There is no such thing as a magical formula to increase your website’s organic traffic fast. The truth is, search engine algorithms, customer behavior, and tools are constantly evolving. The safest way to keep up with the ever-changing updates is with a solid SEO strategy.
SEO is pretty much not dead (regardless of what your LinkedIn feed is screaming at you). You can still increase your traffic to your website by ranking higher on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). What’s more, cool new trends like Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) are gaining momentum…but surprise, surprise! They are still based on SEO ground rules. Understand the differences between SEO, AEO, and GEO in this guide
Continue scrolling to learn some SEO best practices anyone could do to keep your site ranking nice and high on the SERPs.
Why is SEO important for traffic?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an organic method that helps increase your organic traffic making your content easier to find by search engines and users. Ranking high on the SERPs puts your website in the spotlight. It grants it maximum visibility and turns your site into a top destination for organic clicks and visits.
How to optimize your website’s SEO for growing your traffic
There are several tactics you could use to optimize your site to its full splendor. In this article, we are going to break down the most relevant SEO actionable steps to help your pages rank at top of the SERPs.
For context, SEO can be categorized in 3 different areas:
- On-Page SEO: It is a series of techniques to SEO optimize the pages of your own website and your content.
- Off-Page SEO: Consists of the strategies you can do outside of your website to enhance your ranking on the SERPs
- Technical SEO: This is the process of making technical improvements on your website to help search engines do their thing, like crawling, indexing and finding your website.
Each of these 3 categories plays a role in determining your website’s content quality and user experience. Here’s what you can do to nail each one of them and improve your website’s SEO.
Improve your On-Page SEO
Everything is in the details! As a Publisher, you already make great content, so the next step is to optimize it for the SERPS. This is what you can improve:
Use the right keywords
Keywords are the search terms users write when they are looking for something in search engines. Use the right keywords that describe your content best. Select targeted keywords relevant to your audience and place them strategically in your content.
Optimize the SEO Title Tag
Le title tag is a HTML element that helps the search engines understand what your website is all about. This is the clickable headline users will see in the SERP when browsing online. Make sure it is brief (about 50-60 characters), engaging and optimized with the keywords we mentioned above.
Write clear and engaging meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are like a sneak peek of your content. They are brief snippets that are displayed underneath the SEO Title in the search engine result page that that summarize the content of your webpage. These little previews allows users and search engines to get a better grasp of the main focus of your content and contribute to a better click-through-rate.
Structure your content with proper headings
Headings are yet another HTML element on your site that helps search engines and users comprehend your content structure. Apply the correct SEO heading hierarchy, starting with one main H1 per page, followed by H2, H3s and so on to organize the content. This great practice makes navigation much smoother for your users and your content easier to find. Just don’t forget about the keywords here as well!
Add alt texts to images
As the name suggests, alternative texts or alt texts for short, are hidden descriptions you can add to images. This feature allows search engines and visually impaired users who use screen readers to to know what’s on the images you have on your site. Google rewards accessibility so (as a pro-tip) don’t skip the alt texts ever!
Refine your URLs with keywords
Here’s another chance to apply those helpful keywords for users to find you even easier. The URL is your webpage’s address. The last part of this address that comes right after the slash is called the slug. You can edit this slug to describe your content. It should be short and include a relevant keyword. For example: refinery89.com/how-to-increase-organic-traffic/
Set up a smart internal linking strategy
Develop a coherent internal linking strategy to make your site super easy to navigate. Make sure the links between your pages actually make sense. This not only helps your visitors find what they’re looking for but also helps search engines figure out your site’s structure. Extra points in user experience and ranking!
Work on a link building strategy to perfect your Off-Page SEO
High-quality, inbound links to your site act as endorsements in the eyes of search engines. These are called backlinks, which are like back doors to enter your website from another place. A healthy scoop of backlinks from reputable sites is precious since it contributes to building your domain authority.
You can get backlinks by continuing creating great content that others content creators want to refer to or by reaching out to other sites with a decent domain authority score for collaboration. Also, you can track back toxic links that are hurting your site and disavow them for good. Tools like SEMRush come in handy to review all your backlinks and get rid of the pesky ones in a snap.
Run an audit to check your Technical SEO
This is where it might get a bit trickier, but doable! Performing regular technical SEO audits is essential. These audits help detect problems such as broken links, slow page speed, or crawl errors. Tools like SEMrush or Screaming Frog are useful for spotting these issues. Fixing them makes it easier for search engines to properly index your website. Here are some best practices to keep in mind:
- Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console for Mr. Google to index your website more efficiently.
- Run healthy checkups of your Core Web Vitals to get a diagnosis of your site’s user experience (You can review our full guide on Core Web Vitals to learn more on this).
- Improve your site speed using tools like PageSpeed Insights to get suggestions on what to fix.
- Optimize your website for mobile so anyone can enjoy your site from any device!
Ready to start generating more organic traffic?
Optimizing your website for high organic search traffic doesn’t happen overnight, but your site will thank you for it in the long term. Having a solid SEO base on your website will help reduce vulnerability when changes hit. It’s very important to keep being informed on how search engines, algorithms and even the audiences evolve so you can optimize your strategy accordingly.
Lots of high-quality traffic is a key ingredient in efficiently monetizing your website. The more organic traffic to your site you have, the more attractive your website will be for ad placement. If you are looking for ad monetization solutions that won’t impact your SEO, check our Single Tag!
