11 SEO Tips: How to Refresh & Optimize Your Website


Published: | By Irina Weber

Every year brings new opportunities to revalue your SEO strategies to succeed for your clients and brands. It's supposed that 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search, which means that investing in SEO is still effective and valuable for those who want to increase their revenue and market share.

Optimizing your website for search engines like Google is essential for staying ahead of the competition and driving more organic traffic to your site.

Utilizing SEO services can help you leverage the latest trends and techniques to maximize your visibility and improve your website's overall performance.

1. Silo Your Content


One of the most prominent mistakes marketers make is not structuring content properly to follow quickly. The best way to do this is by siloing your content.

In other words, you can hierarchically organize website content to navigate and find any content people are looking for easily.

You need to add links that lead users down in order of your topics or subtopics on each page. That solves the problem with potential duplicate content that can also be published higher in the website architecture, which provides greater authority.

Here is an excellent example of what this hierarchy should look like:

illustration about main blog topics and top 3 sub topics

If it's hard for you to write about particular topics, you can use Quora or Reddit for valuable sourcing information.

Then, publish all your questions that come up and answer them. But, of course, the best way to promote your new content is to use email marketing tools to send emails to subscribers and share it on your social media channels. 

2. Implement Schema Markup


I guess you have heard a lot about schema markup. It is a great way to structure your content and give as much information as possible to search engines.

In many cases, having well-written structured data is one of the most significant factors that Google looks at to get high rankings for your website.

There are different types of data that websites can use. For example, it's essential to use schema markup to help search engine crawlers easily understand your data in the local industry. 

I mean that you need to look at schema types like reviews & organizations, videos, breadcrumbs, how-to schema, and FAQ scheme.

If you want to rank high in SERPs, you need to mark up FAQa with structured data. 

3. Optimize Your Page Speed 


The best way to provide a great user experience is to make sure your site loads fast. One of the main things that influence your website ranking is that you should continuously optimize for speed.

It would help if you looked at different things, such as compressing files, caching static content, and optimizing images.

Another thing you should do is use a content delivery network (CDN) that helps distribute website files through different servers around the world.

Finally, to check out whether you are getting the desired results, you can test your site using the Landing Page SEO module in WebCEO.

It will rate a page's speed on a scale from 0 to 100 and provide actionable recommendations on how to improve your loading time.

screenshot showing page speed score for emailtray.com

4. Fix Your Title Tags


You've heard that Google started removing your well-crafted website titles to attract eyeballs and clicks. It sounds frustrating.

But this is a great way to learn more about your titles and check your main keywords that generate traffic to your web pages.

You can do an SEO audit of your current titles, determine whether you are doing a good job, and find an SEO job.

Ensure that your titles are not too long and include important keywords. Avoid fluff, remove irrelevant boilerplate, and limit the use of separators and brackets.

Tools such as SE Ranking or WebCEO are excellent in a detailed audit of your titles and giving actionable recommendations to improve them.

5. Prepare for Author Pages 


This year Google confirmed the importance of author pages and their schema markup for rating your website.

Good quality author pages build trust with your readers and allow Google to evaluate authors that can be used for E-E-A-T and other things.

Expert pages don't affect your rankings. Instead, it is an excellent way to gain the trust and loyalty of your audience.

Most good author pages include bio information, links to other websites, and articles. So when you link to good author pages, it will help your authors improve their expertise in a specific niche.

Moreover, people want to read quality content written by credible and famous people. So it makes sense to boost your Author Reputation as a significant part of the Google search algorithm that can help your SEO.

6. SEO for Affiliate Links 


Google has recently noticed no penalty for using affiliate links without markup. Moreover, Google introduced specific guidance for affiliate links that they haven't done before.

That goes for review sites that discuss the benefits and implications of products and link to different merchants to help consumers choose. 

So if you review different products, you need to do SEO when building effective affiliate sites. Before creating review sites, look at Google documentation to follow the guidance. 

7. Optimize for Google Discover 


As you can see, many people are flocking to Google Discover. It differs from traditional SEO traffic, but it looks like social media traffic. Therefore, social media sharing is one of the ranking factors that may affect your traffic from Google Discover.

Google Discover is great for publishing many stories, blogs, news sites, and other famous things. So, if you want to get a massive amount of Google Discover traffic, you need to start optimizing for it. 

Here are some tips on how to do that:

  • Curate your presence on Google My Business as it helps increase your chances to appear in the Google Knowledge Graph
  • Create customer-focused content that answers a specific request and matches the user's intent
  • Use appealing images to help users click on the suggested content.
  • Create powerful videos to improve your exposure. To quickly create professional videos on the go, you can use InVideo to make them on your phone, using exclusive filters, transitions, and effects.
  • Understand and improve E-E-A-T signals
  • Experiment with Web Stories 
  • Update top pages with the most extended lifespan
  • Increase your social media engagement around your content

8. Audit Your Google My Business Profile Categories


The number one local SEO tip will be to audit your Google Business Profile (GBP) categories if you run a local website.

According to Darren Shaw's article, your GBP categories can influence your site rankings. 

It's essential to get your Google Business Profile categories in order. First, select the primary category that matches the search request you want to rank for.

For example, if you offer SEO services for law firms, your first category should be "internet marketing service," but not "law firm."

screenshot of search engine results page for law rank

Another local SEO tip is to optimize your GBP for additional relevant categories for your business.

For example, think about other keywords or phrases that you can rank for to support the primary category. 

9. Optimize Your Favicon


Many website owners underestimate the importance of favicon optimization, and typically don't bother spending time on it. This is a mistake!

For example, did you know that nearly 60% of search results appear on mobile phones?

A good favicon can attract customers' attention and increase your click-through conversion rate. A good favicon should look bright and have high contrast.

Make sure that it is visually associated with your website's brand. If you want your favicon to look fantastic on different devices, try to create favicon variations with a higher resolution.

screenshot of google search page for google search console

10. Improve Your Internal Link Structure 


It is not enough to have excellent external links on your site. It's also essential to optimize your internal link structure for better indexing and ranking.

I am talking about the importance of leveraging those web pages with a few links, under optimized anchor text, and pages with great opportunities that aren't ranking but should.

To lead your users to convert pages, make sure to conduct an internal optimization audit properly. I mean, the website structure should be well-planned in such a way that helps you to scale and create more pages for the website easily. 

Here are a few tips for reconsidering your current structure:

  • Carefully distribute your keyword through your web pages.
  • Connect closely-related content with internal links and encourage users to stay on your website longer
  • Point the maximum number of links to your essential content pieces so that Google starts taking these pages seriously
  • Fix all broken links asap to avoid hurting the user experience

11. Create Deep Links


Earlier, if you linked to a web page, you just related to the URL. But if you want to enhance the user experience, you should rely on deep linking.

Sending users to specific text fragments, passages, jump links will help them better achieve their goals than just sending them to your main page. 

Making a deep linking strategy is an excellent way to drive your visitors to relevant pages and give Google signals about specific parts of your web pages.

Moreover, this seems valuable as Google has recently introduced a passage ranking to evaluate individual passages.

Conclusion

Without actively positioning your content on Google, your company can’t survive long. However, once you improve your search visibility, you will get more visitors, conversions, and sales.

That’s why it’s essential to focus on SEO as a key step in website optimization.

SEO is an ongoing process, and you can't see the desired results straight away. The biggest SEO tip you need to keep in mind is to optimize for real people.

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