The 10 Best SEO Measures for Better Google Ranking in 2024

1. 1. SEO measure: Define SMART SEO goals
2. 2. SEO measure: Combining keyword research with user intention, LSI and Entity Salience
3. 3. SEO measure: Core Web Vitals & Page Speed ​​– consider user-friendliness
4. 4. SEO measure: EAT – why users (and Google) should trust your page
5. 5. SEO measure: Why are structured data so important for SEO?
6. 6. SEO measure: Page optimization with tools – consider errors and warnings
7. 7. SEO measure: Pay attention to unique content and counteract duplicate content
8. 8. SEO measure: Internally link specifically and thematically
9. 9. SEO measure: Correctly name speaking URLs and maintain page hierarchy
10. 10. SEO measure: Page hygiene – less is sometimes more
11. Checklist for the SEO measures

At SEO (Search Engine Optimization) it's about appearing in search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo as efficiently as possible for relevant search terms using various strategies and tactics (SEO measures). Companies use SEO to achieve meaningful conversions and, for example, to turn prospects into customers.

In the flood of SEO measures suggested on many pages, it's easy to lose track. These measures can be divided into OnPage (optimization of a single page on the website), OnSite (the entire website, mostly technical SEO measures), and OffPage (external link building). But only in a combination does an SEO strategy emerge, with which you can actually improve your Google ranking.

This text focuses on OnPage and OnSite SEO measures. We also have a good entry page on the topic of OffPage SEO optimization for you.

In addition to the 10 SEO measures for 2024 and beyond, you can also expect a checklist of measures you need to keep on your radar, as well as tips for useful SEO tools, with which you are perfectly positioned for optimal ranking in search engines. As early as the first SEO measure, you will learn why “improving Google ranking” is not a clearly defined goal that will take you further.

1. SEO measure: Define SMART SEO goals

“Better Google ranking”, “More traffic from search engines” or the frequently mentioned “appearing in 1st place on Google” – you've probably heard these or similar answers when website operators are asked what they want to achieve through search engine optimization. The problem: These formulations are rather vague. Without a clearly defined goal, the SEO measures necessary for this can hardly be derived in detail. Therefore, a clear SEO goal should be at the beginning of an SEO strategy. There are various procedures for this, for example the SMART method known from project management is well suited.

SMART goals method

The measurability is immensely important in the SEO area. This makes it easy to communicate achieving a goal as a success to team members, customers or CEOs.

An example of a clearly defined SEO goal could be: “By improving the internal link structure, developing backlinks and optimizing the content, keyword xy should increase by at least 3 positions on google.de by date X. This will be measured with the SEO tool Sistrix.”

Of course, you can formulate your goals in even more detail.

2. SEO measure: Combining keyword research with user intention, LSI and Entity Salience

The Keyword research is the basis of your OnPage optimization. If you publish SEO content, which is suitable to the search intention (user intention), each of these content pieces should be optimized for at least one keyword.

For optimal keyword research, it is recommended not only to rely on one tool, but to combine several. In addition to the Google Keyword Planner, which is not only suitable for SEA, but also excellent as a keyword tool for SEO, you can find a compilation of good Keyword research tools here.

In addition to this, there is competitive analysis, for which you can of course use one or more SEO tools such as Sistrix or Semrush. Basically, a first analysis can simply be to search for your target keywords in incognito mode (Google Chrome) and pay special attention to the pages around your entry in the search engine results pages (SERPs) or the top 10. This way you can also get some inspiration, concerning potential keywords or content.

Back to search intention – this describes the drive or the reason for a search query. To better categorize and measure these reasons to a certain degree, search intentions are no longer only divided into Navigational, Informational and Transactional, but nowadays a little more comprehensive and detailed:

• Visit in Person (often: local business is searched for with smartphone on the way – Google Maps integration)
• Website (looking for a previously known page, if you do not want or can not type in the URL – very high search volume)
• Do (buy, install, download, etc. – many paid results in the SERPs)
• Know (divided into Know and Know Simple). Google already answers clear questions itself in the SERPs with Know Simple.

