In today’s rapidly shifting world, SEO techniques can change on a dime—and the worst part is, that you might not even know it. Hacks that could have won you a front-page result as recently as 2018 are not only obsolete now, but they may even hurt your website’s rankings. Especially if those so-called “hacks” land your site a Google penalty that’s tough to shift.
That’s why you need to stay on top of the ball in SEO. If not, you’ll fall behind and see your competitors zoom past you in the SERPs.
We spoke with Jacob Warwick, Director of Communications at Skedulo, and Jesse Teske, SEO Manager at YLighting, to get their expert thoughts on the most current SEO tactics, as well as writer and content marketer Puranjay Singh, founder of GrowthSimple.
In this post, we’ve broken down the top SEO techniques to help you skyrocket your rankings and boost your number of monthly visitors from organic search.
But before we dive into the details on improving your web page ranking, let’s take some time to test your current page ranking on search engine results. Head over to Keyword Rank Checker – a tool that you can use to determine your page ranking based on keyword search:
It goes without saying that your goal, as an SEO expert, is make your website reach the top of this list. Higher rankings equals more organic traffic – people you can convert at a later stage, and boost the overall ROI of your SEO strategy.
Sounds like the dream, right? But if you’re feeling disheartened with the keyword ranking check you just ran, don’t panic.
9 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic
1) Improve User Experience Across Your Entire Website
Let’s kick things off with a brief explanation of what Google is here to do. Just like any search engine, they want to show the best results for a user’s query, and if they’re greeting users with a list of irrelevant, low-quality results, they won’t use them again. By the way, Google does this very well, which is why they’re the largest search engine in the world – by far.
You’ll need to think about that constant desire to show the best results when you’re optimizing your website for SEO. Why? The answer is simple: If your site isn’t high-quality enough, you’ll have a tough job ranking for your target keywords.
Nobody wants to land on a spammy website that takes years to load, right? That’s bound to lead to a high bounce rate. And although Google hasn’t officially declared it, there is evidence to suggest that the search engine giant does reward sites that have low bounce rates with higher page ranking.
Google’s reasoning is that if a user spends more time on a page, it’s probably because she found the page useful. And since Google only wants to deliver the best possible results to its users, it will push sites with strong engagement up in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
So how can you improve the experience that visitors are having with your website? Unfortunately, reducing your overall bounce rate isn’t as simple as removing a few annoying pop-up ads.
A) Make Your Posts Easy to Read
Ever heard the phrase “formatting content for the web”? To stand any chance at increasing your organic rankings, we need to take that a step further and optimize your content for readability.
Remember: More people reading your content = lower bounce rate = higher organic rankings.
But how do you format your posts for readability? The following formatting tips can help increase the readability of your content:
Shorter paragraphs: Generally speaking, limit each paragraph to 3-4 sentences. It’s even okay to use one-sentence paragraphs if necessary, but use them sparingly or your post will look like a bullet-pointed blog without the bullets. A paragraph is a group of related sentences that support one main idea, so if you split up one paragraph into individual lines, your idea tends to be fragmented and makes it hard to grasp the overall point.
Mixed sentence lengths: Longer sentences are hard to follow on a computer or phone screen, but they can work well when used sparingly, particularly when mixed with medium and short sentences. Here’s a fantastic example of how sentence structures can be varied for readability:
Sentence and paragraph formatting
Sub-headers: Did you know that the average person spends just 37 seconds reading a piece of online content? You can boost that time significantly by including subheadings to make scanning the article easier. Use plenty of clear and informative sub-headers to guide readers down a page, along with call-out points that are emphasized in bold. Readers should be able to scan your blog post and get the gist of what you’re talking about.
Bullet points: When you have a lot of data—stats, facts, ideas, examples—packed into one paragraph, it makes it easier to read when you list them with bullet points (like this!).
White space and images: When you visit a web page and are greeted with a huge wall of text, it can feel overwhelming. Prevent your site visitors from overwhelm by breaking up large chunks of text with relevant, supporting media, including photos, videos and graphs (in addition to bullet points and sub-headers).
