Search Engine Optimization (SEO) enhances your online visibility without requiring paid advertising.
Effective SEO helps brands gain industry recognition and earn a profit.
To stay competitive, businesses must keep up with the latest SEO and AI GEO trends.
Our Prodima SEO experts composed this list of the 16 most useful SEO tips:
- Optimize your website structure
- Choose wisely your keywords
- Enhance the user experience
- Target a relevant audience
- Install reputable SEO tools
- Earn valuable backlinks
- Optimize your internal links
- Polish your URLs and slugs
- Resize your images
- Implement schema markup
- Improve your content
- Embed videos from YouTube
- Demonstrate trust and authority
- Address your on-site metadata
- Monitor your competitors
- Measure your SEO performance
#1 Optimize Your Website Structure
Web structure significantly impacts SEO efficiency. Online visitors form an opinion about a web page in less than 1 second.
The homepage is at the highest level of the website architecture. It presents the website’s main sections, serving as an index.
Under the homepage are the main categories, usually the products or services, and other subfolders.
Here is a good example of website architecture:
- Homepage
- About page
- Products and services (category index page)
- Product and service – detailed page #1
- Product and service – detailed page #2
- Etc.
- Blog (category index page)
- Article #1
- Article #2
- Etc.
- Contact page
- Terms and conditions
- Privacy policies
The website structure depends on the industry, the business positioning, and the target audience. It must satisfy online users across multiple devices (mobile, tablet, desktop).
#2 Choose Wisely Your Keywords
Keywords and keyphrases are the foundation of SEO.
They represent the queries coming from online users when they search for a specific product or service, or just for information.
The most effective keywords are those that online users actively search for.
To find the best keywords, benchmark the market, and select the most relevant ones. Relevant key phrases are those that make sense for your business.
For example, if you sell women’s sports shoes, you may be willing to rank for keywords like “buy women’s sports shoes” or “athletic shoe shop near me.”
If you do, you will increase your website’s chances of appearing to potential customers looking for those specific terms.
The four most important criteria for keyword research and selection are:
- Relevance
- Competitiveness
- Search volume
- User intent
Find the right balance between all those factors before optimizing your web pages for those keywords.
#3 Enhance the User Experience
The User Experience (UX) keeps people engaged on the website.
A good user experience keeps them longer on the web pages and ultimately increases the chances of converting cold visitors into paying customers.
Following the website architecture, brands must build a design satisfying these 2 factors:
- Being appealing
- Being functional
By “appealing,” we mean “attractive,” so people are impressed and want to stay longer.
By “functional,” we mean that the design must allow smooth web navigation and useful features.
#4 Target a Relevant Audience
It is easy to bring visitors to a website. It is more challenging to bring qualified leads.
There is no point in attracting people who are not interested in what you showcase on your website. Brands must focus on potential customers, not random visitors.
To catch the ideal demographic, you must first identify it. We define user personas thanks to these factors:
- Gender
- Age
- Location
- Language
- Interests
- Online behavior
Once you know your audience, you need to publish content that resonates with them. It means both unique and useful copies.
Search engines like Google want to share “good answers” with people. Those “good answers” are found in your website content.
Write for the right people, and they will visit your web pages.
#5 Install Reputable SEO Tools
To implement a solid SEO strategy, consider using the following tools:
- Google Workspace
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Google Tag Manager
Prodima does not intend to promote Google tools. We mention them because they handle SEO for free. It is hard to beat that!
Below is a quick sum-up of the SEO Google Suite:
Google Workspace is a suite of useful tools previously known as G Suite. Over 2 billion people worldwide adopted them. They include several collaborative software tools that monitor, track, report, and organize the SEO campaign information and company data.
The Google Analytics 4 tool tracks everything that happens on your website. You can visualize your traffic performance and learn about its sources. This way, you can adjust your SEO strategy accordingly.
The Google Search Console is another free tool from Google that analyzes a website’s health. Business owners can manage, maintain, and troubleshoot the performance of their web pages. Besides, this software monitors website traffic and includes solutions to make adjustments, such as sitemap submission.
The Google Tag Manager provides website administrators with the tools to track web page goals. Those goals can be the number of clicks on a specific button or the user journey from the landing page to the thank-you notification. It works for tracking your organic performance and for running ads on your website.
#6 Earn Valuable Backlinks
Backlinks are hyperlinks on a web page (the referring page) that redirect a digital user to another website (the destination page). They are among the most important SEO ranking factors for success.
Those off-site links affect the quality of the web page, following Google’s E.E.A.T. framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). They are advocates for a website’s credibility. Therefore, there should be sufficient high-quality backlinks to rank well on SERPs.
Backlinks must be genuinely earned rather than purchased to trick the algorithms. Search engines penalize web domains massively for buying backlinks.
As off-page is serious business, consider working with reputable professionals if you need link-building services.
#7 Optimize Your Internal Links
Like backlinks, internal links connect web pages within the same domain.
For example, by clicking on a product preview showcased on a category page, the digital user will be redirected to the detailed item page.