For many sites that primarily convey information, therefore, the “Know” intention – the search for sometimes more complex information – is the user intention on which the greatest focus should be placed. According to sistrix.de, more than two thirds of all queries indicate a know intention (source). A suitable SEO measure would therefore, for example, be to build up knowledge content in addition to your e-commerce pages, in order to additionally pick up searching people by answering specialist questions.

Another aspect is the lesser-known procedure Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). In summary, this is about semantically similar words and terms. The search engine searches – following the primary search for the entered keyword or key phrase – for topic-relevant pages, based on the frequency of these terms similar to the original keyword. Search engines therefore consider a page to be more relevant for the searched keyword, if many semantically similar terms are on it. But here, too, the rule is: Do not overload with too many (even just semantically similar) keywords, but rather focus on added value for the readers and high information density!

In a similar direction, the next SEO measure also goes: Consider the (also still relatively unknown) Entity Salience.

What is Entity Salience SEO?

In summary, Entity Salience is about evaluating known relationships between entities on the part of search engines. An entity can, for example, be a person, a brand, or an object and corresponding attributes are assigned to it. Entity Salience in the SEO area is primarily about the relationships between different entities and using known relationships and correlations to improve the accuracy of hits on the part of search engines.

An example of Entity Salience would be if a website mentions the films E.T., the Indiana Jones series and Jurassic Park. These are not only (relatively) family-friendly adventure films, but Steven Spielberg also directed all films. Therefore, this page has a high Entity Salience for Steven Spielberg, even if his name is mentioned there only once (or even not at all!).

The easiest method to take Entity Salience into account in your Keyword research, is probably to use the “related queries” in the SERPs. There you often find exactly the entities with which you can enrich your content accordingly. If there is a knowledge graph, “also often searched” can give you additional ideas. Detailed, detailed articles that contain this information often rank particularly well.

3. SEO measure: Core Web Vitals & Page Speed ​​– consider user-friendliness

According to Google, user-friendliness is not more important for a good ranking than relevant content (source). However, a negative user experience (page experience) can very clearly influence the ranking. For example, if the site is not optimized for mobile devices, visibility on mobile devices (and thus also in desktop search) is often significantly restricted. With Google's Mobile Friendly Test Tool, you can check whether your website is mobile optimized (for the Google bot).

Core Web Vitals – Page Experience Signals

A particularly problematic issue is also a slow page load time. In the Google Search Console and with the Google Chrome extension Lighthouse, you can see the Core Web Vitals for your site and, in addition, Lighthouse also shows Speed ​​Index, Time-to-Interactive and Total Blocking Time. For optimal performance, all of these values ​​should be in the green zone. If you scroll further down in the Lighthouse report, you can see what exact problems exist and how you can fix them.

More information on Google Page Experience and how you can create a CrUX report in Google Data Studio to look at the Core Web Vitals over time, can be found in our article on Core Web Vitals.

4. SEO measure: EAT – why users (and Google) should trust your page

After the so-called Medic Update 2018 (algorithm update that particularly affected pages in the health and finance sector), the so-called EAT components were first traded as a relevant SEO measure:

• Expertise (competence),
• Authority (authority) and
• Trustworthiness (trustworthiness)

The three “pillars” of EAT are named by Alexander Rus from Evergreen Media in his article – with the justified addition that relevant content for the search intent is a prerequisite for a website to be considered authoritative and trustworthy.

EAT method in SEO

However, EAT is strictly not a single SEO measure, but should already be included in the SEO strategy of the website. If your site operates in the so-called Your Money Your Life, area (YMYL), you should work towards displaying your trustworthiness and expertise in your subject.

In this context, Google's Page Quality Rating Guidelines are also relevant. Over 10,000 human quality raters rate websites worldwide and follow the criteria provided by Google. These guidelines also discuss the term YMYL pages. YMYL stands for Your Money Your Life, and refers to pages whose content can affect the future well-being, health, financial stability, or safety of the visitors. Google ranks, among other things, “medical information pages” among them.

For YMYL pages, special value is placed on the EAT components as well as the page quality itself. Google seems to use human ratings (of the raters) as the basis for assessing expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, and to incorporate these into machine-learnable systems. Thus, there is a strong assumption of a direct influence of both the EAT components and the increased qualitative requirements for the content on the search results for YMYL pages. This allows specific optimization proposals to be derived.

