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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been around for more than 25 years. The industry, however, has evolved a lot since its inception, and it seems like every year brings a major algorithm update that completely changes the game.
Because of the dynamic nature of SEO, many online guides on the topic offer outdated advice. Strategies like keyword stuffing, link farming and writing exclusively for search engines simply don’t work anymore.
In fact, they are likely to hurt your website’s ranking.
And yet, SEO remains an invaluable tool for businesses to reach more customers, drive organic traffic and boost brand visibility. That’s why I wanted to share the three most important SEO strategies that can help you rank in 2023.
Related: 5 Simple SEO Strategies to Improve Your Rankings
What is SEO and why is it important?
SEO is a comprehensive approach that combines multiple optimization strategies to improve your website’s visibility in search engines like Google. Whether it’s on-page SEO, off-site SEO or technical SEO, you need to be familiar with the latest practices to improve your website’s ranking.
Today, SEO is not just an option — it’s a necessity that can help your business to:
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Improve online visibility: SEO helps your website rank high on search engines, ensuring more potential customers see it.
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Drive organic traffic: SEO brings visitors to your website, attracting customers who are genuinely interested in your content, products or services.
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Boost user experience: SEO involves creating high-quality content, improving page loading speed, making your website mobile-friendly and taking advantage of other practices that can offer your website visitors an overall better experience.
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Establish authority: SEO can make your website seem more authoritative. That’s because users tend to trust search engines to present them with the best possible content.
3 SEO techniques that work in 2023
As search engine algorithms continue to evolve, it’s important to stick to strategies that yield the best results. Here’s what you can do to rank better in 2023:
1. Focus on content velocity:
Content velocity is a strategy that emphasizes the importance of publishing a significant amount of content as quickly as possible. The idea behind this is that your content can’t rank if it doesn’t exist.
Simply put, the more content you create, the more opportunities you have to rank for relevant keywords. This may sound like a basic principle, but most websites out there don’t adhere to it.
Content velocity is important because the faster you publish content relevant to your niche, the faster Google will recognize your website as an authority.
Although content velocity is vital for ranking high, you shouldn’t sacrifice quality for quantity. This means that every piece of content you create should provide value to your readers and align with user intent. Striking this delicate balance between quantity and quality can be challenging, but it’s definitely rewarding.
When I start working with a client, I recommend creating a minimum of 20,000 to 30,000 words of new content monthly. By publishing content faster and incorporating relevant keywords, you can reach topical authority more quickly. Although Google doesn’t have a specific authority metric, a website with a small number of pages can rarely be considered an authority.
That’s why content velocity is a great strategy to climb search engine rankings faster.
Related: 5 Ways to Optimize Your Content for Better Google Rankings
2. Do value-backed guest posting:
Guest posting has been one of the most common ways to build backlinks over the years. However, reaching out to a website and pitching a guest post will most likely get an instant rejection.
That’s because authoritative websites get hundreds of such requests, and when they do approve them, they usually receive content that adds no value to the reader. Nobody is interested in a 500-word uninspiring blog post that does little more than clutter the web with the same old information. Worse yet, these days, a lot of guest posters simply deliver AI-generated content that has zero originality.
A more effective alternative is to offer a value-backed guest post that can benefit their website. For example, offering a 2,000-word article that is optimized around a keyword relevant to their business is a much better deal. That way, you actually deliver some value to the website owner. They get a long-form article that they would otherwise have to pay for, and you get a backlink in return. Win-win.
3. Improve your writing processes with AI:
AI is not good enough to replace human writers. However, it can help content writers significantly improve the writing process by increasing efficiency and productivity.
To give you an example, AI tools like ChatGPT are great for quickly creating attention-grabbing headlines or intro sections following proven formulas. For example, instead of spending an hour coming up with an angle for an introduction following the AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) formula, you can generate it in seconds with ChatGPT with a simple command like: “Create an introduction section for an article titled [Title]. Follow the AIDA copywriting formula.”
You can also use AI to generate content outlines, come up with new keywords and personalize content to add a unique touch to your articles. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to create a pun, make a comparison or provide an example to emphasize a point, making your content more engaging and relatable.
Related: 5 Essential SEO Strategies For Entrepreneurs to Boost Their Traffic
SEO helps businesses improve online visibility, increase authority, boost organic traffic and enhance user experience. However, it’s important to say goodbye to outdated SEO strategies and embrace proven SEO techniques that help you rank in 2023.
Focusing on content velocity, doing value-backed guest posting and improving your writing processes with AI are the things that can be the biggest game changers for your SEO strategy.
Try them, and watch your SEO rankings improve.
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