The Climb is tough, but the view from the top is worth it. Isn’t this true? We strive to be at the top every single day. But how do we do that in this dynamic world? There are challenges at every step and innovations happening every moment. Now, just imagine the dynamic world of SEO, which keeps getting complicated day by day. To keep pace with the ever-evolving market, our basic SEO techniques will certainly help you succeed.
Let us first know a little more about SEO before getting into the details of SEO techniques.
What is SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is an important tactic to increase the quality and quantity of traffic to a website organically. SEO helps improve the visibility of a website or web page. To stay on top of the SERPs, one has to adapt and improvise continuously. Also, a lot of factors play a crucial role like,
- Your audience
- Evolving trends
- Changes in technology
- Algorithmic changes
But you can always stay ahead when you have the most fundamental techniques in place. Let us see the 15 basic SEO techniques that will help you generate more traffic & boost up your content in search engines.
Top SEO techniques to generate more traffic
- Who are your customers & what do they want
- Create interestingly useful content
- Create a good website architecture
- Use keywords
- Write a great Meta description
- Go beyond texts and make use of images, audios, videos, infographics
- Create SEO optimized landing pages
- Make your site mobile friendly
- Improve user experience across your site
- Follow the link building method
- Keep track of your competitors
- Update your old content
- Focus on ranking
- Make use of influencer marketing
- Measure your SEO performance
Who are your customers & what do they want
This is one of the basic SEO techniques. Have your target audience in place, be focused on what type of customers you want onboard. Study your audience as in what do they do, what platforms do they mostly use. Find out ways to connect with them. Always read and respond to your customers’ comments.
Social media platforms like Quora and tools like Google Analytics, Buzzsumo can be used to understand your customers’ area of preference, the posts they like, how they respond to it, whether they find it useful for sharing with others. Once you know your customers well, you can answer their queries with relevant content. A happy customer will indeed help you drive more traffic to your website.
Create interestingly useful content
The content that you publish on your website should be fresh, exciting, and worth reading. Your content should be power-packed with easy vocabulary, recent facts, relevant & quality information that will help the users. Anyone visiting your website should have a reason strong enough to stay on the page and glance through the same. The more time they remain on your website, the better it is for your SEO ranking, also called Dwell time. The content should always be at power with the changes happening around. You can always edit an old article or substance as per the latest trend and update it with relevant facts. That will make your post more SEO friendly.
Also, ensure that you publish content with at least 1800 words, based on a study of google search results. Longer content tends to attract a high ranking on Google’s search results, being more informative. Your content has to be exciting and useful to drive traffic to your webpage.
Create a good website architecture
Website architecture is how a website’s pages are structured to deliver a great experience to the visitors. An ideal website architecture should help the visitors and search engine crawlers easily find what they are looking for, indirectly helping with your SEO.
When you have a website that is appealing to the viewers, it automatically becomes attractive to the search engines. Since Google’s algorithm follows information derived from searchers, if your site has poor CTRs and if visitors do not spend much time on your page, then your site will not perform well in the SERPs. A website that is accurate and well organized will attract more traffic and will allow users to stay on your page for a longer duration, thus improving your search ranking.
Use keywords
Using the right keywords will give you better conversions and help increase your ranking. The use of long-tail keywords can be more beneficial. Long-tail keywords are 3-4, precise keyword phrases. They tend to have a high conversion rate, the average being 36%. Being particular, it can attract more organic search traffic to your website. Long-tail keywords offer clarity towards the type of content provided on the site. The customers can easily find you, and you can connect with your customers in a better manner.
Write a great Meta description
A meta description is a snippet of about 155 characters-a tag in HTML, used to summarize a page’s content. A proper meta description offers an edge to your website on Search engine result pages by providing more click-throughs, thus giving a chance to convert first-time viewers into full-time customers. Since meta descriptions show up in the search engine results, they can affect the CTRs, linked to SEO & rankings. The better your meta descriptions, the more clicks you will get. The more clicks you get, the higher your page will rank. A top-ranking usually means more traffic that will eventually get converted into customers and result in profits.
Go beyond texts and make use of images, audios, videos, infographics
An SEO technique you cannot ignore in the present day of digital media. Every day documents can get a little boring. Make your page more responsive by adding images, more so add multimedia elements like audios, videos, graphics. That will improve your user experience, followed by high SEO ranking. Studies say, almost 68% of customers would prefer watching a video to solve their queries rather than reading about it. When you move beyond texts and add multimedia elements, you create an opportunity to pull in viewers to spend more time on your page. If that happens, you will boost up your search ranking.