An example of an optimization approach would be to let real experts write, present them with an author biography on a separate page each, and link from these pages to their posts on the site.

Further helpful measures that serve to build trust and authority could be:

• Citations and external linking to recognized websites on the topic
• Name the update or publication date
• Transparency: Information about who operates the site, how to make contact, clear privacy information, etc., beyond the imprint
• Make certificates, awards, etc. clearly visible
• High-quality backlinks from other well-known sites in your area
• A Wikipedia entry can be very helpful under certain circumstances

5. SEO measure: Why are structured data so important for SEO?

With structured data, content can be marked so that it is easier to understand for Google and can be displayed as rich snippets. This has to be done on the page in the source code. However, with certain plugins like Yoast SEO or RankMath, this can also be implemented easily without programming knowledge.

The headline and the three sentences that you just read could also be marked as structured data – here according to the FAQ scheme: One or more questions are asked and answered directly on the site. Question and answer are declared as question and answer in the code.

The tagging system schema.org is a cooperation of Google, Bing, Yahoo and the Russian search engine Yandex, in an effort to create a unified standard. On the web portal schema.org you will find all currently available schemas – currently 792 types. However, there are some common schemas that are also partly integrated into the plugins mentioned above. These include, among others, article, recipes, events, organization, person, product, video and FAQ page. In contrast, Q&A (Question & Answer) is rather used for, for example, forum pages on which several users answer a question.

Therefore, as an SEO measure, it is suitable to mark the content (if possible and meaningful) with structured data. These can be validated most easily in the Google Search Console or with corresponding tools, such as Screaming Frog. You have not yet set up a Google Search for yourself? Then read in this article how you can set up the Google Search Console.

Google Search Console – Insight into improvements

6. SEO measure: Page optimization with tools – consider errors and warnings

There are several good SEO tools, which regularly crawl, analyze and display irregularities on your page, such as Sistrix, ScreamingFrog, XOVI, or Semrush. Even though it obviously does not suffice for a good ranking to fix the problems shown in the tools, you should fix errors and warnings there as far as possible. If you do this regularly, this SEO measure can prevent common mistakes and oversights that could negatively impact your Google ranking.

Common warnings in the OnPage analysis can be:

• Missing title tag, meta description, H1 headline or alt attributes of images
• Title or description too long, too short or present multiple times
• 404 and other errors
• Duplicate Content
• Images too large
• Problems loading pages
• Problems with internal linking

7. SEO measure: Pay attention to unique content and counteract duplicate content

Quite clearly: The main goal should be to have only unique content on your page, which ideally you do not use again somewhere else. In everyday life, however, this often proves difficult. Especially on e-commerce pages, the situation often arises that, for example, a pair of pants is offered in different colors or a technical product in a very similar variant. Producing different content for this, which does not largely resemble each other, is almost impossible. And if you don't have the opportunity to switch to a main page with selectable variables, you almost inevitably produce large quantities of Duplicate content.

A clean solution for this and similar problems with multiple recurring content is setting canonical tags. While normally a canonical refers to itself (self referencing canonical), it can also refer to another page, for example, the one with the original content, or a page that you define and which should rank accordingly. This way, search engines only index the page named in the canonical tag. Although duplicates continue to exist, they do not appear in the search and are also not taken into account in the crawl budget.

With regard to content, the rule is: Write longer, comprehensive texts if possible, which are well-founded and well-researched. This is one of the most important SEO measures, which is often neglected.

8. SEO measure: Internally link specifically and thematically

Building high-quality backlinks is a topic in itself and can sometimes be very time-consuming. But without any external involvement, you can build up an internal link structure on your site, with which you can strengthen certain pages using meaningful anchor texts. Internal linking is one of the most sustainable SEO measures, not least because there is almost no limit in internal linking – more is indeed more here.

Internal links are strongest when clicked on by as many users as possible. To this end, links should be highlighted as such and stand in the main body or content area of the page, if possible rather at the beginning of the text. A thematic proximity between the linking page and the target page is also important.

