Winning organic search is all about your SEO best practices. This means investing time in technical SEO, on-site SEO, and off-site SEO. Here’s our top 10 SEO best practices for driving organic search.
Technical SEO
When users visit your site, the user experience will play a big role in whether they stick around or visit again.
1. Mobile-Optimized
According to Smart Insights, there are 5.15 billion mobile users. That’s roughly two-thirds of the world’s population. Is your site optimized for mobile? It needs to be. More than half of all web traffic is on smartphones and mobile devices.
2. Page Speed
Does it load quickly? On some sites, even a two-second delay in load speeds is enough to cause most visitors to leave.
You can check your load speed for free with Google’s PageSpeed Insight tool.
On-Site SEO
On-site SEO encompasses both the structure and the content.
3. Search Engine Friendly
You’ll need to structure your website in the way search engines like. This means using structured data markup, optimized page titles, and optimized meta descriptions.
4. Fresh Content
Google uses what’s called the Query Deserved Freshness (QDF) factor as a ranking signal. When searches are popular or timely, Google will show fresh content over stale content when it’s relevant.
5. Content that Answers Questions
The job of a search engine is to provide the most relevant response to queries. When users are asking questions, you have a better chance of ranking if you are providing the answers. While it’s important to use keywords and key phrases in your content, search engines have evolved semantic search which tries to understand the search intent rather than just the words.
Answering questions helps win the snippet and with voice search.
6. Voice Search
Optimizing for voice search has become important as well. With the increased adoption of smart devices and smartphones, 48% of consumers are using voice assistants for search, according to Search Engine Land. When searching using voice, they’re more likely to ask questions that use keywords.
7. Content Clusters and Hubs
Another SEO best practice is to develop content hubs and clusters. The content hub would be your central repository for information on a topic.
Think of a content cluster like a wheel on a bicycle. In the center is where your central piece on a topic would live, providing an overview and linking to each spoke containing a more specific piece of content. For example, your Hub might be about DYI projects, your cluster about plumbing repairs, and your spokes about fixing a toilet, a sink, a tub, etc.
8. Guest Posts
Using on-topic guest posts is a great way of creating additional content. You’ll also likely get a boost from contributors as they provide links to the content.
9. Expand and Update Content
Look at content that performs well on your site and add to it. Develop similar topics, expand the content, or update it. According to HubSpot, updating high-performing content is considered the most effective tactic by more than half of marketers.
Off-Site SEO
10. Traffic Drivers
Off-site SEO best practices include ways to drive traffic back to your site. This includes such things as getting backlinks from high-authority sites, guest posts on other websites, and effective use of social media. You may also want to consider paid advertising to support your content.