By the end of 2021, online search engine Bing accounted for over 7% of the global search market, Yahoo claimed 2.85% of it and Google took away a lion’s share of 85.55% of the global search.

No wonder, search engine optimization (or SEO) has become a priority for brands in 2024 in order to stand among the top five results on page one of the SERPs. Why top five? Because those top five results claim more than 66% of all the clicks on SERPs.

SEO increases visibility of your business among your current and potential customers online, which is obviously good from a long-term brand equity perspective.

Optimizing the website and its content regularly for search engines helps generate more organic traffic for your business, drives sales, yields better RoI and enables you to focus more on content strategy & social media.

In this article, we highlight top 12 SEO best practices you must follow to get your business website easily recognized by both the search engines and your target audience.

1. Audience-first content

   Regularly creating high-quality accurate content must be integral to your overall digital marketing strategy.
   While you’d be tempted to capitalize on the fact that 93% of the online search experiences begin with search engines and thus optimize the content for search engines by using a mix of hub and spoke keyword phrases as part of SEO, keep in mind that the audience is seeking value in your content.

   They’re looking for solutions to their problems and want their pain points to be addressed appropriately. Your content must compel them to believe in the value your business can provide through its services/products.

   Research content titles using keywords to create compelling title for your content. Suppose a keyword is ‘best office chairs new york’, you can see (in the results below) that ‘2022’ is a repetitive word in all the result links. Use such insights to create highly relevant titles for your target audience.

   Furthermore, say, the digital populace is searching for ‘seo services hong kong’. Your content won’t hold much ground in the long run if all it does is talk about only Hong Kong or only SEO just to rank high on SERP, for ‘Hong Kong’ and ‘SEO’ might be the high-traction keywords at that moment.

   Also, infographics, images, flowcharts, visual stats etc. help drive your point home quickly.

   Content’s length matters too. Usually, relevant contents of up to 1500-2000 words adequately answer users’ search requirements. To achieve that, SEO is vital to your content strategy.

   Ensure that the content is readable, visual, easy to navigate and points to more resources (if required) to resolve the users’ query in the best way.
   

2. Secure the website with HTTPS

   HTTPS enables secure, encrypted communication between browsers and servers, and also secures private information of the users during an active browsing session.

   An HTTP enabled website is flagged by Google as ‘not secure’ and users stay clear of it. One only need glance at the URL bar to check a lock icon for HTTPS secured website. For instance, here is a snapshot of home page of Datawave, an SEO agency in Hong Kong. Users can see the lock icon (highlighted in yellow) and know that the website is HTTPS enabled.

   On the other hand, a website without HTTPS is flagged as ‘not secure’ as evident in the snapshot below.

   HTTPS is being used as ranking factor by Google since 2014.

3. Work on the backlinks, relentlessly

   Backlinks impart credibility and authority to your web pages. They provide social proof, build awareness and position you as an expert in your niche. In fact, backlinks form the backbone of any SEO strategy.

   While looking for link-building opportunities to improve your website’s ranking & traffic, go for high-authority websites. They may not have linked to your content but nothing stops you from featuring one or two of their ideas in your social media posts once in a while to build a relationship and reap the dividends when those websites start linking to your content.

   Src: Backlinko

   As a part of SEO campaign, you could also join thought leadership groups (on LinkedIn, for example) and network with like-minded peers and other professionals already established in your industry.
   Invite them for guest posting on your website. They’ll definitely link to that content, for starters, before moving on to linking to other content on your website.
   

4. Ensure your website is mobile friendly

   Make sure your website is responsive (i.e. adapts to different screen sizes) and dynamically serving the visitors i.e. the visitors are show different website versions built for different purposes when viewed from different devices. You may also go for an app version of your website.

   Choose a mobile responsive theme (WordPress has its own theme library, for instance) and avoid large text chunks that force the users to keep scrolling.
   Distill what you are offering (like Trainline’s home page below) to the users through mobile i.e. get to the point quickly.

   But this would seem pushy to desktop viewers so Trainline’s UI for desktop is as shown below.

   Don’t present the users of your mobile website with long forms to fill, if possible. If it can’t be avoided, use only the absolutely required fields.

   People use their thumbs for pretty much everything when they are using mobile devices. Placement & size of buttons should be done after a lot of thought. One CTA button of wrong size and misplaced on the mobile screen can be an instant put-off for the users.

   You’d want to space out the links on your mobile website so that the wrong link doesn’t get clicked accidently. Use large fonts for easy readability (at least 14px font size) on mobile version.

   Finally, keep testing the mobile friendliness of your website. You can use Google’s free mobile-friendly testing tool. The following snapshot shows that the Shutterstock website is mobile friendly.

   Hiring an experienced web design agency for developing your website versions is the best option in the long run.

5. Keywords & their placement strategy

   As search engines today ‘sense’ the sub-topics relevant to any specific keyword, you can use long-tail keyword phrases (three or more words long) to rank better for multiple relevant terms.
   Make sure to embed these keywords in your title tags, meta descriptions, URLs and the content itself.

   Next, you must do keyword research to observe their recency and search volume, and also to narrow down on LSI (latent semantic index) keywords that indirectly, and logically, relate to the main keywords. Using these LSI keywords helps search engine algorithms (like Google’s machine learning and AI powered RankBrain) to make the ‘sense’ of your web page.