Types of anchor texts

Combining different forms of anchor text can indeed be a useful SEO measure to give the impression of naturally set links. For example, it can have a negative impact if you use very many exactly matching anchor texts (“exact match) too often. This is usually spoken of when the anchor text exactly matches the headline (H1) of the target page, with “partial match” this applies partially. You should only rarely use generic anchor text (e.g. “click here”) because this does not refer a relevant keyword to the target page. For “naked links” the website is written out, for a linked image (“image anchor”) special attention should be paid to the alt text.

The most interesting are anchor texts that link to several words from the main body. Since Google's BERT update in 2019, there seems to be a greater focus on natural human language and surrounding context. For links, this could mean that Google pays more attention to the textual environment of a link and is more likely to consider the surrounding words and sentences than before. Google expert John Mueller also explains that more context around the anchor text can indirectly lead to better rankings for the target page. In general, however, Google prioritizes the user experience absolutely. Therefore, the links should provide added value, but at the same time not take over so much that entire sections consist of links.

Another relevant point: The link should not have to compete with too many other links. The rule that a page should have a maximum of 100 internal links is outdated. However, many internal links can be generated by footer links, widgets, and other page elements that might be a burden on the crawl budget. If this gets out of hand and the links are all required, you can think about link masking in this context. More on the SEO measure right at the end.

9. SEO measure: Correctly name speaking URLs and maintain page hierarchy

They still exist in some cases: URLs like www.website/article2133543?%&? for example, which are often automatically generated by the Content Management System (CMS). A speaking URL, however, contains naturally readable terms, which makes a huge difference for usability. When renaming URLs, of course, always make sure to redirect the URLs with a 301 redirect so that as little Linkjuice as possible is lost.

While on the subject of redirects and renaming – a clear page hierarchy or tree structure helps search engines classify individual pages. If this is too confusing or disorganized, you may need to consider restructuring the page. For some Content Management Systems (CMS), for example, overview pages are typically on the same level as the articles below: website.com/seo-rubric and website.com/article-about-seo-measures. Also, unnecessary levels are often generated this way. Although the click depth is more relevant to Google than the URL structure, you should still try to build a clean and understandable site structure. With a breadcrumb trail, an additional navigation scheme, you can display the page structure in a user-friendly and clickable way.

10. SEO measure: Page hygiene – less is sometimes more

How many URLs your site has in total, you can easily find out with various tools like Screaming Frog or Ryte, for example. However, you'll probably find, especially with larger projects, that many pages generate hardly any traffic, are “orphaned” (there are no links to this page) or generally don't provide great added value. This may include paginated pages. Especially when it comes to page 20 of an overview page where articles are previewed. Especially if the number of such pages gets out of hand, you should consider taking them out of the Google Index (index, follow). Fewer, but performing pages, can significantly increase your performance and relieve the crawl budget. So don't be afraid to occasionally take a few pages out of the index after thorough site analysis.

Another aspect of page hygiene are many internal links, which are sometimes generated automatically. Often there are also multiple links from one page to another. Although there is actually no upper limit for internal links, many internal links can lead to the individual link being less valuable. This then also affects your specifically set, thematically relevant links.

Check, therefore, if these pages really need so many internal links (significantly over 250). Certain overview pages, HTML sitemaps, and similar types of pages may need to be, but fewer links should be present on most pages.

One technical option to counteract the diminished link juice due to too many internal links is the link masking using a PRG pattern.

Checklist for the SEO measures

• Define smart SEO goals: Which KPIs do I want to achieve by when and how?
• Holistic keyword research with Latent Semantic Indexing and Entity Salience
• High quality content is king: Holistic, comprehensive texts, which are well-founded and well-researched
• Keep an eye on Page Speed ​​& Core Web Vitals
• EAT – produce trustworthy content
• Use structured data to be found in Rich Snippets and similar questions
• Onpage site optimization with SEO tools
• Counteract duplicate content through Canonicals
• Link specifically and thematically internally
• Internal linking: Optimize anchor texts
• Pay attention to a clean site structure and meaningful speaking URLs
• Use the Breadcrumb Trail
• De-index surplus content