How to Improve Your SEO Rankings in 2024
There are 9 billion online searches for products and services daily and 90% of these searches happen on Google. To ensure that your business not only stands out, but also secures a top SEO ranking in the search results, how do you make sure that your website lands at the top rather than getting buried in the pile?
It’s no longer an option for businesses to integrate or not include SEO techniques, as SEO is a hard must for online success – a non-negotiable prerequisite to winning the modern-day commerce game. Conductor Academy found 93% of businesses benefited from SEO on website performance and marketing goals.
As the world moves closer to a fully digitized future where more and more customers turn to the Internet, how confident are you about your business’s ability to adapt?
To help your business successfully build its SEO muscle this year, here’s a basic guide on how to improve SEO rankings and some digital marketing trends that you can incorporate into your strategy.
Best SEO Techniques to Improve Your Search Rankings
Take note of which SEO techniques your business can benefit from the most or use this simple checklist we developed:
Use Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) offers advanced insights into user behavior across various platforms. It provides a more user-centric and event-based tracking approach, allowing businesses to understand how users interact with their websites.
With GA4, the digital marketing metrics to track are not only pageviews but also user interactions like clicks, video views, and form submissions. This broader approach helps you understand how users engage with your website, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions to enhance their online presence.
Take, for instance, an online gadget store strategically integrating GA4 to transform its digital analytics strategy. Through meticulous event tracking, including “Product Details View,” “Add to Cart,” and “Product Purchase,” the store moves beyond traditional pageviews to gain deeper insights into user interactions. This refined approach allows the online gadget store to understand customer preferences, optimize inventory, and tailor marketing strategies to enhance the overall shopping experience. For example, the store can highlight trending products, create targeted promotions, and improve the overall product presentation.
The implementation of GA4’s Enhanced Measurement feature proves invaluable for the online gadget store. Automatic tracking of user interactions, such as video views and outbound clicks, provides a comprehensive understanding of how customers engage with multimedia content and external links. This data empowers the marketing team to fine-tune product presentations, ensuring an immersive and informative shopping experience for tech enthusiasts.
GA4’s user-centric measurement approach enables the online gadget store to shift its focus to individual user journeys. This level of granularity helps the store understand the unique paths customers take across different devices, influencing personalized marketing campaigns and recommendations. Real-time reporting during critical events, such as product launches or exclusive sales, enables the team to make agile adjustments to capitalize on emerging tech trends and customer demands.
This new Google Analytics also uses an event-based model, allowing the online gadget store to define and track custom events based on specific user interactions. This flexibility enables the store to capture data on unique actions that matter most to its business. For example, the store might create custom events for “Feature Exploration” or “Tech Review Engagement,” providing more tailored insights into how users interact with specific elements on the website.
GA4 allows to track users across various platforms, including mobile apps and websites. This is particularly valuable for businesses with a presence on multiple platforms. For example, if a customer views a product on their mobile device and later completes the purchase on a desktop, GA4 can track this cross-device journey, providing insights into user behavior. Here’s a guide on how to measure performance in GA4.
By implementing GA4 in this scenario, you gain a more comprehensive understanding of user interactions, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to enhance your website’s performance, optimize the user experience, and drive business growth.
Here’s a video of Bernard San Juan III, Truelogic’s Managing Partner, discussing the importance of transitioning to GA4:
Understand Keywords
When it comes to writing content that can improve SEO rankings, it’s not only a matter of writing well—it’s a matter of including primary and secondary keywords, and its variations in the right places. Keywords are relevant words and phrases that your customers are most likely to use when searching for your products and services online.
For instance, if you sell mobile phones and target university students, your content might include keywords such as “the best cell phones for college students,” “budget mobile phones for students,” “affordable phones for college students,” “phone recommendations for college students,” and so forth.
One way to discover which keywords are the best to use is by searching yourself. See the kinds of results that pop up on Google with certain keyword combinations.
To check out keywords, you can manually type them into the search bar and see the automatic prompts, or you can try different sites (like Google Trends) which help collate the keywords for the most popular searches.
Lastly, include keywords in your title, meta description, and throughout your article. There are SEO rules that determine how many times keywords should appear depending on the length of your content.
Harness The Power of Images
Easy to do, often forgotten.
Rename the images on your online platforms accordingly by using keywords as well. Don’t just upload images with generic file names such as “mobile phone 1,” “iPhone 3,” “Samsung Note ABC.” Integrate your primary keywords in file names because this contributes to helping your content be found faster by the right people, and it will lead them to your webpage, too.
Don’t undermine the power of Google image search; it is just as big of a gateway to discovering your content as text results are. According to a survey conducted by Google, 90% prefer enterprises that use images in their organic or local search outcomes. In addition, approximately 97% of first-page sites include one image.
Maximize Internal Links
Internal links are an effective way to self-promote within your own platform. Say, you have a website or a blog that contains information about all your products and services as well as all the opportunities to purchase them. You can’t expect customers to voluntarily search for these individual products and services themselves—you must spoon-feed their convenience.
Building on our example about phones for college students, think that in one product page featuring a phone model, you can also recommend the right accessories, chargers, phone cases, and external battery packs that pair well with it. This list of recommendations includes internal links to pages of these recommended items on your website.
The goal of internal links is to encourage customers to spend more time exploring your content and, of course, to get them to make all the purchases they need with you and no one else.