Write quality content: All these other points are meaningless if your writing is just bad. Good writing is not necessarily about paragraph or sentence length, bullet points, headers and images; good writing is about great ideas and compelling delivery.
B) Use Bucket Brigades to Pique Interest
Originally, a “bucket brigade” was a chain of people who pass buckets of water from person to person to extinguish a fire. Now it's a copywriting technique designed to capture a reader’s interest and then keep them reading the rest of your page (reducing bounce rate), much like the flow of the bucket being passed down the line.
It essentially involves breaking an idea into multiple sentences, using a trigger word or phrase, and then ending the sentence with a colon to pique interest. Look at this example from Copyhackers:
C) Write in the Inverted Pyramid Style
This method means giving away the most valuable information at the top of the article, and following it up with less important information. If readers tend to scan and rarely make it to the bottom of an article, it makes sense to give them what they want as soon as they land on the page.
D) Analyze (and Improve) Current Page Designs
More often than not, high bounce rates result from poor usability and an awkward user experience (UX). However, it’s tough to figure out where pesky UX problems are an issue because they can vary dramatically from site to site.
E) Site Speed
Back in 2010, Google announced that it would be using site speed as a ranking factor. Fast forward almost a decade and now Google has consistently emphasized the importance of site speed.
Site speed plays a huge role in SEO because people don’t want to wait years to access information they’re searching for.
You should improve your site’s speed not only to work your way up Google’s rankings, but also to increase conversions. One survey found that nearly 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with website performance won’t return to the site to buy again – which could see you losing out on a ton of conversion-rich search traffic who are ready to hand over their hard-earned cash for your product or service.
2) Optimize for Voice Search
Did you know that 50% of all searches will be conducted by voice by next year?
That’s right: Half of all the people heading to Google aren’t typing their queries – they’re using a voice-assisted device to do the job for them.
If you think that's not something you’ll need to factor into your SEO strategy, you're wrong. Voice searchers have different habits than text searchers, and the devices they’re using (whether that’s an Amazon Alexa, Siri or Google Home) take data from SERPs to replay information from the featured snippet box back as their answer.
That’s why our second SEO technique is to optimize your website to answer questions – if you want to target the one in six Americans who own a smart speaker. But how do you do that without overhauling your entire website. Here’s the answer:
A) Write Content Around Long-Tail Keywords
Moz found that voice searchers use long-tail keywords when they’re searching for information through Google, and these terms are 3+ words in length.
B) Use Structured Data
Remember how we said that Google takes information from the featured snippet box and replays that back to voice searchers? Using structured data is a fantastic way to boost the chances of your information being read aloud to your target audience.
There are several types of structured data (also known as Schema markup) that SEOs can use, both of which give Google a quick rundown of what your page is about. That, in turn, helps it to rank better.
Get started by heading over to Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to find out whether you’ve already got Schema implemented.
3) Focus on Topic Clusters Instead of Keywords
Source
Google is evolving – and so is its algorithm. Its objective now is to understand the intention of its users: what they expect, what they’re looking for and, more specifically, what search results would best help answer their query.
But don’t expect your website to end up on the first page of Google simply by creating keyword-focused content. It’s not enough to look at keywords alone. We need to look at the context around them.
Also referred to as “user intent,” you must consider what your users are looking for, rather than coming up with different ways that users can phrase a search query.
Here are two things in particular you should consider:
A) Know Your Target Audience
The type of content you’ll create will depend entirely on your audience. The better you know them — their location, age, interests, etc. — the better the content you’ll create (and the better your SEO).
B) Organize Content into Clusters
Instead of focusing on standalone keywords, organize all your content into different themes. The topic cluster model, created by HubSpot, works by breaking down your content calendar into topic and clusters.
Using that content strategy satisfies user intent since they’re getting information they’re searching for, while also creating a library of internally linked content that Google’s spiders will crawl, understand and use to rank each page.
