Improve your search traffic twofold with these 10 SEO techniques
Did you know almost 80% of your website’s traffic gets initiated by a search query? If not, it’s time to take note and focus on search engine optimization (SEO). From knowing what works and what not to attracting your audience’s attention and entice them into landing on your website, it takes a lot of homework and experimentation to fine tune your SEO techniques. Since search engine algorithms are constantly updated, it’s important to stay on top of the changes and latest news to tweak your SEO strategy accordingly. If you want to double your search traffic, these 10 techniques would help:
- Fix the basic glitches with a complete SEO audit: In your hurry to build a website and make it go live, you may often forget certain basic on-page SEO elements like page titles, meta descriptions, keywords etc. A complete audit will not only help you find such glitches and fix them, but even let you know if your website content is SEO-optimized and formatted properly (using h1 and h2 tags for headlines, making important points italicized or bold, having call-to actions or CTA s etc).
- Optimize your url: The key here is to keep things as simple as possible. Remember to use only readable urls because if humans can’t read or understand your urls, neither would the search engines. Avoid using capital letters in urls (which may cause confusion both for human readers and search engine crawlers) and put hyphens (and not underscores) between words. Don’t forget to add your target keywords in urls because they help search engines better direct users to relevant content. In case there are changes in your urls, use 301 rankings so that you don’t end up losing your search engine rankings.
- Focus on long-tail keywords: Short-tail keywords are the most competitive ones, which makes it almost impossible to rank higher for them. The key is to focus on descriptive, long-tail keywords that are relevant to your target visitors’ or customers’ specific needs or problems. Don’t forget using conversational keywords to optimize your site content as they are becoming more important with the rise of voice search these days.
- Ensure mobile friendliness: With the growing number of mobile users who do almost everything from searching to browsing websites on their mobile devices, search engines have started ranking mobile-friendly websites higher over their non-mobile friendly counterparts. In case your website isn’t yet mobile-friendly, do it now to get prioritized by various search engines.
- Make authoritative pages work for you: Find your most visited or authoritative pages using online tools like Google Analytics or Ahrefs Site Explorer. Next, place internal links to your landing page (that may need a traffic boost) from these highly visited pages. This way, people coming to these pages would be encouraged to pay a visit to your landing page as well.
- Focus on high quality content: Get into the habit of surfing social media sites (Quora, Facebook, LinkedIn etc) to find what people are asking about or looking for? This will give you some topic ideas about your new blog post or web content. Remember – people are always looking for a fresh take on an old concept, or interesting news that’s relevant to their problems or interests. So, find what people need or are interested in and then plan your content. In-depth, high-quality and well-researched content (typically around 2000 words) may take time to produce but with a regular routine, you will start offering value to your readers, which in turn would improve your web traffic twofold or even more.
- Focus on quality for your backlinks: During your linkbuilding effort, emphasize on quality, not quantity. Rather than having a few dozen backlinks from non-relevant or dubious sites, having a handful of backlinks from reputed, authoritative sites would do much more for your web traffic. You should also remember to diversify your link profile. The more deep or diverse links point to your content, the more will the search engines get inclined to believe your efforts toward ensuring your website having a natural profile. So, though you may have most of your links from one type of webpage, it shouldn’t be your solitary source of backlinks. Invest time and effort to build a strong link profile where your backlinks are coming from authority sources, especially those with a diverse profile.
- Write guest posts with backlink from the body of your piece: Many will say guest posting is said and thanks to crappy sites and those that publish anything and everything, guest posts may not help if you aren’t careful. Even getting backlinks from author-bio (as is the norm in most guest posts) won’t help since such links are devalued by Google. So, your job is to find authority and popular sites, come up with post ideas that are relevant to them and give them an interesting snippet that adds value to their site/blog. Get them to accept your guest post idea and negotiate a backlink from the body of your piece. This will help you direct a notable percentage of such blog/website readers to land on your own website/blog.
- Learn from your competitors: Analyze your competitors to know what keywords they are ranking for, the sources from which they are getting backlinks, posts that are doing extremely well etc. Tweak them to suit your needs and make the most of such information. This is a smart way to score one up on your competitor and give your traffic a sizable boost.
- Make your presence felt on social media: Social networking sites can play a key role in improving your web traffic significantly. Share interesting, clickable, actionable content with your social media followers and fans and ask clearly what you want them to do (share, retweet, post comments or give likes etc). When you know what your readers want and share content matching their needs, or interests, your chances of clicks and shares increase, which in turn would give a huge boost to your organic traffic.
Increasing your web traffic twofold is no child’s play. You need to make a persistent effort with some smart planning and execution while using a combination of basic and advanced SEO strategies to make it work.
