Want to Improve Your SEO? 10 Practical Tips to Make You Visible in All Search Engines!

Improving your SEO is now more important than ever. The arrival of AI tools like ChatGPT means that virtually anyone can conduct keyword research and write SEO copy. This will lead to a lot of extra (generic) content and increased competition in Google.

Our extra tip is: stop doing this! LLMs are tools that help you with inspiration, but they cannot replace human work. That is why we give you 10 practical tips to improve your SEO in a world where AI is our greatest friend and enemy.

1. Check if Your Website is Being Crawled Properly

When looking at the basics of SEO, everything starts with a website and a crawler. In principle, it doesn't matter which search engine we look at; they all use a crawler to answer your search query correctly.

And no, LLMs themselves do not use a crawler, but the organizations that train the models do use a crawler to gather data from the web

How do you check if your website is being crawled properly?

To check if your website is being crawled properly, use a tool like Screaming Frog. This tool is an artificial crawler that crawls your website, just like a search engine does.

If you do not have a license for tooling such as Screaming Frog, you can also view the crawl statistics in Google Search Console. Google is still #1 when it comes to search engines in both the US and India.

• Log in to Google Search Console.

• Go to Pages on the left side of the menu.

• Check which pages are and are not indexed and which error messages are displayed to get a good picture of your website.

• Then go to Settings on the left side of the menu.

• Next, select Crawl Stats.

Here you get more insights into how often your website is crawled, whether there are issues, and what is being crawled.

2. Check if Your Website is Indexed Properly

Besides crawling, indexation is the most important factor for ranking your website well for relevant keywords. If a page is not indexed, SEO is pointless.

When you click on Pages in the left menu within Search Console, you also gain more insights into how your website is indexed. First of all, you clearly see how many pages are indexed and how many pages are not.

Select only the pages that are not indexed and review all error messages. For example, "Crawled - currently not indexed" is an interesting one to examine. Which pages are included here? Are there any important pages among them? This often happens with low-quality or duplicate content, so it’s a signal to improve those pages.

3. Start with Classic Marketing

When we mention the classic marketing mix, you hear people think: “that is really old-fashioned”. No, it is the foundation for properly understanding a product or service. Primarily the P for Product.

• Product: What are you marketing? Is it a product or a service? What are the USPs? What service do you offer? What is the product life cycle? And most importantly: What kind of problems does your product or service solve?

You need all this information to create an SEO strategy. After all, it is part of marketing.

In addition, we always recommend creating a Persona together with your client or team. Describe what the ideal target audience looks like. What kind of people are you writing for? How do they experience the problems you solve? In India, this might mean understanding regional preferences or language nuances. In the US, it might mean focusing on convenience or specific lifestyle values. This forms the basis of a good content strategy.

4. Conduct a Good Content Audit

Content is and remains important. When you want to improve your SEO, you must first map out what you already have. Which content performs well, which can you reuse, and what needs to go?

Conduct a thorough content audit to map out your content and identify what is performing well and what is not. Below are a number of points you should definitely pay attention to during such an audit:

• Traffic trends over the last 6–12 months.

• Keyword rankings for primary and secondary terms.

• Conversion rates (leads, sales, sign-ups).

• Backlink profile strength for each page.

5. Don't Be Afraid to Discard Content

Situation 1: Sometimes you have spent hours toiling away on a beautiful page for your website. What happens? It performs terribly and turns out not to align with your visitor's intent at all.

Situation 2: You have written a page about a topic, you achieve top positions, but the visitors you get fall into the wrong target group.

These are examples of situations where you need to ask yourself whether the content you have written actually supports your goal. If this is not the case, and it is also not relevant for your website visitors to read it, you simply make a decision. To improve your SEO, you need to clean up. This is also known as Content Pruning.

Removing or updating low-performing content helps Google focus its crawl budget on your best pages, improving their chances of ranking higher.

6. Improve the Speed of Your Website

Speed has become more important in recent years, yet many parties pay too little attention to this after the site has been delivered. Unfortunately, websites become increasingly slower as they get older. Not because the website is poorly built, but because:

• Web editors often place images that are too large.

• Often, over time, an unnecessary number of plugins and scripts are placed on the website.

• For example, the PHP version on the web server is outdated.

Do you want to optimize a website for SEO? Check your website's speed occasionally using Chrome's inspection tool. Go to your website in incognito mode. Right-click and select Inspect. You will then see Lighthouse in the menu. Here you can measure your speed. For a quick check, you can also choose PageSpeed Insights.

Note for Indian audiences: With many users on mobile data networks, optimizing for speed is even more critical to reduce bounce rates.

7. Make Sure Your Website is Responsive

A website must perform well on every device. The Core Web Vitals help determine whether your website performs well on the web or on mobile.

In Google Search Console, you can find the report: Core Web Vitals (formerly Site Vitality). When you open this report, you will see how your website scores on mobile and desktop.

Error messages that need to be resolved often relate to your layout, because elements are too large, too small, or shift when you switch devices. Given that the majority of searches in both India and the US happen on mobile, a non-responsive site is a major SEO killer.

8. Set the Right Priorities

Improving SEO is about setting priorities. Every SEO specialist has a different strategy. To set the right priorities, we always use a priority matrix.

By plotting all tasks on this matrix (Impact vs. Effort), you create a very clear schedule based on priorities. Focus on high-impact, low-effort tasks first to get quick wins, then move to high-impact, high-effort projects.

9. Improving Your SEO Through Better External Links

Ranking well for challenging keywords is impossible without a strong link profile. That is also why millions have been invested in link building over the past decades.

So how do you improve your link profile, and what do you do with bad backlinks?

Where we used to hope that 'disavowing' bad links in Google Search Console would offer a solution (I don't think anyone knows if that actually ever worked), in recent years Google has indicated that they simply ignore bad links instead of punishing them with a Google Penalty.

So just accept it then? Yes, actually, and above all, work on acquiring new, good backlinks. What you can do (for example, if your anchor text profile has become spammy due to excessive use of exact anchors) is contact the website owner to ask if they are willing to adjust the anchor text (or possibly remove the link).

What are good links? When it comes to good links, we primarily think of links from relevant websites with a decent link profile and a reasonable number of organic visitors.

• Relevance: Websites that cover the same or related topics.

• Decent Link Profile: Domain authority metrics are a reasonable indication of whether a link profile is good, but these metrics are easy to manipulate. Always check which links are behind the domain values.

• Organic Traffic: There are many websites live solely to place links, without much real love being put into the content. If a website has no organic traffic, that usually says enough.

Outsource link building? Be careful. Many agencies sell low-quality links. Focus on earning links through great content, PR, and genuine relationships.

10. To Measure is to Know

Our final tip might seem obvious, but we notice that things still often go wrong. If you want to improve your SEO, you need to ensure you have data to act on. How are your pages performing? What kind of traffic are you currently receiving? Which pages are converting?

Ensure that you have an analytics tool running (like Google Analytics 4) and that Search Console is collecting data. You can easily create an SEO dashboard in Looker Studio with this data to visualize your progress.

Use LLMs as Partners, Not as Replacements

As we mentioned at the beginning, LLMs are not there to replace human work. However, they can help you better understand SEO, assist you with writing copy, or find the right data.

When looking at the 10 tips to improve your SEO, there is a strategy behind this as well, and you need to draw connections between data and the human aspect. If you truly want to write helpful content, it stems from your own expertise and knowledge.

So yes, this blog was written from my own perspective, and no LLM was involved in the final output.