C) Research Keywords and Use Them Sparingly
Confused why we’re listing keyword research as an SEO technique when we’ve told you to focus on topic clusters, rather than keywords? Because keywords still matter.
Organizing content thematically is very important, but it’s a mistake to ignore keywords entirely, given that they serve as signposts to Google’s spiders, signaling topics and giving hints as to the nature of the content on the website.
Marketers now face a struggle to find accurate search volume data with Google Ads hiding those results (unless you run a PPC campaign). However, there are a number of tricks and tools that can help marketers find topics and volume data.
4) Longer Content Equals Higher Ranking Usually
A recent study by Backlinko concluded that the longer the content, the higher the likelihood of its ranking at the top of the SERPs.
However, writing 2,000+ words for every blog post is not for everyone. It’s an intensive and time-consuming process – but most of all, sometimes it’s not necessary. Remember what we said about satisfying user intent?
Some search queries are by people who aren’t looking to digest a lengthy blog post. Their answer could be a matter of words or a few paragraphs, so the other 1,500+ words you’re pressuring yourself to create might be a total waste of time and energy.
Let’s take the “link building tips” keyword, for example. People searching for that phrase are likely looking for a comprehensive guide to link-building strategies they can use to conquer Google.
People searching for “link building do’s and don’ts”, on the other hand, might not need that lengthy type of content. A simple bullet-pointed list is probably all they’re looking for.
Unfortunately, there’s no hack to determine how long your content should be other than good old-fashioned common sense. Ask yourself what information someone would be looking for if they’re using a keyword you’re targeting, and start from there.
Struggling to find the motivation to write a long-form blog post? Instead of starting from nothing, take an existing page from 1,200 words to 2,000, rather than going from 0 words to 2,000 words.
Existing content already has authority and an established readership. So rather than writing something entirely from scratch, it’s much simpler to find a post of yours that is already doing well on Google, refresh it with updated information and extra content, and rely on existing signals to make it rank for terms.
5) Conquer Video with YouTube SEO
YouTube videos rank in the top 10 of Google search far more often than any other type of video. And, according to Forbes, YouTube is also the second most popular search engine with more than 3 billion searches per month – surpassing Bing, Yahoo, and AOL combined.
Most SEOers forget about YouTube when they think of search engines. But if you’re smart, have a knack for creating engaging videos, and have the time to invest into optimizing each video for YouTube SEO, there’s no reason you can't build a huge audience on that platform. One YouTuber doubled their traffic with the same content after implementing YouTube SEO.
A) Make Your Video SEO-Friendly
Just like Google’s spiders, YouTube’s algorithm works by understanding information about your video. The filename, the title, the description of your uploaded content — all these elements affect your rankings in YouTube search.
Video Title – Crafting a compelling video title is a balancing act — you have to make the title SEO friendly and make it clickable to improve your click-through rate. Ideally, you should follow the same convention in your video titles as you would in your blog posts; to get clicks and shares, include keywords as well as power words. Here’s a great example of a killer title.
B) Make Longer Videos
Like content, longer videos tend to do better in YouTube search. Try it yourself. Type in a popular keyword or topic and see what shows up at the top of the page.
Notice how all these videos are 5+ minutes long? As with written content, longer videos tend to get the most traction – but remember to think about user intent first.
C) Create Custom Thumbnails
The majority of search engines use click-through rate as a ranking factor. If people are clicking through to your result when they’re searching for a specific term, you must be offering something of value, right?
Optimizing your video with a great thumbnail can help that.
A strong thumbnail should tell viewers exactly what the video is about. Ditch one of YouTube’s screenshots of your video and create a custom thumbnail that uses a compelling image along with a title card.
6) Build a Variety of Backlinks
It won’t come as a surprise to learn that backlinks are important in the SEO world.
According to Google, links are still the #1 factor when it comes to determining search rank because without them “ranking without links is really, really hard.”
