13 SEO Techniques 2023
The SEO search engines are among the most important basics that the website deliberately brings in visitors and issues topics and sites on the first pages of Google.
SEO is an essential factor in obtaining or finding a site within the Google search engine, and this works to increase sales if your site is a sales site, and visits if it is a news or informational site.
The SEO techniques below all help you do one or more of those things:
1. Spy on your competitors’ content topics to get new ideas
Competition makes life harder, but your competitors can also be a source of topic ideas.
To find your competitors’ most trafficked pages, you can use the Top pages report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
For example, if we plug a competitor into Ahrefs, we see its guide to Magento SEO gets a fair amount of search traffic.
2. Prioritize low-difficulty topics to fast-track progress
It’s worth prioritizing low-difficulty topics if your site is new because you may struggle to rank for competitive topics early on.
You can find these with a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Just search for keyword ideas, then filter for those with low Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores.
3. Refresh old content to stay relevant on the SERPs
Old content needs updating periodically because rankings don’t last forever, especially if you’re targeting time-sensitive topics.
For example, here’s the estimated organic traffic to our list of top Google searches over time.
4. Create thorough content to rank for more keywords
Covering the relevant subtopics in your content niche often means you’ll rank for more keywords and get more traffic.
We proved this in our study, which found that if a page ranks #1 for a keyword, it ranks for almost 1,000 more keywords in the top 10 on average.
But how can you create more thorough content? It’s simple—you’ll need to fill the content gaps.
5. Create content hubs to become an authority in your space
Content hubs are interlinked collections of content about a topic.
For example, our beginner’s guide to SEO is a content hub. It has a pillar page about SEO that links to and from subpages about how search engines work, SEO basics, keyword research, etc
6. Get high-quality backlinks to improve rankings
Backlinks are one of Google’s top ranking factors, but getting high-quality ones is easier said than done. It’s arguably one of the most challenging parts of SEO.
For that reason, before you start trying to build more backlinks to a page, it’s worth checking whether this is likely to help.
7. Optimize internal links to boost important pages
Internal links are links from one page on your website to another.
Like backlinks, they transfer “link equity” from page to page. Unlike backlinks, you have complete control over where and how you internally link on your website. That’s why a popular SEO technique is to point more internal links at pages that need a boost.
8. Reclaim backlinks by fixing broken links
Broken backlinks are a common problem because people often delete or move pages over time. Unless you redirect these pages to their new URLs, any backlinks pointing to the old ones will effectively point to nowhere.
9. Create click-worthy search results
Ranking high on Google is only part of the battle. You also need to entice searchers to click on your result.
Here are a couple of ways to do this:
1- Write a compelling title tag and meta description.
2- Add schema markup for rich snippet eligibility.
Google often shows title tags and meta descriptions in the search results, so making them as compelling as possible without creating clickbait is important.
10. Win featured snippets to build traffic quickly
Featured snippets are short answers that show in some search results. Google pulls them from one of the top-ranking pages.
11. Optimize Core Web Vitals to provide a better experience
Core Web Vitals are used by Google to measure user experience. They measure a page’s load time, interactivity, and the stability of the content as it loads.
Google highly recommends in its own documentation that site owners optimize them.
12. Get easy backlinks by curating industry statistics
Curating industry statistics is a great way to acquire backlinks.
The reason is that when bloggers and journalists are looking for statistics on a topic, they will often search for them on Google.
If they find your article, they usually reference it using a backlink.
We’ve actually seen this ourselves with our post on SEO statistics.
13. Improve E-E-A-T by adding expert quotes
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust.
Although not a direct ranking factor, Google has said it uses a “variety of signals as a proxy to tell if content seems to match E-E-A-T.”
By including expert quotes in your content, you can get backlinks and improve your E-E-A-T.
Here’s an example where we got a link to our hreflang tags guide simply by quoting John Mueller.