Universal SEO Tips That Every Business Should Follow

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website UX, accessibility, and authority to improve organic ranking. 

SEO drives more than 1000% of traffic than organic social media. 53.3% of web traffic comes from search engines. 

Ranking on Google and other search engines is crucial for every business. 

Here are the top universal SEO tips that every business should follow:

1- Improve Loading Speed

Site speed is a Google ranking factor. If your website takes a lot of time to load, you will likely see a decline in rankings. Besides, loading speed has a direct impact on the bounce rate. 

As page load time goes from one second to three seconds, the probability of a visitor bouncing from your site increases by 32%. If it further increases to six seconds, the likelihood of bounce goes up by as much as 106%. 

Here are some great ways to improve loading speed:

• Enable Gzip compression to reduce the file size. 
• Use a cloud storage provider. Upgrading the usability and accessibility of your site are crucial to improve site speed and reduce operating costs. This is where cloud storage is so useful. Make sure to compare various cloud storage providers for their pros and cons to determine the right one based on your needs and budget. 
• Eliminate unnecessary codes from your website.
• Use PageSpeed Insights to determine how fast your website loads. It also provides a bunch of recommendations to improve your site’s performance. 
• Create AMP (accelerated mobile pages) to reduce loading time on mobile devices. 

2- Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Mobile-friendliness is yet another Google ranking factor that plays a crucial role in your website’s position in search engines. Also, mobile devices account for almost 52% of web traffic worldwide. 

Every business must ensure their website is mobile-friendly, not only to rank higher but also to increase traffic. 

Use Google Mobile-Friendly Test to verify if your site is responsive or not. Enter your URL, and it will return with your mobile-friendliness status. It also shows if there are any loading issues with your site.

3- Acquire High-Authority Links

Links are one of the top factors for ranking higher in Google. 

Google values both inbound and outbound links. Internal links help users and search engines find content on your site. It entices visitors to stay on your website for longer, thereby reducing bounce rate and increasing the dwell time. When creating new content, link to at least three to four relevant pages within your website.Backlinks, on the other hand, act as a reference and indicate that your content is worthy. Websites with more backlinks (from high-authority sites) tend to rank higher than those with fewer links. 

4- Pick the Right Blogging Platform

Blogging is one of the crucial aspects of SEO. Blogging helps you address your target audience’s concerns via content and position yourself as an authority in your industry. 

If you are new to blogging, it is important to choose the right platform. If you don’t, you will end up spending a lot of time managing and designing the website. Here are top blogging platforms in 2020 that are easy to set up and can be scaled as your business grows. 

5- Publish High-Quality Content

It goes without saying that if you desire to build trust with your audience and achieve a higher ranking on search engines, you should be publishing high-quality content. 

Ensure that every piece of content that you publish is highly informative and addresses your target audience’s pain points. If you post things that don’t interest your ideal customers, all your efforts will go in vain. 

6- Target the Right Keyword

When creating content, integrate the phrases that most of your target audience uses to find your business. Tools like Keyword Surfer to find the right keywords.  

Install the tool’s extension on your browser, and it will show you monthly search volume, cost per click, and related keywords every time you search anything on Google.  

7- Enhance the Overall User Experience

You can’t ignore UX if you want to improve your website SEO. 

Search engines want you to offer the best possible user experience to your site visitors. Make sure it is easy to navigate through your website. It would be better to add a search button on your site to help users find what they are looking for instantly. 

Add enough white space on your website. White space around text increases user attention while making your site feel fresh. Remember the user’s preference to personalize their experience when they visit your site the next time. 

8- Ensure Your Technical SEO Is on Point

Technical SEO refers to the process of ensuring your website meets the technical requirements of search engines. It helps search engine spiders to crawl and index your site without any problems. 

Use tools like SEMrush to conduct a site audit to find all the technical SEO errors on your website. It shows all the issues your site has and how to eliminate them. 

Here are some things that can help you improve your technical SEO. 

• Create search engine friendly URLs. It should define what users can expect on the page. For example, www.abc.com/123 is a non-search-engine friendly URL. But, www.abc.com/seo-tips is a great URL as it highlights the content of the page. 
• Install an SSL certificate to secure your site. Google prefers websites with HTTPS as compared to HTTP.
• Create sitemaps to help search engines understand your site structure. 
• Implement robots.txt to tell search engine bots which pages they can crawl. 
• Set up 301 redirects to point broken or deleted pages to new ones. 

9- Update Old Pages Regularly

If you have been publishing content for quite some time now, you probably have a lot of posts that haven’t been updated since they were first published. If so, you can enhance your rankings by refreshing them with the latest information. 

You don’t need to update all the old pages. Check the ones that have performed (or are performing) well and optimize them for better ranking. Remove old stats (if any), tweak titles, description, and try to get more backlinks from authority sites. 

Final Thoughts

SEO is an ever-changing process. However, the nine things mentioned in this article remained the same for years and will probably stay likewise in the future. Make sure your website follows these nine universal SEO tips to increase your chances of ranking higher. Which of these tactics have you been following? Which of them are you going to implement first? Let us know in the comments.