However, don’t fall into the trap of thinking “any link is a good link.” Low-quality links that are easily spammed — blog comments, paid links, etc. — don’t seem to work anymore and can actively harm your site.
Links that are earned — through high-quality content, outreach and influencer marketing — on the other hand, are safe and extremely effective.
7) Get a Grip on Technical Optimization
SEO and content tips aside, it’s absolutely essential to have a solid website, without worrying about any technical issues that may arise. Why would Google rank your site in position #1 if users are greeted with a ton of glitches?
You’ll need to get a grip on your technical SEO in order to rank well in 2019 and beyond using these tips:
A) Switch to HTTPS
It happens when sites don’t have HTTPS – the most commonly used, securest version of the old HTTP web protocol.
Google has started to warn users when they’re visiting non-HTTPS websites, and if you’re yet to make the switch to secure, encrypted connections, you might be turning away a huge chunk of people willing to visit your site.
HTTPS is a best practice that will help your website boost its SEO presence, stay secure, and make it harder for malicious parties to break in and take advantage of your website.
B) Enable AMP for Mobile
AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, began as a Google-backed open initiative to allow publishers to easily create responsive, mobile-optimized content.
It takes information from website pages and displays them in an easy-to-view format for mobile devices.
Envisioned as a way to quickly render content on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, AMP combines three components:
HTML tags: which help common web patterns render quickly
AMP JS: a library that manages the resource loading and best practices necessary for fast rendering
AMP cache: a content delivery network that both loads content and ensures speed
Since AMP was only incorporated into the search giant’s results in February 2016, the format itself is still fairly new. For those of you who use WordPress, AMP should be much easier to implement than a home-grown CMS from scratch.
C) Budget Money for Crawlers
To make sure Google is crawling your preferred pages (and not pages that don’t appear in its index), you might need an extra pair of hands in the form of crawl software. We want to give search engines the best view of our website, right?
These SEO crawler programs are similar to Google’s own crawlers, and will give you an overview of how your page will perform when determining rankings for your target keywords:
Deep Crawl: Possibly the most comprehensive tool of its kind available today, Deep Crawl is the equivalent of a physical exam for your website, checking its SEO health and viability in an increasingly crowded market. Deep Crawl will provide you with a laundry list of necessary improvements and errors, such as: duplicate content, broken pages, flawed titles, descriptions and metadata.
Botify: A cloud-based crawler that has already signed up big names like Expedia and eBay, Botify is one of the strongest crawlers available today, short of Google’s own secret algorithms. Not only can Botify check whether Google has crawled your page, but it can also offer suggestions on how to restructure web content and site maps to optimize your web page for Google’s crawlers.
Botify Analytics
D) Correct Your Semantic Markups
To help Google understand your data, or to show your website smartcards and voice searches, you need to ensure that your semantic markups are correct.
Semantic markups are essentially HTML tags which can help emphasize key information on your website. It tells Google’s spiders what the page is about without needing to digest every word on the page.
Just take heading tags, for instance. Text wrapped in a <h1> tag is the page’s main title, and should give a brief explanation of the entire shared content on that page. Text wrapped in a <h2> tag are subheadings, and so on.
Here’s an example heading structure:
<h1> The Ultimate Guide to Guest Posting
<h2> What is guest posting?
<h3> Benefits of guest blogging
<h3> 5 types of links you can build
<h2> How to write an awesome guest post
<h3> 1. Pick the perfect website
<h3> 2. Send an email pitch
<h3> 3. Write your content
E) Fix “Page Not Found” 404 Errors by Redirecting URLs
Nothing will sink your website faster in search rankings than a 404 error.
Following a link that leads to a 404 page with the text “Error: Not Found” is essentially a dead end. And nobody likes being stuck in a dead end – especially your audience. So it’s in your interest to fix these broken or missing pages and re-engage your users as soon as you can.
First of all, download your backlink profile using a tool like Monitor Backlinks. Backlinks that are pointing to a pesky 404 error page will be highlighted, so sieve them out and head to your Google Analytics dashboard to find out how many page views the 404 error page gets.
