SEO is much more than choosing a few keywords and plugging them into your site. You have to keep up with changing ranking criteria, the best on-site practices, and continuously develop new content for your website.

Working in SEO also requires a ton of patience.

Any changes you make in your SEO today typically won’t yield any results until a few months down the road. Those changes might not even work so you have to make new changes and wait another few months.

Sometimes having a list of tasks and SEO expert tips can help you stay focused and improve your website’s SEO. We’ve compiled our top tips to help you create an effective SEO plan you can get results with.

Know Your Audience

Whenever you start developing an SEO expert strategy, you need to start with your audience. You are selling to a particular target demographic, after all.

You should know these kinds of things about your target:

• Who they are
• What their problems are
• What keywords they’re using to search for solutions

You need to know your audience inside and out because it helps you develop better content. Better content reads well, is useful to your target audience, and results in more shares.

Start A Blog

If you don’t have a blog yet, you need one. Having a blog and posting to it regularly is a low-cost tactic to get more traffic to your website.

It can also help with your keyword strategy, too. By writing content that uses the same words you’re using on your web pages, you give your website regular SEO juice.

Focusing on creating high-quality thought-leadership pieces will boost your SEO because more people will find your pieces useful and share them with others.

Don’t Keyword Stuff

In the early days of online search, an easy way to rank #1 for your chosen keyword was to stuff it into every nook and cranny of your website.

These days, Google will punish you for that type of activity even if you’re doing it unintentionally.

An easy way to make sure you’re optimizing your pages and content correctly is to install an SEO plugin into your CMS system. It will tell you which parts of the page need to be optimized with how many keywords.

Have Plenty of Internal Links

Linking your web content to other pages and blog posts on your website help add structure to your website. By having more structure, web crawlers are better able to crawl and find all the content on your website. This is particularly important if you have a large website with tons of content.

Adding internal links can also make things more intuitive for your readers. For example, if someone is reading a post about global warming on your site, you might link them to a blog post about how people can reduce their carbon footprint each day within the text.

Speak Naturally

Thanks to AI, Google’s algorithm has slowly been learning how we speak and the intent behind our searches. What this means is that we can start writing as if we’re talking to people rather than to machines.

Your focus doesn’t need to be on getting a certain number of keywords into a piece of content. Rather, focus on using your chosen keyword and other associated words.

For example, if your website talks about demand generation, you might also use keywords like inbound marketing and lead generation. These words are not synonyms, just related words that frequently go with demand generation.

Have a Mobile Site

Nearly 60% of searches happen on a mobile device. It’s thanks to this shift that we will soon have mobile-first indexing from Google.

Mobile-first indexing will prioritize websites that have mobile versions. Having a mobile website creates a better user experience for searchers.

Here are some ways you can optimize your mobile site so the UX is great:

• Compress images
• Stop videos from automatically playing
• Remove unnecessary scripts or images
• Turn off popups
• Ensure your text is the right size

If your website isn’t mobile responsive, make it so ASAP.

Speed Up Your Site

Having a slow website is the number one SEO killer. If a site takes more than 3 seconds to load, about 40% of users will abandon it.

If more people bounce from your site, that signals to Google that there’s a problem with your website. It’ll start ranking your competitors, in lieu of your website.

You can speed up your site by turning off automatically playing videos, compression photos, and enable browser caching.

Research Your Competitors’ SEO

Whenever you run searches with keywords you’re trying to rank for, check to see which competitors are beating you out for which keywords. Keep tabs on a spreadsheet so you can track your progress over time.

You should also note where your competitors rank below you. You can likely assume they’re trying to beat you out for that keyword and are bolstering their SEO efforts, too.

Write for Google Modules

In the past couple of years, Google has released new search display modules like Q&A and featured snippet. Both modules pull from content that’s written in that format.

If there are common questions in your industry, write a Q&A page for your website or write a few blog posts in that format. For featured snippet, write concise pieces to common questions in semantic language.

Do a Regular Audit

While you should always monitor your analytics for sudden changes in bounce rate or conversions, you should also regularly do a thorough site audit. Auditing your website every 6 months or so is an SEO expert best practice.

During your audit, check these things:

• Meta titles and descriptions
• Internal and external links
• URLs
• Text formatting/headers
• Broken links
• UX
• Page speed

Regularly auditing your site can help you stay on top of changing SEO criteria and not fall behind.

Get Help If You Need It

Sometimes companies don’t have the internal skills or capacities to manage their website’s SEO. In those cases, hiring an agency or managed SEO service can be money well spent.

There are several things to look for in an SEO service. They include checking the company’s past work, asking for customer references, and understanding how quickly they can get results.

SEO Expert Tips to Keep You on Track

By following these SEO expert tips, you will notice increased SEO rankings in no time.

Some key takeaways include always create content that’s valuable to your customers, make the UX awesome, and audit regularly.

If you want to outsource SEO or need additional help, check out our managed SEO service.