What SEO hacks have worked the best for you? 🔥

If you're doing the basics w/r/t comprehensive content, growing semantic relevancy, and answering user questions, the most overlooked (and testable!) aspects of the Google algorithm are CTR and site speed.

Google's product is the search page. If people see your listing and don't click on it, Google takes that as a negative signal. Add schema code. Experiment with meta descriptions. They don't directly have a ranking impact, but a more compelling description that gets a higher CTR will help.

Same with site speed -- there are studies about how many more people give up with every half second of load time. Mobile first indexing also puts a priority on speed. If someone clicks on your result and immediately returns to the SERP, that's taken as a negative signal as well. Google wants to serve results that make users happy. Google's tool (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) is one of many that they use, but it's a good start.

If you want a real dive into what Google looks at, they post their manual review guidelines. The most recent update was in December: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

Building topic authority by making each and every page as comprehensive as possible and building as many of them as possible.

Also, internal linking anchor text optimisation works well.

Lastly, adding FAQ schema where appropriate results in ~3% ctr improvement ... which can improve visibility too

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/code-blog-has-reached-11k-organic-visits-monthly-98c9d963f7

Not exactly a hack but something quite useful: quickly pushing sites into the Google index

After writing a new piece of content, search for the URL in the Google Search Console. If it is not in the index yet, you can tell Google to crawl & submit the site. It will also show you if there are issues that prevent indexing like a noindex tag.