6 universal SEO tactics

Google regularly updates its algorithm, the competition is not far behind and everything goes digital – the SEO world is constant changing. Consider these 6 universal SEO tactics and you’ll never be wrong.

1. Holistic SEO approach

Holistic SEO (search engine optimization) refers to improving all important aspects of a website to make it rank higher in the search engines:

• Good technical SEO
• Quality content
• Great user experience
• Secure website

2. Optimize your site speed

Site speed is one of the factors which determines whether you get a good ranking in Google. And with the new Google Page Experience update in May 2021, Google sets new SEO ranking signals. In the below blog posts, covers how to improve your site speed and which tools can help you measure your site’s speed:

• Google Page Experience
• WordPress Speed Up
• Improve image load speed
• WordPress Checklist

3. Provide excellent content

Create the best quality content that you can, and consistently review and improve on it wherever possible. Ask yourself whether your questions are answered by visiting your pages, and whether it aligns with what you’re seeing in the search results:

• Demonstrate your expertise and stand out from the crowd
• Research into your topic, competitors, blogs, magazines etc.
• Solve your audience problems
• Who are your audience and what they’re looking for

4. Focus on your audience

Focus on what your audience wants and needs – that’s something that isn’t going to change, as search engines always aim to give users what they’re looking for.

Search intent
Google wants to rank pages that best fit the search term, as well as the search intent behind a specific search query. That’s why it’s essential to make sure your post or page fits the search intent of your audience. Consider the search intent and then do the keyword research – are you offering searchers what they’re looking for when they type in their search term (your keywords)? Are they looking for information or to take action, and what do they need from you? Look at the search results for your keywords to answer those questions.

Attention is fierce
Focus on what your audience needs: getting people’s attention is fierce. Can you solve their problems and why should they engage with your content. Take your visitor’s perspective, it’s all about your users, not yourself or your company!

5. Improve internal linking

Make it easy for search engines to crawl and find which articles are most important on your website. This helps your users find what they’re looking for. Improving your internal linking structure – (1) make sure that your most important articles also have the most internal links pointing to them, (2) add links to your most recent posts, to avoid orphaned content and (3) make sure that links are relevant to the context of a page/post or they won’t make sense to either the search engine or the user.

6. Fresh and relevant content

A never ending content maintenance: your content should always be fresh and relevant. Both search engines and users like that:

• Clean up content, are the content out of date
• Check the most important keywords and see what comes up
• How are pages/posts performing? Decrease in number of visitors, are pages/posts still relevant?

If you want to rank well, you need to work hard into being the best search result. Search engines want to offer their users what they’re looking for: high quality content that’s up to date and served on a fast loading website both on desktop and especially on mobile.

Recommended further reading by Yoast: WordPress SEO: the definitive guide.