How to improve your rankings with actionable SEO suggestions

Here's a dose of reality for you. Gartner predicts that traditional search engine volume will drop by a whopping 25% by 2026, mostly because of AI chatbots and answer engines. This means the old bag of SEO tricks just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

Climbing the search rankings in this new world isn't about finding some secret hack. It’s about a steady, consistent process of putting proven SEO suggestions to work across three key areas: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and AI-driven implementation. Think of it as a flywheel for growth: you implement suggestions, your rankings go up, you get more traffic and data, and that data fuels new insights. It’s a continuous cycle of improvement.

This guide will walk you through actionable tips for each of these pillars. But here’s the thing: having a great strategy is one thing, but actually doing it is where most people get stuck. The biggest bottleneck is almost always creating content. We’ll also get into how an AI-powered tool like the eesel AI blog writer can help you turn those brilliant suggestions into rank-worthy content, without the usual headache.

Understanding SEO suggestions

So, what exactly are "SEO suggestions?" Simply put, they're specific, actionable recommendations to help your website perform better in search engine results. These aren't just random tasks on a to-do list; they're targeted actions based on real data and proven best practices.

You can get these suggestions from a few key places:

• Comprehensive SEO audits: Tools like Ahrefs Webmaster Tools are fantastic for this. They crawl your entire site and flag technical issues, content gaps, and backlink problems that need your attention.

• Search engine tools: Platforms like Google Search Console give you direct feedback from the source. They'll tell you how Google sees your site and where you might be running into trouble.
• Official guidelines: At the end of the day, these suggestions are all rooted in what search engines like Google want to see.

The whole point is to create a website and content that search engines are happy to reward. Google has been very clear about this: they prioritize helpful, people-first content that shows E-E-A-T, which stands for expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Every suggestion is ultimately about boosting one of these signals.

On-page SEO tactics

On-page SEO is all about the optimizations you can make directly on your website. This is your home turf. It’s about making your content more valuable for the people reading it and easier for search engines to understand.

Content and keywords: The foundation of on-page SEO

Great SEO starts with understanding why someone is searching for a particular term. Are they looking for information ("what is SEO?"), comparing options ("eesel AI vs Jasper"), or ready to buy ("best AI blog writer")? Tools like the Semrush Keyword Overview can help you analyze the search results to figure this out. Aligning your content with the right intent is half the battle.

From there, focus on creating helpful, people-first content. Google’s guidance is crystal clear: they reward high-quality, original content. This means your articles need to be comprehensive, unique, and actually answer the user's question completely. No thin, fluffy stuff allowed. For example, at eesel, we applied this exact principle to our own growth. By publishing over 1,000 deeply researched and optimized blog posts, we took our daily impressions from 700 to over 750,000 in just three months.

Your title tags and meta descriptions are your digital storefront. They’re what people see in the search results, and they play a huge role in whether someone clicks on your link or a competitor's. A compelling title can make all the difference.

Don't just dump a wall of text on your readers. A logical structure using H1s, H2s, and H3s makes your content easier to read for humans and helps search engines understand the hierarchy of your information.

And finally, strengthen your internal linking. When you're writing, strategically link to other relevant pages on your own site. This helps users discover more of your great content, passes authority between your pages, and gives Google a roadmap to find and index everything you've published.

The role of technical SEO

Nobody likes a slow website. A slow site frustrates users and hurts your rankings. Google uses a set of metrics called Core Web Vitals to measure user experience. This includes Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures loading performance and should be under 2.5 seconds. It also looks at Interaction to Next Paint (INP) to measure interactivity (aim for under 200 milliseconds) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) to measure visual stability (aim for a score of 0.1 or less).

A mobile-friendly experience is also non-negotiable. Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means it primarily looks at the mobile version of your site for ranking. If your site is clunky or hard to use on a phone, your rankings will suffer.

Also, be mindful of your images. Large images can kill your page speed, so make sure they're compressed. Use descriptive filenames (e.g., on-page-seo-suggestions.jpg instead of IMG_1234.jpg) and fill out the alt text. This helps with accessibility and can get your images ranked in Google Image Search.

Off-page SEO strategies

Off-page SEO covers all the actions you take outside of your own website to improve your rankings. This is all about building your site's reputation and establishing it as an authority in your field.

Building high-quality backlinks

Think of backlinks as votes of confidence. When another reputable website links to your content, they're essentially telling Google, "Hey, this stuff is legit and trustworthy."

The key here is quality over quantity. One link from a major industry publication is worth more than a hundred links from spammy, low-quality directories. Focus on earning links from sites that are relevant and authoritative in your niche.

