile. More than half of the total searches come from mobile phones. Users are switching their activities to smartphones as it is portable and handy as compared to the desktop. If your website is responsive enough to perform well over the smartphone screen, then it will perform better in SEO practices too.
6. Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is important to enhance your authenticity. It has become a natural human behavior that people trust the internet and they search for anything first to know more about it. Always keep your brand visibility great on all platforms whether it is social media or the search engine.
Propose a unique logo, use attractive and informational meta tags related to your brand, keep posting regularly, use content marketing, and employ the link-building strategy. You can also go for blog commenting and microblogging. Stay active on forums and help your audience in your niche as much as possible. You can create a great image this way.
7. Topic Relevance
Undeniably, the title is the first thing any user sees before coming to your post. Always create attractive titles. Keep your title within the word limit, and use question-style topics for your article or blog. Your website design or content part is not impactful until the visitor comes to your website. Thus, the title is most effective there to attract the audience to your website.
Try inserting a keyword on your title and find the most relevant title by combining the latest posts. Creating something that creates urges the readers to click the link. Avoid clickbait content, it is strictly useless and can reduce the ethnicity of your website. Discuss the pain points of the audience and write in a resolved manner.
8. Links
Interlinking has been a very successful methodology for great SEO performance. Healthy links from authorized sites in the same industry help to increase the authenticity of your site. Several SEO marketers perform backlink-building techniques as a basic SEO service to drive traffic. Just take care of the toxic or broken links regularly.
9. Site Speed
Google released its algorithmic update about the web core vitals. These metrics target website speed and performance. The time the website takes in loading should be less than or equal to 2.5 seconds. Similarly other web core vitals by Google help to determine the website performance in terms of speed. Website speed impacts user retention. Increased time in content representation over the website including images can increase the bounce rate of the website. Most of the users are likely to drop websites with higher loading times and never come back.
10. Internal Linking
Internal linking helps you to create great website representation and user retention. While the user is looking for more information on any topic in your blog, then you can redirect it to the relevant page of your website if available by inserting hyperlinks. Internal linking of the blogs and service pages of the website maintains good traffic on other content and also, additionally gets you great traffic on the website and so forth.
11. Domain Authority
Domain Authority is a great search engine ranking factor developed by the search engine “Moz”. It represents the chances of a website ranking on the search result page. Domain authority (DA) is measured from 10 to 100. Higher the score, higher the domain authority. Great site audit, optimized website structure, good quality backlinks, and amazing content get you high domain authority. Always keep checking for toxic or broken links to maintain a good score.
12. Site Security
Website security is important to protect your content from plagiarism. So far taking an example of the eCommerce store, the store has many personal data of the users like address, contact details, age, preferences, and account details. This type of sensitive information needs robust protection. You can approach various actions to protect your site in every manner by taking these steps:
- Keep your Software Up-to-Date
- Enforce a Strong Password Policy
- Encrypt your Login Pages
- Use a Secure Host
- Keep your Website Clean
- Backup your Data
- Scan your Website for Vulnerabilities
Best you can Hire a Security Expert company for cyber security. They have a team for vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VAPT). They perform a deep analysis of your website and provide you with a report of best practices that can be employed to protect your website from malware attempts and access from unauthorized sources.
13. Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E-A-T)
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Google mentions E-A-T in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines (SQRG). It helps SEO service companies to evaluate their website performance. Designing your website content and blogs according to Google’s eat can help you out with higher domain authority and user retention.
It also introduces the concept of YLML, which is the “Your Money Your Life” phrase, where the websites writing for medical, law, or finance need to take care most because wrong content may cause certain harm to the readers. So, the websites that fall under YLML have to take care of Google’s E-A-T especially.
14. Social Signals
Your image on social media impacts the standards of your online business. People consuming online services or products, surely are tech-savvy, you can expect most of them over social media. So, if you have a good social profile, it can benefit your sales performance on search engines. And do not forget that, search engines list your social media profiles also.
Your presence on different platforms enhances your visibility, brand awareness, customer engagement, and user interest in your business. Even businesses and startups are gaining leads from social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook on a higher amount.
15. Technical SEO
It works way around the technical factors on the site like, XML Sitemap, AJAX, robots.txt, etc. such types of factors help to secure a site, keep SEO budget-friendly, and deliver a robust user experience to the website visitors. Apart from the content and graphics of the website, technical SEO asks you to focus on the wireframe of the website.
What do these elements mean to your SEO strategy in 2023?
The year is almost gone now, ahead in upcoming years’ new marketing aspects and user behavior will be introduced. You will require a new marketing strategy to stand on the top in the market in 2023. The above-listed top effective elements that work as SEO ranking factors are units of your SEO strategy. So, while creating it the first step would be the site audit and after that, you can decide what is required in your website and what is not. If you are going to start SEO from scratch, then all the elements are important for the same.
Conclusion
Increasing competition in the digital marketing niche has introduced a dynamic set of functions and features, which are employed by the business to stand out over the top. Adequate knowledge of SEO and algorithmic trends is important to implement best practices for the growth of your business in 2023.
Even after attaining the top position on the search result page, you need to keep learning and focus on the targeted keywords, potential business prospects, and traffic sources to stay there.
You have an idea of the main components of SEO now. You can hire an SEO company to let yourself focus on providing the best services to your clients. The team at an SEO company has all the expertise and skills to practice SEO over the business processes.
