Building a functioning website can take a lot of time and resources. However, with a bit of patience and with the right approach, you can create a great-looking website that highlights all your brand’s best qualities.
However, there’s just one problem. Once you’ve gone through the trouble of building a great website, how are you going to get more people to view it? Unfortunately, this is where many people hit a roadblock.
The answer is to have a sustainable SEO strategy in place that considers how Google has developed and improved over the years, as well as what its web crawlers are looking for when it comes to creating great user experiences.
Below, we’ll go over 10 practical tips you can follow to optimize your site for both users and search engines, helping you to rank your pages faster and drive more organic web traffic.
1. Building an SEO Strategy That Scales
Increasing your web traffic effectively all starts with understanding where your site’s strengths and weaknesses currently are. To find this out, conduct a thorough SEO audit and see how your site compares against industry benchmarks established by Google and third-party SEO tools like Semrush or Moz.
While tracking your own site metrics is essential, you should also compare them with your competitors. See what they’re doing and how they’re ranking their own content. Taking this approach can often reveal helpful insights that point to areas of your site needing improvement.
2. Mastering Keyword Research for Traffic Growth
Keyword research has always been an important part of knowing where and how to create content for your users. However, you don’t want to only focus on targeting the highest traffic keywords, thinking they’ll lead to a large amount of web traffic overnight.
Because of how competitive most shorter keywords and phrases are, you’re likely not to rank well or even at all when trying to target them. Instead, use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Google Keyword Planner to narrow down your search to less competitive, but still active keywords. This will help you build a foundation of low-to-medium traffic terms that add up over time.
3. Publishing High-Quality, Authoritative Content
Although keyword research is important, it shouldn’t drive every aspect of your content development strategy. It’s much more effective to focus on creating high-quality, helpful information for your users. You can do this by building topical authority on your site.
To gain more topical authority, you want to build content pages around a central theme or subject and branch off into similar supporting topics. For example, if you wanted to be an authority on “motorcycles”, you would want to construct a content cluster model around that term.
In this case, you would create a primary pillar page that paints an overview of all the essential elements surrounding motorcycles, while linking out to separate topics that go into a deeper dive into areas like engine repairs, riding accessories, top models, etc. All of these interlinking subtopics help to prove you're an authority on the topic, which in turn benefits your SEO.
4. Updating and Optimizing Existing Content
If you’re looking to increase your web traffic, you might think you need to constantly add new content pages to your site. While this is one way to increase your chances of ranking for new keywords, you don’t want to neglect the content you’ve already created.
You can always revisit older, outdated content and freshen it up to improve your rankings. This could include adding new information, updating your metadata, incorporating interactive elements like videos or infographics, or making other changes to improve the user experience on your site.
5. Optimizing On-Page SEO Elements
There are a variety of on-page SEO elements you should focus on improving over time. For example, your title tags and meta descriptions for each page of content can really help to increase your click-through rates when optimized correctly. Make sure you’re incorporating your keywords whenever possible during this process.
Another place to look for areas of improvement is your content structure. You want to make sure all your content is designed to follow a specific hierarchy. This can be established by using H1-H3 headers, including bullet points and numbered lists, or adding a “key takeaways” section at the beginning or end of your content.
6. Enhancing User Experience (UX) for Better Engagement
Most people visit websites on their mobile devices. Google knows this and wants to ensure that the websites it points users to are designed to be mobile-friendly and responsive.
Because of this, you should ensure that you run performance tests on your site to see how it loads and renders when compared to desktop applications. Your goal should be to create a seamless browsing experience regardless of the size of the screen on which visitors access your site.
7. Building High-Quality Backlinks
Not all of your SEO efforts should be focused on what’s on your site. While this is important, your off-site SEO can also play a key role in how well your pages rank and how much traffic the site brings in each month.
One critical off-site SEO strategy is to manage and optimize your backlink profile. Backlinks are links published on other websites that point back to your own. These links, especially those on high-authority domains, tell Google’s crawlers that your site is credible and worth directing web traffic to.
You can acquire more quality backlinks by implementing an outreach program where you connect with like-minded brands or online resources and offer them valuable content in exchange for a link back to your site.
8. Leveraging Content Marketing and Distribution
Simply waiting for users to stumble across your content pages after you publish them often doesn’t yield great results. The more active you are in promoting and distributing that content to other digital sources, the better your site visibility and traffic will be.
Whenever creating a new blog post or article, think about all the different platforms you can share this content on. Social media platforms, video-sharing sites, and email subscribers are all great places to start when helping to get more eyes and ears on the content you create.
9. Staying Ahead of Algorithm Changes
It’s important to remember that Google is always changing how it evaluates and ranks website content. Because of this, it’s critical that you always stay up-to-date with the latest industry changes or disruptive technologies that impact how users find new information online.
The best defense is a good offense in this regard. If you consistently focus on the fundamentals - such as creating original, high-quality content and providing a great user experience - you’ll likely be well-positioned to weather any changes as they arise.
10. Measuring and Tracking SEO Performance
One of the most essential elements to keeping your SEO efforts relevant and practical over time is to monitor your ranking performance closely. If you’re not regularly tracking where your content is positioned online, you won’t have an accurate gauge of whether the tactics you’re implementing are really working.
The great news is that there’s a significant amount of free and paid resources you can use to tackle this process. A good place to start is by using Google Analytics to understand better where your traffic is coming from and how users are interacting with your site.
You can also leverage other platforms like Screaming Frog, Surfer, and Moz to provide helpful dashboards and access to updated search rankings, helping you gain more perspective on your site metrics and how to improve them.
In Summary
Building a great-looking website is essential, but getting traffic to it takes dedicated efforts and a well-balanced SEO strategy. By following the tips provided, you’ll gradually increase the visibility of your content, giving you more opportunities to attract site visitors and convert them into customers.