SEO Best Practices 2024: How to Improve Your Website SEO Organically

As a small business owner, having a website is essential to the success of your product or service. Let’s say you designed a clean, pretty website and your next question may be, "Now what?" Well, I have the answer. You need to get that website noticed! One way to do that is to utilize search engine optimization (SEO). Organic SEO strategies are a free, highly effective way to improve your site's performance today. Read this blog to learn how to improve your website ranking naturally and increase viewership and website traffic.

With the increase in accessibility to technology and online users, SEO is more important than ever, and you need to prioritize it. According to QuickSprout, the top search result on Google only has a 33% chance of getting clicked. If you do not show up as number one on the main Google page, you will miss out on a lot of organic traffic.

Explore SEO Best Practices 2024

There are many ways you can improve your website’s SEO and visibility. We are going to chat about 4 ways you can improve your website organically. SEO best practices 2024 include using smaller sub-strategies such as on-page SEO techniques and off-page SEO tactics that can help your website move to the top rankings organically without having to pay a dime!

1. Create a Clean Eco System

An effective way to increase your website’s SEO score is to create a clean ecosystem of all your platforms. What does this mean? Incentivize, ask, and give a call to action to your audience to follow you on other platforms. Why do this? If people follow you on one platform, they are likely to follow you on another.

Let’s use an example. If you have a large following on Instagram but want to get started with TikTok, your first step would be introducing a call to action to your new platform. Maybe you get a lot of views on your stories; link your TikTok to all your IG stories so that when people are watching, they are getting direct instructions on what to do next. Follow this same system for your website.

The goal is to use that call to action in your posts, captions, and stories to push the audience to that new platform and create a consistent presence.

2. Use Keywords Throughout Your Website

Keywords are SO crucial when it comes to how to improve website SEO organically. If you don’t have keywords, chances are people will never be able to find your website. If you are looking for new clients, you need to find a way to draw them to your website. For example, if you own a yoga studio and need more people to attend a class, it would be beneficial to you to use keywords pertaining to yoga studio classes on your website to try and draw the audience to your website and services. This is a great way to attract an audience that is actively looking for a product or service online, but may not be aware of your business.

Keywords should fit naturally into the copy on your website. You can place keywords in:

Your actual text. (i.e. sentencing)
H1-H3 headings.
In the ALT text of pictures used on the page.
Your page’s meta description.

If you are not sure how your website is currently generating your keywords and would like to get a free SEO report you can use websites like:

These websites will give you the current score of your site based on your website copy. They will also provide suggestions, and areas for improvement. For example, your SEO score might be a “C+” because you have a great use of keywords, but you don’t use any keywords in your headings.

3. Use Backlinks

The first thought that comes to mind when creating a website or even blog post is to only direct your content to your products, but what if I told you using other links could get you a higher SEO ranking?

Backlinks are hyperlinks from one web page to another website. Whether you include these types of links in your blog post, to give your audience more information or other pages on your website, it is important to have them. Get creative! You can use, other links from blog posts, education links, homepage links, and more! Make sure that whatever links you use are credible and related to you and your business.

The backline rule is also the same if you flip it around. Your website will gain more authority online if other sites are linking their pages to yours. There are many ways to get other organizations to hyperlink your website. Check out some examples below

Guest blog posts
Interviews: podcasts, vlogs, media
Collaborations with other folks in the industry.
Featured products.
Press/features.

4. Technical SEO

The technical aspects of how to improve website SEO are just as important as the visual. To get a high SEO ranking, your website needs to be optimized and run smoothly. Here are a few highly effective technical SEO improvements you can check on your site.

Site Speed

Your site speed is important because Google is always on alert. If it is too slow, Google will recognize that and it will harm your ranking. On the flip side having a slow website can also affect the way website visitors engage. People are used to everything loading fast, so if they come across your page and feel like it isn’t loading best believe they will move on to the next one.

If you happen to have a slower site speed, try optimizing your page speed and server response time, as well as looking in on the plug-ins. To test your website speed use Pingdom a free service.

Mobile Friendly

If you direct people from your social media pages to your website, chances are they are using their mobile devices. Take the time to optimize your website for mobile users to prevent killing the user experience as well as your ranking. If you find that most of your target audiences use their mobile devices consider taking the next step and creating a mobile app, which will also help improve your SEO.

Black woman checking SEO on mobile device

SSL

Last but not least, make sure that users’ data is protected with SSL. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer and is a protocol for establishing secure links between networked computers. The quickest way to check and see if your user’s information is protected is if you see a lock icon in the top left corner of your web browser link. Depending on the platform you use to host your website you can add various types of widgets or apps to add SSL to the site. This is crucial to your SEO score, and it gives your consumers an added layer of brand credibility and trust, especially if they have to intern sensitive information like personal documents or credit card information.

Fixed Broken Links

Key number one to not having broken links is to use reputable authority websites as hyperlinks. Even then you’re bound to have a few broken links which could bring down the credibility of your website and decrease your SEO ranking. Using platforms like Dead Link Checker throughout the entirety of your website can help prevent any broken links.

By following these SEO best practices for 2024 and integrating strategies like content optimization for SEO, focusing on SEO for small businesses, and keeping up with SEO trends 2024, you can effectively enhance your website’s organic search performance. Additionally, paying attention to local SEO optimization, mobile SEO tips, voice search optimization, and a long-tail keywords strategy will help ensure comprehensive coverage of your SEO efforts.

Last but not least, make sure that users’ data is protected especially if they have to intern sensitive information like personal documents or credit card information.

Now that you have learned how to improve your website SEO organically, it’s time to put it into practice! Share and pin this post with others that will find it helpful! Ruth Sherrill Marketing Services is a marketing agency that specializes in helping business owners create profit and nurture an audience through shareable and informative content. Keep up with us on our socials by following us on Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok!