SEO Techniques: Tips to Help Increase Your Search Traffic

SEO is a very intricate, involved and sometimes tricky method of adapting your online work – to work for you. While it does take SEO a while to start working – there are plenty of ways to increase your search traffic by making minimal changes to your existing pages and posts, improving future posts as well as maximising your website traffic with little-known tricks.

Thanks to one of the greatest SEO marketers, Neil Patel, we’ve shared some of the most useful techniques to getting your website traffic increased and turning SEO into an aspect of your business that works for you:

What SEO Techniques Increase Traffic?

Conduct a Website SEO Audit: Make Sure Your Posts Are Optimised

A great recommended website that will crawl your website is QuickSprout. They will audit each of your pages, and alert you to any issues that may be preventing you from ranking the way you should be. It will alert you to issues such as page titles (H1 Headers), Meta Descriptions, Subheadings (H2 and H3 Headers) and URL length issues. These can then be rectified according to their suggestions for better SEO.

Use Off-Page SEO Techniques to Garner Traffic Actively

• Use social media platforms like Quora
• See your most popular pages in Google Analytics
• See what posts get the most shares
• Listen to visitor comments on your blog posts

This will allow you to actively answer questions by means of blog posts or articles; you can answer real questions, used by real people to get ahead in providing them with answers that you are 100% sure there is a demand for.

Create Landing Pages that are fully SEO Optimised

Not all SEO needs to be conducted through posts; a well optimised landing page will direct users to your website, and allow you to garner the information you want to make them a lead. Using non-navigable landing pages will allow the user to not be overwhelmed with options, and will not require them to navigate to find a way to submit their query to you.

Using the right keywords, having a contact form that is easily understood and navigable and adding a pop-up form are sure-fire ways to engage website visitors and prompt them to leave their details with you.

Neil Patel has given us the anatomy of a perfect landing page as below:

Ensure Your Website is Mobile Friendly

60% of all searches are conducted from a mobile device; having a website that takes too long to load pages, loads pages incorrectly or poorly and is not user friendly for the mobile user is a guaranteed way to increase your bounce rate. Users loose patience after about 15 seconds, if they cannot find what they are looking for. Try using your website from your own phone to see what snags you may encounter, and make immediate fixes to those.

Use this tool to determine if your website is mobile-friendly.

Here is a quick example of how a well-designed mobile site might look:

Ensure Your Blogs and Articles Meet The Minimum Suggested Word Count

The infographic below demonstrates how longer word-count articles rank higher in Google’s search results, in line with White Hat SEO practices. Meeting this word count is the simplest way to improve your online articles.

Promote Your Content On Social Media

Having a business page linked to your website and e-commerce store allows for a far greater audience reach, without much effort. Sharing your blog posts will not only increase traffic to your website, it’s a great way to engage an already interested audience in your topic. You can garner comments and reactions to see how you can improve the article, feedback to see if users enjoyed reading it – as well as open the door for questions you can answer in future blog posts.

Optimise Each Blog – Fully

Optimising your blog means you have seen to each and every one of these guidelines:

• You’ve chosen a keyword and used it in your article heading, in the meta description and SEO title, and within the first paragraph of your blog. The reader knows immediately what the article contains, so any user who stays on the page is likely to become a lead or at least engage by having their question answered.
• You have used the coding-end of your publishing program to attribute H1, H2 and H3 headers to your article. This is the only way Google will know what you are writing about.
• Your images all have the each keyword you have used and are trying to rank for, as the Image ALT text. The image will then be associated with your article and draw in even more traffic.
• You have quality backlinks – to your own website. Whether it’s a related article, an article of interest or even an article that expands on a topic that you might only have touched on in your current blog, linking back to yourself allows users to continue “clicking” and decrease your bounce rate – and improve your Click-Through-Rate.
• Link to external sites who are trustworthy and hold a high domain authority; this allows users to feel safe and trust you – and may open the door to a reciprocated link.
• Monitor, monitor, monitor. If you are writing excellent blog posts, but you are not tracking them by means of Google analytics and site-crawl programs like MOZ – your efforts are unfortunately going to be in vain. Without tangible metrics, your work may be great but you would never know it!

Fix Your Broken Links and Redirects

Your website audit may have brought up some pages that contain dead links and poor redirects; fixing these is as simple as finding an alternative link to replace broken or expired links with – or remove the broken link entirely. Redirects should work instantly, so if there is any lag or no redirect at all – rectifying this will allow Google to start ranking that page again and bringing in more traffic.

Use Keywords Your Competitors Are Also Using

There is no harm in aiming to create more updated, relevant and engaging articles than your competitor; be careful you don’t write work that is too similar  without proper accreditation.

Update Old Content

Content that was previously published should be updated regularly; you have the page optimised and ranked – but updates with new dates, prices etc. will rank higher in Google’s search results. The risk reward ratio on this is incredible!

If you would like to have your page ranking higher without doing the hard work yourself – get in touch with us today by clicking here!

h/t to Neil Patel for the information sourced for this article!

Cover Image Credit: ALI