You never know – you might find that you’re turning away 300 visitors each month because they’re arriving on your site with a dead end!
Keep those users around by using an SEO plugin like Redirection to redirect URLs of broken links to fully functioning pages. You’ll want to redirect the broken page to the next, most relevant page to make sure they’re not frustrated with landing on a totally different page than they expected.
8) Target Local Searchers with Landing Pages and Listings
Almost half (46%) of all searches on Google are from people looking for local information. That could include:
Local shops
Opening hours
Telephone numbers
Addresses
So, if you have a brick-and-mortar business, you can’t neglect local SEO and listings if you want to stay profitable.
Here are three huge SEO techniques to capture local people who could become your customers. After all, 72% of people who search for local businesses online end up visiting stores within a five mile radius!
A) Double-Check Your Directory Listings
As powerful as search engines like Google or Bing are, they still can’t be everywhere at once, and have to rely on additional information from local, on-the-ground sources.
These sources can include directory listings, which gather, aggregate, and submit relevant data for area businesses – information from physical directories (like Yellow Pages) or scanning business registrations.
In a nutshell: Bigger search engines (like Google) will rely on these data aggregators to fill in the gaps of the existing information that's already in their databases, and will also cross-check to make sure that the facts are up-to-date.
Problems arise, however, when aggregators collect out-of-date data, leading a search engine like Google or Bing to list the wrong information – such as an old address for your business or a disconnected phone number.
9) Know How to Measure SEO Performance
Reporting and analytics are two critical elements of SEO – both of which are indispensable to improving your overall marketing strategies.
Effective reporting means you can understand key questions such as:
What content really appealed to your customer?
What part of the website had the most UX issues?
Which page was the least (or most) visited, and why?
Which on-page SEO changes resulted in the highest rankings?
Which style of keyword should you focus on, in future?
It’s tricky to understand those intricacies (and use them to your advantage to skyrocket your SEO even further) without regularly monitoring and reporting your results.
Here are three tools you can use to conquer exactly that:
A) Data Studio
Interested in gaining the ability to tie online data back to offline data in order to get a full 360 view of how your content and marketing is performing?
Google’s Data Studio helps you to do that by aggregating data (such as rankings, traffic, conversion data) from multiple sources into a single interface. It’s a fantastic SEO tool for internal teams to use, but also a superb way for SEO agencies to share fancy reports with their clients.
But, most importantly, the SEO metrics you’re able to track with Datastudio can help you determine the effectiveness of your SEO strategy, and assess whether you need to pivot or change tactics to improve on your results.
B) Wayback Machine
Always be on the lookout to see what your competitors are doing and how well it’s working for them. What techniques are they using? How have they changed their approach? What mistakes have they learned from?
One great tool to see how your competition has changed is Wayback Machine, which allows marketers to access petabytes of archived web pages. By sifting through Wayback Machine’s extensive database, you can track the evolution of your competitor’s brand and web presence – taking note of factors such as:
Changes in UX design
Differences in copy from one web version to the next
Movements of key page elements, such as page navigation or calls to action
Still, you shouldn’t implement something just because your competitor is doing it – whether that’s designing a website a certain way or using specific copy or images. You’ve got to use your common sense, combined with industry knowledge, before giving your SEO team the go-ahead to copy their changes.
C) SEMrush
If you’ve followed this guide to a T, you might notice an influx of organic traffic arriving at your website from Google. That’s great news, but how can you find out which keywords are driving the most results?
SEO is rapidly changing from one year to the next, with new algorithms constantly emerging and Google frequently editing their webmaster guidelines. Business owners and marketers have to adapt quickly, but it’s still possible to give your business website the edge on your competition.
Remember to focus on solid content creation and copywriting fundamentals, engage your viewers deeply, and stay abreast of technical trends like backlinks, SEO health, site speed, and schema. And don’t be afraid of using a handful of the AI-based tools we’ve recommended to welcome the emerging AI revolution that’s set to take over the marketing world.
