The best practices SEO 2023 to optimize your Website

61%. This is the number of marketers who, beginning in 2018, in the study State of Inbound from HubSpot, announced that to generate more traffic to their website as their No. 1 priority for the year.

It’s a safe bet that in 2019, this objective will remain very important in B2B digital marketing strategies.

And what’s better, to attract more targets to oneself than natural search?

And if in 2019, you apply SEO best practices in your Content Marketing, to finally climb your traffic curves? Let’s go!

1.Do an audit of the performance of your website

When we think of “SEO”, we tend to start immediately on the idea of keywords, semantics, content.

Now, in SEO, form matters as much as substance: the way your content is displayed on your website will influence the positioning of your pages in search engine results.

In 2019, consider doing a full audit of your website, to ensure that all your content creation efforts do not fall through the water due to technical issues.

Start by evaluating the loading time of your pages: this is a crucial criterion that Google and its partners take into account to reference your website. You can test this performance through various tools, such as Google Pagespeed Insights, or GTMetrix.

Any page of your website must absolutely be able to load in less than 2 seconds, otherwise, it will be penalized in search engine queries. Not to mention that your prospects themselves, even if they arrive on your page, will probably not have the patience to wait for it to load for as long!

If you get a poor score on your load tests, do not hesitate to check that your server has good bandwidth, or that your images on the page are not too heavy.

Also check that your website has a mobile-first design, that is, it adapts to all types of screens (desktops, tablets, and mobiles). Again, this is a critical factor for your site to be well referenced. With the constant increase in global web traffic from mobile screens, this is a key element to take care of now.

Last technical manipulation to be carried out today if it is not done: move your website to https, and more to HTTP. If Google already penalizes sites that have not adopted this protocol, this will be even more the case in the months to come.

2. Change your vision of SEO: from the keyword to the semantic field

Is everything in place in terms of technical performance? Perfect: you can start applying SEO best practices in terms of content.

No doubt you have heard that you need to optimize the writing of your content around the main keyword, which will tell the search engines robots on which queries to reference your pages.

In 2019, you need to move to another vision of seo, which goes beyond this main keyword logic.

Indeed, search engine robots are today more and more powerful, able to understand better and better the semantics used in an article or a web page.

This is why, even if you have to keep in mind the notion of keywords, your web texts must be enriched, and put forward expanded semantic fields.

Bring your best pen, and make sure to diversify your vocabulary to the fullest. More than ever, content writing is becoming a profession where technical skills and storytelling must be skilfully handled.

3. Lengthen your content without losing relevance

As a consequence of previous good SEO practice: the need to lengthen the size of its contents.

Finish the 500 words blog posts, which are stuffed with keywords jumble: place articles that become real resources for your prospects and customers.

Search engines particularly appreciate content that addresses a subject from top to bottom, exemplifying it and digging it deeper.

Of course, it is not a question of diluting the main information in a mass of useless sentences, but of creating content that tackles a theme from its most complete angle, and brings multiple answers to the problems of your prospects.

To make this content more readable for Google and your targets, do not hesitate to add a summary containing anchors that lead to each of your different parts, in the introduction.

4. Thinking “thematic cluster”

If you follow the previous good SEO practice, it’s a safe bet that it will also be useful: the one that wants to create thematic clusters.

The “cluster topic” strategy, is a way of structuring its content to make Google’s robots understand the different topics on which your pages should be referenced.

Generally, marketers and Search Engine Optimisers usually organize the content of their website according to different keywords.

With the thematic cluster, the idea is rather to:

Create “pillar pages” that are real resources for your prospects, where all the facets of the same theme are discussed.
Then link these main pages, via hypertext links, to shorter articles, which address more particularly one facet or another of this theme.

Thanks to such an organization of your site, the search engines understand the coherence of the content you create and will make these pages go up on more varied requests.

5. Bet on the vocal search

This year, again, Google Home and other Amazon Echo will be under the Christmas tree of many of your prospects. All the more reason, in 2019, to embark on an SEO strategy related to the vocal search.

Google Home, Siri or Alexa’s voice search wizards are already answering thousands of questions every day. But which web pages stand out best in their research? Those who have written the key question within their content.

Google favors this kind of content, based on key issues, placing them in particular zero position on some key-queries. An example below with the query “how to create a blog”:

So go on this simple plan of action:

List the questions that your prospects and customers ask about your solution, but also the problems it solves. Do not hesitate to ask your sales representatives or your customer service department to help you with this list: closer to the field, no doubt they will have interesting insights to send you.

Create content around these questions that respond precisely and in an illustrative way.
Gather in a Frequently Asked Questions section some of the most important, on a dedicated page of your website.

Here is another best practice SEO that will feed your blogging strategy, and bring more value to your targets.

6. Treat the way you illustrate your articles

Of course, the textual content of your website is crucial in your SEO strategy.

But too often, digital marketing managers forget the impact of visuals in the SEO of their website.

In 2019, we strive to better illustrate his articles, optimizing each time their alternative text.

Warning: despite the belief that still persists, it is rather recommended to write real sentences in alternative texts, rather than a series of keywords separated by dashes.

Design a visual chart for your marketing team, which states what kind of images can be used to illustrate your articles.

Do you want to go even further? 2019 can also be an opportunity for you to embark on a video marketing strategy that will enhance the impact of your SEO strategy. By breaking down the themes of your blog articles into video format, and publishing them on your YouTube channel, you will see Google put your website back in the search results of your prospects, who are fond of this dynamic format.

7. Implementing Some Google Features

Google My Business

Google My Business is a very comprehensive directory service developed by Google. The advantage of this online directory is the place it takes place directly on the SERP of Google on a very large number of requests. So, it’s a great way to gain visibility without spending money. Its listings are found on Google and Maps, Google’s navigation service.

Google My Business is a beautiful business card to show your business and other essential information about your business, your restaurant, your coffee, your store, your shop … You can thus define the location of your establishment, schedules of openings but also photos and customer reviews.

Set up structured data

The data is Big, the Data is Smart, the data is marketing … but it is also structured. The structured data is essential information for search engines. They aim to standardize information on websites via the code. You can decrypt your content to make it easier to understand and Google likes it! The structuring of the content via this universal code makes it possible to send signals to the search engines without distorting the quality of the content for the human internet users. This mark-up schema uses the standard schema.org format.

Learn to understand and use structured data to make it easier for search engine robots to read information.

Rich snippets

Some structured data allows access to rich snippets. Rich snippets highlight relevant content on Google through attractive formatting. The following are examples of data types that can display rich snippets:

Notice / rating
Products (details, price, availability, etc.)
Events
Recipes
Title, duration and music album
Phone number, business address, logo
Restaurant

The rich snippets increase the click rate thanks to the place of choice that they occupy in the search results. They improve the qualification of visitors who have already had a preview of the content.

By applying these 7 good SEO practices, no doubt: your website will gain visibility on search engines, and attract more prospects.