Explore Backlinks, Too
It might feel counterintuitive for potential ranking competitors to link your website in their content, however, this is a metric that Google uses to improve SEO rankings and to increase brand authority. Forbes reported that 95% of web pages don’t have backlinks. Be one of the 5% that do, and you’ll see better results in search engines.
Consider a software development company aiming to enhance its online visibility. By creating a comprehensive and valuable guide on a trending software development topic, the company can reach out to authoritative tech blogs, requesting them to include links in their relevant content. This not only builds credibility by earning an endorsement from influential players in the industry but also signals to Google that the content is trustworthy and relevant.
Through consistent efforts in guest posting, relationship-building within the tech blogging community, and monitoring backlink quality, the software development company can secure high-quality backlinks, ultimately boosting its SEO rankings.
Remember: The more trustworthy external websites link to your content, the higher the chances that Google’s algorithm will push your content towards the top of search results. It’s almost as if you’re getting an endorsement from the Internet’s big players, and Google rewards you for this. The more powerful your backlinking is, the more visible you become in search results.
Create Relevant and Timely Content
However, understand that SEO keywords and linking strategies are 100% dependent on good content. You might have mastered these strategies, but they will have been executed in vain if your content is subpar.
If you have an e-commerce site selling fitness equipment, create in-depth guides on effective workout routines, nutrition tips, and product reviews. This not only engages your audience but also establishes your site as an authority in the fitness niche.
Good content, in the language of SEO, is constantly updated (in terms of including new information, links, or photos), shareable, straightforward, and contains all the relevant details. In other words, make your content bookmark-worthy, the webpage that customers will keep returning to every time they need to refer to a specific product or service.
Optimize Your Website or Webpage
No customer wants to wait more than a few seconds when tapping on a website link. You set yourself up for failure if your website is any, several, or all of the following:
- Slow to load
- Difficult to navigate
- Full of error links or empty pages
- Forever “under construction”
- Outdated design or functionality
- Not mobile-friendly
The point of searching for products and services online is the experience of seeing results instantly. Customers on the Internet do not want to wait, and if they learn to associate feelings of impatience and frustration every time they engage with your major online platforms, you’re in trouble.
It may require a sizable investment to overhaul a website to make it more SEO-oriented, but the payoffs are huge. An aesthetically pleasing website, made for both desktop and mobile use, provides a seamless interface, and with fast loading times is the recipe you want to be cooking with.
You might be outdone by competitors in terms of products and services themselves, but if your website proves to be the better user experience, it’s very much possible to win over customers with this asset. To enhance user experience, be sure to consult with a proven web design company.
Invest In Local SEO And Connect It to Your Google Business Profile
Local SEO is all about becoming visible in local searches. This is especially important if your business has a physical shop; anyone who finds you on Google search results will immediately get all the business details they need, including your address, contact numbers, operating hours, branches, directions, and so on.
Try searching for a well-known store with a physical location in your area and see if this information appears at the top of search results in a compact but comprehensive snapshot.
You can improve your local SEO by setting up a Google Business Profile. Here, you input all your business’ relevant details, allow customers to leave reviews (which you should respond to, whether positive or negative), and possibly include FAQs plus a means to contact you directly for customer queries not covered by your basic information.
The more interactive your online presence is with customers, the more you can improve your SEO ranking.
Say No to SEO Hacks
One prevalent black hat SEO technique that has been widely used in the past is “keyword stuffing.” This tactic involves overloading a webpage with an excessive number of keywords, often making the content read unnaturally and providing little value to the reader. The intent is to manipulate search engine algorithms into ranking the page higher for those specific keywords.
Suppose you have a website selling custom handmade leather wallets. A black hat SEO practitioner might employ keyword stuffing on a product page like this:
Original Content:
“Explore our collection of handmade leather wallets. Each wallet is crafted with care by our skilled artisans. Our wallets come in various styles and colors to suit your preferences. We take pride in delivering high-quality, durable products that stand the test of time.”
Keyword-Stuffed Version:
“Welcome to our handmade leather wallets online store. If you’re looking for handmade leather wallets, you’ve come to the right place. Our handmade leather wallets are the best handmade leather wallets available. We offer handmade leather wallets in different handmade leather wallet styles and colors. Our handmade leather wallets are made by skilled handmade leather wallet artisans who specialize in crafting handmade leather wallets. Buy our handmade leather wallets now for the ultimate handmade leather wallet experience.”
In this manipulated example, the phrase “handmade leather wallets” is unnaturally repeated, making the content less readable and valuable for users. While this might trick search engines into thinking the page is highly relevant for those keywords, it provides a poor experience for actual visitors.
Search engines, however, have become sophisticated in detecting such practices. Black Hat SEO may work for several weeks or even months but be forewarned. If you’re found out, you will be penalized. Improving your SEO ranking without making any or significant changes to your website is just too good to be true.
Don’t fall for it.
As a final note: Without a doubt, SEO has gained immeasurable importance to businesses since its conception in the ‘90s. What was simply a way for search engines like Yahoo, Google, or Bing to organize the world’s first websites is now an indispensable tool for businesses to eclipse thousands of competitors—both physically and digitally.
Invest in the best SEO techniques and the right SEO agency to help your business grow and keep refreshing your content and keywords to maximize your SEO investment.
Need help with your SEO? Talk to us today.