In this article, we’ll learn ten actionable and effective SEO tips that help you increase organic traffic.
Most of the tips below apply to any website, although some are specific. Even if you implement one or two of them, you’ll see an improvement in your SEO.
Choose the right keywords
Your website can only generate organic traffic if it ranks on Google for some keywords. This is why choosing the right keywords is the foundation of a successful SEO strategy.
A keyword has three main characteristics: keyword intent, search volume, and keyword difficulty.
First, you should check if the chosen keyword has the correct search intent (informational, commercial, navigational, or transactional).
Second, try to find keywords with high search volume and low keyword difficulty. If you choose overly difficult keywords, you may spend too much time and effort on SEO, but not achieve high rankings.
Sometimes it’s better to rank for keywords that have lower search volume but are more relevant to your business.
Take a look at the following example:
Keywords marked in green are a better choice because they have lower difficulty and still have good search volume.
You can use this free tool from Ahrefs for keyword research.
Include related keywords in your content
To get a high ranking for a chosen keyword, it’s not enough to just include it everywhere on the page. You need to use semantically related keywords on the page.
When you use semantically related words and synonyms of your target keyword, you help search engines understand your content better. Google uses its language knowledge to figure out how words and concepts connect.
Some tools can help you find semantically related keywords, such as SEO Writing Assistant from SEMrush. These tools analyze search results and suggest relevant terms to enrich your content:
Optimize titles and meta descriptions
The title and meta description represent a page in search results. They are also displayed when you share a page on social media.
Well-designed titles and meta descriptions may help to increase the CTR, which results in more organic traffic.
A good title and meta description accurately describe what the page is about and relate to the page’s content:
This is one of the simplest SEO tips and doesn’t take long to implement. Learn how to optimize titles and meta descriptions.
Improve Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are three metrics that determine how good a page is in terms of loading time, interactivity, and visual stability.
Core Web Vitals act as a kind of “tie-breaker” in ranking. When several pages have equally good content, the page with good Core Web Vitals will get a ranking boost.
You can check your Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console:
This SEO tip may seem like a difficult task, but this is not always the case. If your site runs on WordPress, you can improve Core Web Vitals even without coding skills.
Leverage internal links
Internal links determine site architecture and help users navigate through the site. You can use internal links to improve the SEO of the necessary pages.
A page with high authority can pass on some of its authority to other pages via internal links. This is also known as “link equity” or “link juice”.
So if you want to improve SEO for a given page, add internal links to this page from other more “authoritative” pages of your site.
When creating internal links, remember about link text (or anchor text) – the clickable text over the hyperlink. It should be relevant to the linked page and not generic.
Finally, if you have any paid or affiliate links, add the rel=sponsored or rel=nofollow attribute to them.
Eliminate low-value pages on the site
Your site may have a large number of low-value pages. Examples of such pages are internal search results, various archive and tag URLs, duplicate pages, etc.
Low-value pages are often generated automatically by a content management system, and you may not even realize they exist.
Fixing low-value pages will help to improve the search visibility of your high-quality content. It’s like with a tree – if you want it to bloom, you need to cut off the old branches.
To check if you have low-value pages, open the “Page indexing” report in Search Console. When the number of indexed pages is much higher than the number of submitted pages in a sitemap, it may indicate that your website contains many low-value pages.
There is no universal advice for fixing low-value content. The most typical techniques for eliminating low-value content include:
- adding the ‘
noindex‘ meta tag; - canonicalization (usually used for duplicate content);
- redirect or simply remove it from the website.
Optimize pages that already rank #11-20
Your site may have pages that already rank #11-20 for your target keywords. But the vast majority of organic traffic goes to pages that are in the top 10.
You can find pages that rank #11-20 in Google Search Console. Open the “Performance” report, select “Pages”, and then sort them by average position.
Find pages that have a large number of impressions but a low number of clicks. They likely rank #11-20 (or lower) in Google for your target keywords.
You can optimize such pages to be in the top 10 or ideally in the top 5. This will greatly increase organic traffic to these pages.
Fix broken backlinks
Broken backlinks are those that point to “Not found” pages of your website. They can appear if you remove pages that have backlinks.
So fixing broken backlinks is probably one of the easiest link-building methods. You just need to restore the deleted pages that have backlinks or redirect the deleted page to the most suitable existing page.
You can use Broken Link Checker from Ahrefs to find broken inbound links.
Optimize for rich results
Google Search has various search result features and rich results: product snippets, featured snippets, sitelinks, knowledge cards, and more. Here is an example of a product snippet:
If Google displays rich results for your page, it can make your page stand out from the competition. This usually results in more organic traffic.
To get rich results, you need to add Schema markup to the necessary pages.
Optimize images
If your site has original images, this is another great opportunity to increase organic traffic, especially for eCommerce sites.
You might be surprised by how much organic traffic your images can generate. On some sites, images can account for up to 40% of a site’s organic traffic or even more.
You can check in Search Console how much traffic your site generates from Google Image Search (choose Search type: Image):
To get the most out of your images, they should be original and of high quality. Images should also have descriptive filenames and descriptive alt attributes.
Finally, your images should match the content of your page.
Conclusion
I hope the above SEO tips can help you improve SEO and increase organic traffic to your site.
It is okay if you cannot implement all of them. Start with the simplest ones and gradually move on to more advanced ones.
If you want to learn more about SEO best practices, check out this complete SEO checklist.
