To help businesses improve their search engine rankings, we asked 11 CEOs, founders, and marketing experts to share their top tips and strategies. From leveraging evergreen content and keywords to increasing user reviews and ratings, discover the valuable insights these industry leaders offer on optimizing your website for better search engine performance.
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- Leverage Evergreen Content and Keywords
- Optimize Images for Site Performance
- Implement Content Bucketing Strategy
- Understand Search Intent and Content
- Optimize Images for Search Engines
- Boost Engagement with Video Content
- Focus On Core Web Vitals and RUM Data
- Prioritize Quality Content Over Keywords
- Embrace Content Velocity and Consistency
- Optimize Google Business Profile and Links
- Increase User Reviews and Ratings
Leverage Evergreen Content and Keywords
Evergreen content will consistently rank high in search as long as you use the right keywords and update it periodically to ensure that it stays relevant. Having this type of content on your website’s blog will help boost your site’s ranking, as it will show up more frequently in searches.
Be sure to make use of a wide range of keywords, from broad to niche, to really drive traffic by expanding the content’s reach. This will help you not only improve search but get a more diverse audience visiting your site as well.
Jenna Nye, CEO, On the Strip
Optimize Images for Site Performance
In 2023, I’m still saying this. It should be an obvious one, but repeatedly we see websites with enormous images, videos, and other media that just slow performance to a crawl. Often, it’s because marketers add these images to web pages or as featured images on blogs, without knowing they need to be compressed.
A once super-fast site gets bogged down by all these images. I always recommend using SVG images where possible, such as on web pages, then using JPGs that are less than 250kb, ideally even smaller, for blog-featured images and page-featured images. It’s so simple, but so often forgotten.
Matthew Stibbe, CEO, Articulate Marketing
Implement Content Bucketing Strategy
Many businesses focus primarily on keywords and backlinks, but search engines like Google also consider how users interact with your site to determine its ranking. My favorite user engagement optimization technique is the “content bucketing” approach.
Content bucketing involves organizing your website content into thematic buckets, which provides a clear and logical structure for both users and search engines. By grouping related topics together, you make it easier for users to find relevant information, which leads to increased time spent on your site, a lower bounce rate, and more pages viewed per session. These user engagement metrics are closely monitored by search engines and play a significant role in determining your site’s ranking.
Johannes Larsson, Founder and CEO, Financer.com
Understand Search Intent and Content
Understanding the search intent of a keyword will help you identify the content you need on your site to rank for that keyword. Types of search intent are informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. Informational keywords are those where information on a topic is needed.
You might create an in-depth blog post providing that information. Commercial or transactional keywords are those where the searcher is interested in buying something. These keywords could optimize pages promoting your products or services. One way to find out the intent of a keyword is to enter it into a search engine.
If the organic search results at the top include websites with information on the topic, the keyword intent is informational. If the results include sites to buy products or services, the keyword intent is commercial or transactional. Now you know the content that is ranking at the top of page one and what you may need to create in order to compete.
Annette Matzen, Senior SEO Manager, Zenni Optical
Optimize Images for Search Engines
Before uploading images to your website, it’s helpful to take the following steps to optimize your images for search.
First, run your images through an image compressor like tinypng.com. This helps to reduce the file size of your images so that your website will load faster. Website load time directly affects how your website is ranked amongst other search results.
Second, upload your compressed images to geoimgr.com to add geotags. Doing so will help with your local search engine listings.
Once you have completed both steps, upload your optimized images to your website.
After uploading, add alt text to your image that helps to describe what is happening in the image. Alt text helps to make your website more accessible, which is not only great for making sure that your content is available to all, but also affects your search engine rankings.
Megan Gersch, Owner and CEO, Megan Gersch
Boost Engagement With Video Content
SEO has come a long way and simply entering a few keywords on a blog post no longer does the trick when trying to rank.
My number one tip would be to focus on strategies that can help to increase the time people stay on a specific page. There are a few ways to do this, but adding videos to your blog posts is definitely a great option.
Be smart when incorporating videos into your posts. For example, when you write a post that lists a couple of steps to get something done, make a video that will go into detail for one or two of these steps.
If the article is interesting enough, the reader will surely be tempted to watch the video on the blog post. This can increase the time the user spends on your page—and that shows Google people enjoy the content on your blog and find it useful.
Dr. Willy Portier, Co-founder, Concerty
Focus On Core Web Vitals and RUM Data
Core Web Vitals (CWV) not only influence the customer experience but also have a powerful impact on your site’s performance and revenue. If Google penalizes your organic search rankings because of poor CWV scores, it’ll mean less traffic and customers to your site.
So, for actionable insights beyond tools like Google Lighthouse or CrUX, I recommend using RUM data with a focus on business results. A good starting point is to look at the conversion correlation for each page of your site and then determine the business opportunity for each CWV optimization so you can prioritize solutions for maximum ROI.
Chuck Moxley, Global Head of Marketing, Blue Triangle
Prioritize Quality Content over Keywords
Keyword stuffing was the way to go way back when before search engines got smarter, but I still see so many sites that equate the number of words with quality for search engine rankings. Your content should be engaging, long enough to cover the topic in full, and should be readable and user-friendly—search engines are quite good at understanding high-quality content not dependent on keyword density. Trying to cheat the system backfires and isn’t worth the risk.
Kate Kandefer, CEO, SEOwind
Embrace Content Velocity and Consistency
In 2023, content velocity (consistent, high-quality publishing) remains a major lever for improving search engine rankings relatively quickly. Most business owners simply do not publish enough content to even have a small impact on their search rankings and visibility.
Most websites need at least 40-60 optimized landing pages/SEO blogs/pillar pages at a minimum before they gain any type of SEO traction—plus regular monthly publishing. You don’t need fancy backlinks right at the beginning.
You need to write good content on relevant trending topics that your ideal customer finds interesting, as well as their pain points, incorporate trending keywords properly, and then distribute it.
Sully Chaudhary, Founder, WriterArmy
Optimize Google Business Profile and Links
Create and optimize a free Google Business Profile (GBP) listing for your local business. It increases your business’s online visibility almost immediately by helping it show up in listings online where you otherwise wouldn’t pop up. Also, work on obtaining inbound links to your website from other established websites in your local community.
Brian Offenberger, Owner, B Street Local
Increase User Reviews and Ratings
One tip/strategy that businesses can use to optimize their website for better search engine rankings is to get more user reviews and increase your company rating. Search engines like Google consider the quantity and quality of reviews as a ranking factor for local search results.
By encouraging customers to leave positive reviews on your website and other review sites like Google My Business, Yelp, and Facebook, you can improve your online reputation and visibility to potential customers.
Responding to reviews (both positive and negative) can show your engagement and commitment to customer satisfaction, which can further improve your online reputation and search engine rankings.
Joe Kevens, Founder and Director of Demand Gen, B2B SaaS Reviews