When you're not at the top of the search engines, the reason is because you don't have enough authority most of the time. There is a tiny chance you have a penalty or a technical error. The answer to your question is getting backlinks from authoritative websites.

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Establishing your brand presence

Even when a site mentions your brand without linking to you, it still counts. These unlinked mentions contribute to your overall authority and signal to Google that you're a real, established entity.

Being active on platforms where your audience hangs out, like LinkedIn, X, or Reddit, can also be a great way to get your content discovered. Sharing your articles can lead to social shares, engagement, and sometimes, natural backlinks. Plus, real discussions in forums can give you incredible, authentic insights to add to your content.

Ultimately, all these off-page signals, including backlinks, social shares, and brand mentions, work together to build your website's overall authority, which is a massive factor in how well you rank.

Using AI to implement SEO suggestions

Okay, so you have a list of SEO suggestions. Now what? Manually acting on every single one, especially when it comes to content, is painfully slow and incredibly hard to scale. This is where modern AI tools come in, but not all AI is created equal.

Over a decade of experience on the content side here and I'd say what AI does well is giving you a rough draft to sculpt. It doesn't give you the sculpture, but it does make it so you don't need to waste so much clay. What I've found is that experienced copywriters using these tools are blowing past the competition trying to rely on copying and pasting from Claude or Chat. Using SEO knowledge and copywriting experience AND AI is where things level up.

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Comparing general vs. specialized AI tools

General AI chatbots like ChatGPT are useful for brainstorming and creating outlines, but for content intended to rank, it's important to understand their characteristics.

• Focus on summarization: General AI tools often summarize what's already on the first page of Google. They may not add unique value or insight without specific, detailed prompting, which runs counter to Google's guidelines for helpful content.
• Requires fact-checking: OpenAI itself notes that ChatGPT can write "plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers." This means you have to spend time fact-checking everything, which can slow down the content creation process.
• Lacks inherent brand context: The output is generic by default. You'll have to perform heavy editing to make it match your brand's voice and determine how to naturally mention your own products.
• Generates text only: You get a block of text. All the images, infographics, tables, and video embeds must be created or sourced manually.

The eesel AI blog writer advantage

This is where a specialized tool makes all the difference. The eesel AI blog writer isn't just a text drafter; it's a complete content generation platform designed specifically for SEO.

• Context-aware research: Instead of just summarizing, it actually understands search intent. If you're writing a comparison post, it pulls pricing data. If it's a guide, it finds technical specs. This leads to deeply researched content, not just shallow filler.
• Automatic assets and media: This is a huge time-saver. It automatically generates AI images and tables and even finds and embeds relevant YouTube videos to make your posts more engaging.
• Authentic social proof: It can pull real, relevant quotes from Reddit threads and weave them into your article. This adds a layer of human credibility and authenticity that other tools simply can't replicate.
• Built-in optimization for SEO and AEO: The content is structured for traditional SEO from the ground up. But it's also optimized for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), creating clear, concise answers that are perfect for being featured in things like Google's AI Overviews.

A modern content workflow

With the right tool, the workflow for acting on a content suggestion becomes incredibly streamlined.

1. Identify a content suggestion: Let's say your audit tells you to target the keyword "how to improve rankings with SEO suggestions."
2. Use the eesel AI blog writer: Instead of opening a blank document, you open the dashboard.
3. Enter your keyword and website URL: This gives the AI the topic and the context of your brand.
4. Generate a complete blog post: In minutes, you get a full, publish-ready article complete with deep research, AI-generated assets, media embeds, and social proof.
5. Review, add your expertise, and publish: The heavy lifting is done. You just need to read it over, add your own unique insights, and hit publish.
6. Monitor rankings and traffic: Watch the results roll in and feed that data back into your next round of suggestions.

For a more detailed look at how to implement these strategies, check out the video below. It offers ten practical tips you can start using today to see a real impact on your website's performance.

This video from WordPress offers ten practical tips you can implement to improve your SEO rankings.

Your next steps to improve rankings

Improving your search rankings in 2026 isn't about magic bullets. It's about consistency. It comes down to nailing your on-page fundamentals, strategically building off-page authority, and, most importantly, having an efficient way to execute.

The biggest bottleneck for SEO has always been creating high-quality content at scale. While general AI tools can assist, they often require significant editing. True success comes from using a specialized, context-aware AI platform that transforms your workflow from a manual grind into a streamlined process.

Stop letting content creation slow you down. See for yourself how a purpose-built AI can turn your SEO suggestions into published, rank-worthy content in a fraction of the time.

Generate your first publish-ready blog for free