Create SEO optimized landing pages
A landing page is any webpage where you send visitors to initiate a conversation and close a deal. SEO landing pages are the ones with features appealing to google’s ever-evolving algorithm that decides whether the page is valuable to the searchers or not. They are pages that optimized for search engines. Create helpful landing pages with your offerings to people looking for it, thus attracting more traffic.
Make your site mobile friendly
Mobile devices account for more than half of the website traffic worldwide. As per WARC data, around 72.6% of internet users will access the web through smartphones alone by 2025. That calls in for optimizing your website for mobile devices, a big platform to drive in more traffic.
Google has come up with mobile-first indexing as it recognizes that most of the users access websites from their mobile phones these days. With this, Google now uses the mobile version of a webpage’s content for indexing and ranking. It indicates that Google wants you to prioritize your mobile customers and design your website to be mobile-friendly. Since convenience has always been a driving factor, offering a mobile-friendly site will pull in traffic.
Improve user experience across your site
A search engine like Google always wants to deliver the best results to its users. So it tends to push sites that have high engagement rates up in the SERPs. What you have to do is improve the experience of your website visitors. And that is possible by
- Making your website easy to load
- Writing easily readable posts
- Making use of white spaces, putting in images, audios, and videos
- Designing the site in an organized manner
Have content on your website that is easy, attractive, and useful for the users. Also, ensure that your site attracts viewers and keeps them intact on your page. A happy customer will always drive more traffic.
Follow the link building method
Google gives importance to Link building and says that links are among Google’s top three ranking factors. Link building is a process of creating relationships that will bring visitors back to your site. They play an essential role in the entire SEO dynamics and can improve your site’s search ranking. Backlinks and outbound links both play a vital role in driving traffic to your site.
Keep track of your competitors
A famous saying goes like this, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” It means follow not only what your business partners are involved in but also what your competitors are doing. Keeping a track of your competition will give you a chance to better your ways for your audience. It will even give you an idea as to how the viewers perceive your competitors and will help you stay a step ahead by following viewer feedback on the same.
Update your old content
You need not create new posts now and then, what you can do is modify an older post with recent facts and make it unique again. It will save you a lot of time and effort. Updated content will quickly drive in more traffic. Since Google loves fresh content, you can always update your content with accurate information and republish it on your site. It will increase the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and improve your search traffic.
Make use of influencer marketing
A first impression will always decide the future of your relationship. A good idea will help generate referrals by influencing your customers. Influencer marketing can add to your SEO efforts in a big way. Working with influencers gives you a chance to create backlinks to your site. When these influencers create unique shareable content and link you in, it generates a high-quality backlink for your website, thus healthily improving your site ranking.
Influencers have a significant reach, and they can increase your visibility when they engage with your content and share it. This is one SEO technique with which the scope of your content increases, attracting potential visitors. More visitors or traffic will lead to higher rankings in search engines.
Focus on ranking
With this SEO technique, you can pull users to your site by improving the usability of your website and making it user-friendly. Rankings will not increase. Naturally, you will have to monitor minute details and make changes accordingly to make your way up on the search engines. The more time a visitor spends on your page, the better are your chances on the ranking front. Also, when you rank high on a search engine, it shows that people like your page and finds it useful. Traffic follows eventually.
Measure your SEO performance
SEO is a method to increase website traffic. So, how do you measure its success? You have to perform an SEO audit to measure how your website has been playing by checking,
- Proper use of keywords, well-written headline and meta description
- Quality of your links, backlink
- Mobile traffic
- Time spent on your page
- Bounce rate and the percentage of users exiting your page
- Accessible, attractive & useful readable content
You can always use applications like Quicksprout to analyze your site’s performance and design ways to improve your search traffic. All you have to do is open Quicksprout. Enter your website URL in the box and click on analyze the site. Quicksprout will tell you how exactly you can make relevant changes to your website to increase search traffic. Any performance when well-measured only makes it better.
In a Nutshell
Search engine optimization will always be of importance, even in times to come. So, your website should ideally start with some of these basic SEO techniques and later on, with monitoring the results, checking website traffic and search ranking.
With the help of this, you can validate your SEO strategies, which will eventually help you make your way up in the Google search results. You might even land up in the No.1 position.