   For instance, if your content is about ‘volleyball’ with LSI keywords like ’bump pass’, ‘spike’, ‘libro’, ‘dink’, ‘service’, ‘rotation’ etc., search engines sense the context and rank the web page for volleyball related queries.

   Use a target keyword at least once in the H1, H2 & H3 tags for enabling the search engine crawlers to differentiate relevant content and determine headings and sub-headings to display in SERPs. Ideally, there should be few keywords in the first 100 or 150 words of your content as well.

6. Formulate and strengthen the internal linking strategy

   If you wish the search engines better understood the hierarchy and authority of your web pages, create and implement a good internal linking strategy.

   Identify where in the content you must link to a page, the frequency of linking and the anchor text with keywords in it. This allows search engines to recognize the priorities of your webpages while crawling and indexing them.

   Internal linking is vital to those sites that have hundreds of web pages containing humongous volume of content. Presenting a tightly-knit, logically organized & complete information to the users is possible when internal linking is done effectively. Users develop confidence in your content and keep reverting to it in future.

7. Capture and match the search intent

   Observe Google’s top search results for search queries related to the content you are about to post. You’ll get an idea of the intent behind a query.

   For instance, queries starting as ‘how to drive car’ convey that the user is in learning mode, not buying mode. Google ‘understands’ this, that’s why it displayed a link containing ‘…tips for beginners’ as well (highlighted at the bottom).
   However, if the query was ‘buy a car in seattle’, then the results change as follows.

   Clearly, you must ‘foresee’ a bit and factor in the search intent while developing your content.

8. Speedup your web pages

   For starters, keep the elements lightweight on your website. Next, do compress the images before uploading them to your site – mobile or desktop version – and ensure the image quality is not compromised.

   Go for hosting the videos with a third party since uploading videos there and then embedding them on your website shifts the virtual weight of the videos to that third party. If you’re using YouTube as the third party platform, make sure to turn off the ‘autoplay’ to avoid the playing of an unrelated video after yours.

   Avail the facility of a CDN (content delivery network) to deliver the search results locally and quickly.

   Leverage lazy-loading feature which defers loading the off-screen content until the user scrolls to it. A well-optimized website theme with efficient code also makes the pages fast. Keep checking the page speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Here is the page speed result of Datawave as a reference

9. More of technical SEO

   Although we have discussed about keywords earlier, optimizing for meta description deserves a separate mention as a part of technical SEO. Meta description is an HTML attribute used to summarize web page’s content in SERPs.

   It is essential that a keyword finds its place in the meta description. It’d be even better if the description starts from a keyword itself since Google displays only a truncated snippet of the meta description. This snippet is just around 160 characters long from the description’s start.

   Same goes for the page title. Only around first 70 characters are displayed by Google in the page title, truncating the rest, as highlighted below.

   Although Google doesn’t use meta keywords as a ranking factor (Bing does though), optimizing the meta description and site title serves better to match the search intent of a user because the meta description is used to generate a preview for search.

   Using the main keyword in alt tag and captions, optimizing images for better page load times, using keywords in outbound links – these are some of the on-page SEO tips you can implement for better standings in SERPs and serving users’ needs more accurately.

10. Create SEO friendly, short URLs

    SEO friendly URLs have target keywords embedded in them to be easily crawled by search engine when a user searches for your content.

    For instance, from SEO perspective, the URL ‘www.somedemosite.com/on-page-seo-tips’ is far better than ‘www.somedemosite.com/p=34/this-is-some-super-long-website-url-here-about-SEO-tips’.

    The following image describes what a short URL extension must be like for a keyword ‘buy ethereum’.

11. Business listings

    An optimized Google My Business Profile (GBP) goes a long way in boosting SEO ranking and instils trust among your current & potential customers.

    Add every relevant information about your business in the GBP, keep the profile active and accurate, add your business to local directories – all this adds to the ranking.

    Src: SearchEngineJournal

    With a GBP, your business pops up in the search results of all those third-party apps that use Google Maps to serve their own set of users and those users can land on your website.

12. Do SEO for better UI/UX

    Google’s SEO starter guide emphasizes providing users with the best search experience should serve as a lighthouse for all website optimizations.

    Absence of intrusive ads, website responsiveness across devices, fulfilling users’ search requirements, easy navigation, organized & readable content etc. are some of the standards your website must meet.

    As an example, Airbnb’s UI is captivating and decluttered. They’ve made it facile to book a stay right from their home page, something like encouraging the user to immediately go into action without wasting time in any further search or scrolling.

    Signals like click-through rate (CTR), dwell time, time on page etc. are also taken into consideration by Google to determine your website’s SEO ranking. People will stay longer on your website if it has a great UI and provides a smooth UX, enabling the user to close a transaction in few clicks.

Those were the 12 SEO best practices one must adopt for better results vis-à-vis SERP and target audience. Clearly, SEO is not just keywords!

Typically, SEO can take anywhere from 1 year to 1.5 years to yield significant results.
SEO experts at Datawave, an SEO and digital marketing company in Hong Kong, have vast experience of consistently managing to improve the ranking and website traffic within 6 months of commencement of SEO.
To know more about how we accomplish that, feel free to reach out to Datawave