Companies invest lots of resources in search engine optimization (SEO) to increase their website’s visibility by incorporating Google’s algorithms to give the best traffic results.

These algorithms are based on many factors, such as the nature of the query, page usability, relevance, geo-location, source expertise and settings.

Considering these five factors, we discuss the top white-hat SEO techniques you should incorporate into your SEO strategy.

Enhance Your Page Experience

It is one of the most important white hat SEO techniques companies employ. Google’s definition of page experience is defined by the set of rules that take into account how users interact with a specific webpage. These measurement tools go far beyond the fundamental information value.

It uses Core Web Vitals, which measures page loading performance, visual stability and interactivity based on a set of metrics. Furthermore, it also takes into account mobile-friendliness, intrusive interstitial guidelines and HTTPS.

Page experience carries a lot of weightage, where several pages may satisfy the search criteria for relevance.

A webpage that has less relevance but delivers a better page experience is still beaten by a webpage that provides high-demand information.

To cut a long story short, page experience acts as a tiebreaker between different SEO factors.

Ensure the Website Is Mobile-Friendly

Using the mobile-first approach in your SEO strategy is very important. According to a survey, there are about 5.32 billion mobile phone users globally. Therefore, if you are not putting substantial effort into your mobile phone users, you are missing a massive part of your business.

Since the time Google released its mobile-first indexing factors in 2020, making sure the mobile-friendliness of your website has become an extremely important reason to rank on the search engine. You can use tools like Mobile-Friendly Test to analyze if your website is easy-to-use for mobile users in the eyes of Google.

Google will report all the mobile issues there, so you can take appropriate actions to overcome those issues.

Mobile-friendliness of websites has taken importance like never before; Google is all-in on mobile. This is why we consider it an essential white-hat SEO technique.

Keyword Research Is Still Important

Yes, you heard it right. Keyword research is still essential to increase SEO ranking and search traffic.

Google does not provide such a tool where you can conduct keyword research for your website. So, third-party applications like Ahrefs and Semrush come as saviors.

Nevertheless, the mechanism of conducting keyword research and performing actions using this research has changed over time, and the credit goes to RankBrain and BERT.

RankBrain uses machine learning at its core to conduct keyword operations. It helps Google put things in context instead of exclusively relying on metadata strings. Google now understands the language techniques used, such as synonyms, stemming and answers.

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is a transformer-based machine learning approach for natural language processing (NLP) developed by Google.

The main objective is to provide better search results for more conversational and longer searches where words like “for” and “to” impact the context of a search query.

During the launch of BERT in October 2019, Google forecasted that it would impact 10 percent of all searches in the United States.

The new era of keyword tools takes this mechanism into consideration by generating relevant data like Keyword Groups, Parent Topics, and Search Intent. Users can develop contextually relevant content using this information.

Pay Attention to On-Page Optimization

Succeeding in organic search traffic requires a combination of multiple factors, such as off-page SEO, on-page SEO and technical SEO.

On-page SEO is one of the essential ingredients in a successful SEO strategy recipe. This white hat SEO technique can not be ignored at any cost. Building a solid backlink profile means nothing if you do not pay attention to on-page optimization.

Google itself offers a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, an excellent resource for everyone looking to increase their chances of appearing on the search engine results page (SERP).

This guide covers the critical on-page features, including the best practices that you can use for optimization, which might include:

• Page titles
• Meta descriptions
• Headers
• Image alt-text
• Page URLs
• Structured markup
• Internal Linking

Claim Your Business Listing

Google Business profile, previously known as Google listing, is a free business listing platform.

In this white hat SEO technique, you can create a business profile on Google listing if you have a physical location. This way, you can enjoy the benefits of appearing in Google Maps, Google Search and Google Shopping.

Some primary benefits that you get by creating your business profile on Google listing are as follows:

 1. It’s FREE advertising – economical than paid search and quicker than SEO.

2. Google Maps can favor geographically relevant businesses.

3. A profile that is well-optimized will create a better first impression.

4. It gives the ability to review profile performance and get insights.

5. You can build trust with a good star rating. Moreover, it provides social proof.

Focus On User Experience

Google has always encouraged webmasters to provide a better user experience.

As Google algorithms are getting smarter, the websites that emphasize providing a better user experience receives the benefit. A good user experience (UX) goes way beyond writing clean code.

The main target of UX design in business should be enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty through ease of use, utility and pleasure provided in the interaction with the website or app.

Giving a positive UX is one of the white hat SEO techniques which many people do not pay attention to.

Have a Well-Rounded Content Marketing Plan

According to a report by Content Marketing Institute, 51 percent of correspondents say that capturing the audience’s attention has become very difficult compared to previous years.

Content is one of the top Google ranking factors. High-quality content is significant to getting high search traffic to your website. Great content comes in many forms. A well-planned content should include the following form of content in their plan:

• Blogs/articles
• Podcast
• Video blogs (vlogs)
• Infographics
• Images
• SlideShare presentations

There is a very high opportunity for those willing to invest in this white hat SEO technique.

Also, everyone talks about producing high-quality content. But what exactly is great content?

The answer is curating the valuable content, finding the relevant user and then targeting that audience with the content. This is how you provide value addition to your audience with your piece of content.

A famous formula for creative and engaging content is:

Useful x Enjoyable x Inspired = Innovative Content

Read More: How to Write High-Quality Content in 2022

Link Building Supercharges All Other Efforts

Having a solid backlink profile is still important as it was ever before. The day may come when link building will affect less in ranking, but the day has not arrived yet. The critical point to remember is to get the right kind of links.

Links should have the following features in them:

• Relevance to your website
• Require a human editorial review
• Kinds of links that are earned

Another way to earn relevant links is to build a resource center. You can work on any kind of website with a good resource center. Furthermore, a resource center helps to build authority and trust.

Include Descriptive URLs 

Search engines pay attention to URL structure to identify what this web page content is about. Therefore, URLs should be precise and short. They should convey exactly what you want to communicate with your web pages.

Moreover, you can easily incorporate this white hat SEO technique into your strategy with less effort. All you have to do is smartly create the web page URL if you want it to rank in SERPs.

Ensure To Optimize Images

Many websites don’t pay attention to image optimization, which is a shame. Search engines cannot see pictures the way we see them. So, using alt tags to tell the search engines what this image is about is crucial. So using descriptive alt tags enriched with keywords can help Google algorithms better understand the context of the image, which ultimately leads your website to rank in SERP rankings.

Bottom Line

The key to getting high organic search traffic and rank on the search engine results pages (SERPs) is to keep yourself updated with the latest Google algorithm updates.

The article above discusses the most important white hat SEO techniques that you can use to get a competitive edge in the industry by ranking higher.

An effective SEO strategy is a combination of all of the above-mentioned tips and techniques. You just can’t get successful by building a solid backlink profile and leaving on-page SEO behind. Similarly, it goes the other way. Getting high search traffic and ranking is not a piece of cake and requires an ongoing effort.