They ensure that website navigation is a positive experience for online users. No web page should be “orphan” (not linked to any other page of the website).
Internal links bring context by connecting pages with similar topics. They create content clusters that we will detail below.
#8 Polish Your URLs & Slugs
A web page URL (Universal Resource Locator) is the web address of a domain hosted on the Internet. The URL slug is specific to a single page within the website.
For example, a web address may read “mypage.com/blog/article-abc” with “mypage.com” as the domain/name of the website and the “article-abc” ending of the address as the slug.
The URL and slugs influence a page’s SEO ranking by providing additional information about the content.
URLs with ambiguous slugs that don’t include keyphrases, such as “mypage.com/blog/8sjl1j3”, make it difficult for algorithms to index them.
Shorter URLs with effective keywords are the most effective.
#9 Resize Your Images
Images are among the most common causes of poor website performance.
Business owners must optimize them to achieve faster page load times, a better user experience, and more efficient SEO.
Uploading images to a website is a simple process, but we must pay attention to file sizes.
A rule of thumb is to upload images that are smaller than 150 KB. The lower the better.
Of course, we also need to publish visually appealing pictures. Designers must find the right balance between size and quality.
#10 Implement Schema Markup
Schema markup is the digital data and vocabulary that search engines and LLMs (Large Language Models) use to process information. This specified code relays information by interpreting valuable written content and displaying it on a SERP preview.
Depending on the online query, schema identifies the question at hand and provides websites with suitable responses, also known as “featured snippets.” FAQs are a perfect illustration of such featured snippets.
Businesses that implement schema markup usually rank higher in Google search results. Markups also help content be better picked up by AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overview, or Perplexity.
Use the free Google Structured Data Markup Helper to optimize your website.
#11 Improve Your Content
Rather than creating new web pages, consider revamping the current content.
Updating old blog posts with new images and refreshed text can have a drastic effect on organic traffic.
Search engine crawlers tend to trust “older URLs” more than newly published web pages. Online history is a thing in SEO.
Overall, web pages with higher seniority perform better than newer ones, especially if they are under a solid domain with great DR (Domain Rating, according to Ahrefs) or AS (Authority Score, according to Semrush).
#12 Embed Videos From YouTube
Today, video content is a preferred source of information. YouTube is the second-most-used search engine worldwide, after Google.
We recommend that website owners embed YouTube videos on their relevant web pages. Embedding is a more effective SEO option than uploading.
YouTube is an online channel that includes SEO tools dedicated to video’s organic optimization. It is another good reason to embed those videos from this channel.
#13 Demonstrate Trust & Authority
To boost Google’s E.E.A.T. framework, businesses must share valuable knowledge from reputable experts on their websites.
The purpose is to become a trustworthy source of information across the internet. Search engines prefer to rank trusted domains that are more likely to satisfy a visitor’s needs.
Algorithms automatically promote pages that showcase a better user experience. It is a basic principle of Search Engine Optimization.
When implementing E.E.A.T. material, include as much information as possible, such as pictures, links, and testimonies of reliable experts.
Ensure we can connect the author of such information, for example, by creating bio pages of your experts.
#14 Address Your On-Site Metadata
Based on your keyword research and SEO strategy, optimize the following web on-site metadata:
- Page titles
- Meta descriptions
- Page subheadings (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
Brands should write on-page subheads to support the overall content. It does not mean blindly copying and pasting the keywords identified in the research, as most people did back in the 2010s.
We also recommend prioritizing the most worthy pages rather than investing in the entire website.
SEO is a never-ending process. There is always something to improve somewhere. Marketers should focus on the pages that convert or bring revenue.
#15 Monitor Your Competitors
Brands should monitor their domain performance relative to competitors’ websites.
They must investigate the industry, market trends, and opportunities by comparing data and rankings. By auditing other websites, SEO marketers often learn valuable information.
Here is a checklist to perform great SEO benchmarking:
- How did they structure their websites?
- How are their Core Web Vitals?
- Which web pages perform the best?
- Which keywords bring them most of the traffic?
- How do they write their blog articles?
- What kind of backlinks do they receive?
Several items can be checked with free tools. However, most of them require premium systems.
If you cannot do it yourself, consider working with a reputable SEO agency like Prodima.
#16 Measure Your SEO Performance
Businesses must monitor their SEO performance to manage the success of their website.
SEO is not a task you do once and then forget about it. It involves assessing the online performance from all standpoints, and in the long run.
Here are the most important SEO metrics to follow:
- Website organic traffic
- Web page impressions on SERPs
- Organic keyword rankings
- Web traffic source
- Number of backlinks
- Quality of backlinks
Check the evolution of those metrics over time. Identify the gaps and adjust your SEO strategy whenever needed.
Improve Your Organic Rankings
Search engine optimization is an overwhelming and meticulous process.
It is one of the most rewarding but also time-consuming marketing strategies.
Those 16 useful SEO tips cover the staple strategy you should follow to stay ahead of the digital marketing game.
If you have any questions, contact us, and we will be happy to clarify the details!
