2023 is going to be a year in which the websites are going to once again play a fundamental role in any business. It does not matter if it is ecommerce or another type of business, being in the top positions of the search engines will continue to be essential.
That any business has to have a website is nothing new. During the last few years, all kinds of small and medium businesses have had to innovate, and part of that innovation has been to create or optimize a web page. Not only is it enough to have the best design, in fact it is useless to have a thunderous design if the pages we want do not rank well in search engines. For this, the role of SEO is very important.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a job that, through a series of good practices, seeks to position certain landing pages, or specific pages, in search engines to receive more organic traffic and, therefore, better conversions. Over time, the way of do seo and almost every month there are new updates to the algorithms on which they depend to rank well.
Recently, Google has released another content update and many pages are seeing their positions change in search engines. We wanted to bring you some advice so that you do not get left behind and so that you can optimize your website with the best practices that search engines advise.
5 tips to optimize your website
Ideally, if you do not have enough time for it, it is to delegate to one of the many SEO agencies that are scattered around the world, since it is a laborious job that requires many hours and, above all, patience. But if you want to venture to carry it out, these are some tips for you to optimize your website in the best possible way.
Create a roadmap
When positions change, it is normal to panic and try to fix things as soon as possible. We agree. But with all these new algorithm updates, maybe it’s time to think better in the medium term, instead of putting out patch after patch that sooner or later is going to stop working.
For this it is interesting create a concept map with the objectives that have been set both in the short and medium term to have everything in one place and be able to check at all times. Creating this roadmap is essential so that everyone knows what is being carried out and, above all, if there are new additions to the project, to know what has been done and what is pending.
In this concept map, we advise you to plan on the four things that we are going to show you next and, if you can, it would be ideal to have more people from the team to come up with the best ideas.
Analyze the competition
One of the essential things is to analyze the competition. Not only from a product point of view, but from an SEO point of view. How many pages do you have for certain products? What search intent are the pages ranking for? How are they distributed within the web? There are tools like SEMRush that will help you carry out an audit to answer all these questions and more.
All this is not to shamelessly copy what they do, but to get an idea of what they have that we don’t have, or vice versa, and to know why they rank better than us. For example, if you both have a page on the best running shoes and at first glance you see that there is a big difference in the number of items for sale, number of words in the content, but what matters is how relevant that content is, or the user experience is worse on your page, may be the main factors that respond to this difference in positioning.
Carry out that audit to find out what the main differences are and try to fill those gaps with a well-defined strategy.
Write relevant articles
Google has placed special emphasis during 2022 on relevant content. It doesn’t matter that you have a page with a large number of words. If at the end of the day you don’t meet the search goal that the user is looking for with their search intent, you won’t be able to rank high. If you write something trying to rank for a well-defined keyword, try to include some long-tail keywords derived from that main one to improve user information, but don’t write for the sake of having more words without rhyme or reason.
A tactic that comes in handy in this situation is to open an incognito page, write the keyword for which you want to position and take a look at the content of the first 5 pages to see what the search engine considers most relevant. It is a technique known as skyscraper that consists of seeing the content and, in some way, trying to improve it. Of course from an ethical point of view and without copying any content because that way your site will be penalized.
Keep in mind that with the rise of platforms that write articles using artificial intelligence, you may be tempted to carry them out this way, but it is not advisable at all. Google is aware of this practice and they especially emphasize that the content has to be written by a person. But how will they know if it is written by a person or by the AI? I wouldn’t put them to the test if I were you because their algorithm is on another level.
Improve user experience
Pages need to be updated over time. If you have had the same page for 3 years and you continue to rank in the top 3, it is spectacular. But you have to keep up to date and not only in the content, but in the user experience. That is, include more or less images, update them, include more CTAs (click to action) and even add another type of content that you had never thought of before. For example, if you have an ecommerce and you are selling headphones, you may be interested in adding a YouTube video beyond just the images with the product description and reviews.
Audiovisual content is being seen more and more in the highest positions and it is for a reason. Do not hesitate to create this type of content and upload it to YouTube to be able to include it in one of your pages. It will help increase time on page and that is a good sign for search engines. In addition to, of course, improving the user experience since you would have a very complete page.
Increase performance for search engines
Optimize the loading speed of the page, include the alt text in the images you have, make descriptions in the audiovisual content. Make it easy for the tracker. As we have told you before, having the best page design is of little use if it takes 10 seconds, or even 5, to load. That is not a good sign, since loading speed is an important signal for search engines when it comes to ranking.
The alt text of the images is very important too. Many upload images without including it and if the crawler does not crawl that text, it will not know what the image is about, so it will not put it in context on the page, or even try to position it for the image section in the search engine. They are small details that together count a lot when it comes to being at the top.
With these tips you should have a definite idea of what will be the next steps that you have to plan for not only your next content, but also for the existing ones. Search engines will continue to play a fundamental role in any business and technologies and algorithms change. Don’t stay behind.
As we mentioned, making a concept map with the steps to follow with defined deadlines or using it as a best practices guide is something that can help all businesses when defining the best methodology. Perseverance and good work will continue to be the most important factors to reach the top.