Stay Ahead of the Game: SEO Dos and Don’ts for 2023

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) continues to be an essential part of any digital marketing strategy in 2023. More and more businesses are shifting their focus towards online channels, and SEO helps businesses stay competitive by improving their online visibility, driving organic traffic to their websites, and increasing conversions.

Just having a website is not enough for a business enterprise to facilitate customer engagement and improve its online presence. It is important to implement and stay updated on innovative SEO strategies to improve the search experience of every user.

To stay ahead of the competition and keep up with the latest SEO trends in 2023, it’s recommended to partner with an experienced digital marketing services company. By doing so, you can implement the most up-to-date SEO strategies and ensure that your website is optimized to its fullest potential for increased traffic and higher search engine rankings.

Hope you’ve read the top 10 SEO Trends for 2023 we discussed earlier.

Dos and Don’ts of SEO

Here’s a checklist of the SEO dos and don’ts every marketer should know.

Dos

Optimize for voice search

• Ensure your website is fully responsive
• Optimize images and compress files
• Optimize content with long-tail keywords
• Focus on structured data and schema markup
• Invest time in local SEO for your brand

Quality content

• Provide content your audience is looking for
• Work on obtaining quality backlinks
• Use videos, images, or any other media content
• Share your content on social media to get greater engagement
• Work on including medium tail keywords
• Create quality content that addresses user intent

Internal Linking

• Link high authority pages to new pages
• Use the right anchor text to improve rankings
• Add new links to old content
• Update your top-performing old content with new valuable links
• Remove unnecessary links from your website content
• Stay reasonable with the number of internal links used
• Consider user intent to create meaningful internal links

Images and Video Optimization

• Choose images that relate to your content and create videos too
• Save images and videos in the smallest possible file size
• Compress them when necessary, while retaining quality
• Choose image and video formats that search engines can index
• Make sure your alt tags include brief text that describes the image
• Keep file sizes small so that your pages load quickly
• Use YouTube or any standard video hosting sites to host your video and embed it on site

Featured Snippets

• optimize your content for featured snippets
• provide informative, up-to-date content
• use long-tail keywords
• provide clear answers to questions people are likely to search for on Google

Page Load Speed

• reduce the size of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files
• remove code comments, formatting, and unnecessary codes
• improve server response time to be under 200 minutes

Optimize Google My Business (GMB) Listing

• Include the correct contact phone number and the current website URL in your GMB
• Make sure to complete the verification, once you set up the account
• Provide up-to-date information such as business hours, physical address and other details
• Send replies to customer queries as quickly as possible
• Promote and encourage reviews in GMB
• Create posts to inform customers of your products, offers, and events

Search Intent

• Focus on the 3 Cs of content – content type, content format, and content angle
• Choose keywords that have clear search intent and provide content that users need
• Make sure to use subheadings and limit pop-ups
• Add videos and images that make your content easier to understand
• Re-optimize old content for search intent

Pay-per-click (PPC) Ads

• Include video ads in your PPC marketing strategy to capture a large pool of audience
• Optimize content for long-tail keywords
• Create attractive landing pages
• Invest in social media ads
• Write a compelling headline and a clear call to action (CTA)

Focus on Structured Data

• Write high quality content with relevant keywords and structure your data

Don’ts

Bad SEO Tactics to Avoid

A poorly optimized website can affect your SEO rankings. Keep track of your website’s overall performance, mobile responsiveness, page load speed, cache memory, and web navigation. Avoid the following practices:

1. Keyword stuffing leads to Google penalties. Think smart and find keyword topics. Use related keywords and long-tail keywords.
2. Spam comments can kill any conversation. Prevent this issue by installing a WordPress plugin on site, which will automatically filter comments.
3. Poor user experience could lead to higher bounce rates. Provide informative content and use the PageSpeed insight tool to speed up your site.
4. Content plagiarism is a grave problem that will cause copyright issues. Professional content writers can help you create unique content
5. Duplicate pages confuse search engines. If you have duplicate pages, use canonical tags to tell Google which post is the original.
6. Don’t ignore local SEO, as optimizing your website for local search can help you attract nearby customers and improve your overall online presence.
7. Don’t forget to regularly update and optimize your website, as outdated content and technical issues can harm your search engine rankings and user experience.

Work with experts to implement a winning SEO strategy and boost your rankings in 2023. A skilled SEO team will analyze your website and provide a comprehensive report based on its SEO, internal links, HTML tags, backlinks, page speed, mobile usability, text statistics, social media, organic presence and content quality. Then they’ll recommend the best SEO strategies to improve your website’s online ranking and attract more targeted traffic.