5 easy and actionable SEO techniques for better organic traffic

Any brand can pay to boost its visibility in Google rankings, but the true test of your ability to draw in visitors from the world’s biggest search engine is organic traffic.

If you want people to find your website through Google, you need to earn your place on the first page of search results for your most important keywords. If you’re not on the first page, you might as well be invisible, since 75% of users don’t bother navigating to page two or beyond.

Here are five techniques that can supercharge your SEO and push you up the Google rankings:

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1. Research your audience

Google wants to deliver high-quality, relevant results to its users. So, to get yourself in the search engine’s good books, you need to provide content that is of genuine interest to your audience.

There are various steps you can take to better understand your customers’ needs and interests, such as:

  • Investing in social media engagement
  • Using Google Analytics to find existing pages and content that have proven popular
  • Looking at user comments and feedback on blog posts

As well as helping you to maximise the relevance of your content, audience insights will help you come up with the most effective keyword strategy.

2. Optimise your whole website

SEO success is about more than optimising a single blog or webpage for search. Conducting an audit of your entire website will help you identify flaws and performance issues that could be hampering your SEO efforts.

You might find that your site is lacking in basic on-page SEO elements like:

  • Meta titles and page descriptions
  • Search-friendly URL structures
  • Header tags

As well as helping you to maximise the relevance of your content, audience insights will help you come up with the most effective keyword strategy.

3. Be user-friendly

If your site is user-friendly, your SEO efforts will benefit because people will want to spend time exploring your site and will be less likely to bounce (navigate away after only viewing one page).

Metrics like dwell time and bounce rate are key factors for RankBrain – a core component of Google’s algorithm that uses machine learning to find the highest-quality, most relevant results for search engine queries.

Two of the best steps you can take to boost user experience across your site are improving your page loading speed and ensuring all of your content is mobile-friendly.

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4. Perfect your linking strategy

Links are a hugely important SEO ranking signal, with Google using them as a measure of the credibility and quality of your content.

If a well-established, reputable site links to a piece of content on your blog, for example, the search engine will see that as a sign of your trustworthiness and authority on a particular subject. So it’s worth looking into how you can earn more inbound links.

Including outbound links to relevant third-party sites also helps to boost your overall content offering to users, while internal links to your own assets can tie your pages together and create valuable topic clusters.

5. Measure results

There’s no way to know how your SEO efforts are going – and consequently what techniques you should probably change, amplify or abandon – without measurement.

Getting a handle on data reporting and analytics will help you understand:

  • How much organic traffic you’re receiving and where it’s coming from
  • Which pages are attracting the highest and lowest visitor numbers
  • Page loading times
  • Your most successful keywords and on-page SEO techniques

The more information and insights you have into your site performance, the better prepared you’ll be to drive organic traffic.

Check out our Technical SEO page for all you need to know!