Do you feel that you have followed various SEO guidelines but are still not getting profitable organic traffic results? If yes, then this article is right for you.
SEO is not an easy thing to learn. Continuous experimentation is necessary to find the formulation of SEO techniques or strategies that can effectively help your business increase organic traffic.
As a shortcut, in this article, we will present some practical SEO tips that you can apply to improve your SEO strategy to make it more effective.
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1. Take sufficient time to analyze the SERPs
Google’s search algorithm is designed in such a way as to display search results that are most relevant to what the user wants or is looking for.
Therefore, it is important for you as a content creator to fully understand the search intentions of the keywords used by searchers.
You can get an understanding of search intentions by analyzing Google search pages for certain keywords and analyzing what information users want from using these keywords.
Some of the components that you need to pay attention to in analyzing search pages include:
- Search features (featured snippets, location features, knowledge packs, image packs, etc.)
- The type of content that appears at the top (product pages, listicles, tutorials, etc.)
- Websites that appear in the top rankings (databases, businesses, media, directories, etc.)
- The appearance of your page (title, meta description, date, jump link, etc.)
Don’t forget to use window incognito, delete cache, cookies, search history, and do a desktop and mobile search in doing these SEO tips.
2. Perform SERP overlap test
SERP (Search Engine Result Page) overlap test is a series of tests conducted to determine the relationship between several keywords.
Two keywords are said to overlap if the appearance of both search results is relatively the same, so you can use these two keywords to develop one content.
Here are some steps that you can follow to do the SERP overlap test:
- Perform a search through window incognito on keyword A and keyword B.
- If the SERP display of the two keywords tends to be different (for example, ranking 1 in the SERP keyword A is ranked 9 in the SERP keyword B), then Google considers the two keywords to have different search intentions.
- Conversely, if the SERP display of the two keywords is relatively similar, then Google considers the two keywords to have the same search intent.
3. Optimize for featured snippets on SERP
Featured snippets are sections where Google displays direct answers to queries entered so that searchers don’t have to look at other pages to find the information they want.
The featured snippet is located at the very top of the search so getting a position in the featured snippet will really help you in increasing organic searches.
To appear in the featured snippet, create content that answers specific questions from users. The content you create must be semantically relevant to the keywords used in the search.
So make sure the description that you present in response to the keyword question is correct.
4. Do on-page SEO, but not all pages have to be search-friendly
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your website pages both on the front-end and back-end components in order to get better rankings on search engines.
Doing on-page SEO is very important in order to give a signal to Google that your website page has certain information needed by searchers. However, not all pages on your website need to be optimized so that they become search-friendly.
Some examples of pages that do not need to be prioritized for optimization include advertising landing pages, thank you pages, internal sales pages, as well as log-in pages.
Instead of wasting time optimizing these pages, you should maximize your efforts to improve your other information-rich pages such as home pages, service pages, about pages, as well as blog pages.
5. Target high and low-volume keywords that vary
In designing an SEO strategy, it is important for you to target the keywords used throughout the buyer journey, including high and low-volume keywords.
Top funnel keywords usually tend to have a larger search volume, while low funnel keywords have less search volume because of their more specific audience coverage.
Therefore, you don’t need to hesitate in targeting small-volume keywords if these keywords do have better potential to bring in conversions.
6. Cut the amount of content after long term traffic growth
Trimming the amount of content or what is commonly referred to as content pruning is a process of reducing the number of indexed pages by removing old content that is not performing well.
When your website traffic has experienced growth over a long period of time and your website content is increasing, of course, there is some content on your website that does not perform as expected.
The accumulation of your content can have a negative effect on the website because it can slow down the speed and performance of the website.
For that, you need to occasionally conduct an audit to identify pages or content that are not providing meaningful traffic, backlinks, or conversions on your website.
7. Increase page authority
Page authority is one of the main factors that determine your ranking in Google search results. Therefore, it is very important for you to build brand and authority in your business niche.
Some of the ways you can increase page authority are by regularly publishing blogs, being active on social media, and also guest posting on other websites.
8. Apply the pillar-cluster model to your content
Users want a search engine that can display answers to their questions accurately. Therefore, Google continues to improve its algorithms in order to better understand the intent and context of a search or the content of a page.
Now Google has been able to understand topic relationships between multiple queries, monitor similar queries from past searches by certain users, and display content they deem most credible to answer those queries.
From a content creator’s perspective, one thing you can do to help Google understand the context of your blog or website is to apply the pillar-cluster model.
By having a single pillar page that contains an overview of a topic and has a hyperlink to a cluster page, you can effectively signal to Google that your pillar page has high authority on a particular topic.
9. Optimizing multimedia files
Optimizing multimedia files on your website doesn’t seem like something that has a big impact on SEO. However, this assumption is wrong.
The size of the multimedia file will affect the speed at which your website loads. The larger the file size, the longer the page load time will be.
Whereas website speed is one of the ten main factors that determine the ranking of website search results on Google.
10. Perform a technical SEO audit
When search engine bots crawl your website for indexing purposes, search engines need to understand your website well, in terms of content and structure.
Websites that do not have a good structure will make it difficult for search engines to index, which in the end your page will not appear on the SERP.
For this reason, this one SEO tip is very important to make sure your website is easily accessible to search engines. Some of the technical content you need to pay attention to include:
- Page speed
- XML site map
- URL Structure
- Site architecture
- Pagination
Here are some SEO tips that you can try to increase organic traffic in 2022.
