Do you want to improve your site’s ranking in search engines’ organic results and attract more traffic? Consider implementing the following SEO tips.
As more consumers turn to the internet to find and purchase all sorts of products, every conscious business leader must prioritize optimizing their online presence. The first step is ensuring that your pages rank well in organic search results with the help of SEO consulting services.
Why Organic SEO?
Quite often, we liken SEO and reliance on organic search results to buying a lottery ticket. It’s a win-lose situation, with a higher probability that the odds won’t be in your favor!
Therefore, some businesses have resorted to promoting their websites through native advertising and other media channels. This looks more reasonable than spending countless hours and a lot of effort on organic SEO with no guaranteed results on the surface.
Which is better — relying on organic search traffic or promoting your pages through paid ads?
According to Search Engine Journal, organic search results account for up to 70% of the web traffic. This means that 7 out of the ten links that search users click on each day are organic. This explains why while paid ads can be a great add-on to your digital marketing strategy, the gem lies in optimizing for organic search results.
So, let’s look at some actionable organic SEO tips and how they will help boost your web traffic.
1. Optimize for Search Intent, Not Search Engines
When it comes to optimizing visibility for organic searches, your pages must have great content — there’s no shortcut. This is probably the most valuable lesson every SEO expert should learn.
The primary concept behind SEO is to ensure that users locate and access the information they want as fast as possible. Instead of focusing on beating the ranking algorithms, focus on delivering more value to your users:
- First, find out what your target audience wants to know. You can use platforms like Quora or the “people also ask” section in Google searches.
- Next, tailor your content to address your users’ needs. The more value your target audience finds in your content, the more they’re likely to repeatedly visit your pages.
If you concentrate on beating search engines’ ranking algorithms, you’ll end up having boring keyword-riddled pages that no user would want to look at twice. And the opposite is true — please your target audience, and you’ll automatically please the search engines.
2. Use Long-Tail Keywords
Using the most popular keywords in your market is not enough; narrow them down to those directly related to your product or service.
With time, search engines will identify your site as a trustworthy destination for that specific niche topic. Besides, you’ll be avoiding unnecessary competition for overused high-demand keywords and focusing only on those that bring maximum value to your pages.
Note that ranking is all about establishing your website as a reliable authority for a particular subject. For instance, this article explicitly targets users who want to increase their organic traffic. We are, therefore, not focusing on all SEO-related keywords.
3. Use the Inverted Pyramid Writing Style
A typical reader will scan the first few sentences or paragraphs of your content before deciding on a full read. So, you should ensure that they’re hooked and intrigued to read more from the very beginning.
If you have some background information in journalism or mass communication, you must have heard of the inverted pyramid writing style. It involves placing the most valuable information (who, why, what, when, where, and how) at the beginning of your content, followed by the less important ones.
4. Create Cornerstone Pages
You should have pages based on specific topics. If you have several pages competing to optimize for similar keywords, Google will strain to determine the most relevant page to rank. To avoid this SEO confusion, merge them into one cornerstone page. This simplifies the search engines’ work and establishes your website as a more reputable authority on that specific topic.
5. Ensure That Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly
Google first announced that they’d make mobile friendliness a ranking factor back in 2015. Since then, they’ve been keen on making it a key ranking signal. In September last year, Google developers announced that plans were underway to index the whole web with a mobile-first approach.
Here’s why. More than 50% of global Google queries come from mobile phones. In a bid to deliver the best user experience, the platform must cater to the needs of its widest user-base (mobile phone users) by ensuring that sites that rank higher are mobile-friendly.
You can check your site’s mobile-friendliness using Google’s mobile-friendly tool for free. The baseline is that users should comfortably navigate through to read and your contents using their mobile gadgets as with their desktops.
6. Leverage Social Media
Although Google doesn’t consider social shares as authority links, having a solid social media presence can significantly improve your site’s ranking.
In a recent study of over 23 million social media shares, Cognitive SEO found a direct relation between SEO and social shares. Google relies on how often people visit, like, or talk about your pages to determine your content’s usefulness and subsequently rank your sites. Since social media directly affects these factors, it should form part of your SEO strategy.
Social media allows you to share your content with the target audience, get their views, and in the process, achieve higher visibility. If the audience finds your content useful, they’ll inevitably share it, hence more traffic, and backlinks.
7. Avoid Black Hat SEO Techniques
The seventh tip is more of a caution than an SEO technique. We cannot insist enough on the importance of abiding by Google’s EAT guidelines.
Black hat SEO involves using uncouth means to trick search engines into ranking your pages higher, e.g., by buying backlinks. It’s not worth it, and it’s too risky!
From our observation, black hat SEO tactics can only deliver short-lived boosting in popularity at best. Soon, Google will spot your unethical techniques, or an algorithm update will wipe out all the gains you’ve made. So, always try to use white-hat techniques like guest blogging sites, best free press release sites and social sharing channels.
Professional Digital Marketing Solutions
As you must have noticed, we’ve focused on actionable and straightforward organic SEO tips to help you get started or improve your existing strategy. There’s still more to organic SEO — and digital marketing at large — beyond the above seven tips.
You can always reach out to BizIQ for guidance or consultation whenever you feel lost. We are a leading US-based digital marketing and organic search agency focused on helping small to medium-sized businesses maximize the online space to the fullest.