10 SEO Tips For Boosting Online Traffic in 2023
It’s a new year and search engine optimisation is still one of the most powerful aspects in making a business rank high in search engine results and to boost online traffic. From optimising images to making your website mobile-first, there are so many things that you need to do without fail to be SEO-ready.
In this article, we look at 10 SEO tips for boosting traffic to your website this year!
1. User Experience
UX design is all about appealing to the emotions of website visitors. In short, it involves making people happy and influencing their behaviour positively.
The obvious question — how is SEO related to UI/UX though?
When a visitor lands on your website because of your SEO efforts, having a good user experience is what will drive them to stay longer on the site, and ultimately take the next step, i.e. conversion.
People who are familiar with your industry including your target customers will choose unique styles and wording to describe your services and products. This is where a combined UX — SEO strategy will work wonders. The UX designer has to ensure that the flow and content of the website are perfectly planned for the user. UX and SEO together work as a strategy when you keep finding improvements in it.
2. Featured Snippets
The short snippets of text that you see on top of Google’s search results are called Featured Snippets. They are special because of where they appear in your search results. Any marketer worth his or her salt would want to have their content appear as a featured snippet.
The featured snippet could be in the form of definitions, tables, lists or steps. Also referred to as “Position #0”, it is placed even above the number 1 result on Google’s search results.
In the above picture, you can see the featured snippet when someone Googled ‘how to build a business.’
For a website visitor, featured snippets are great because they get a glimpse of the information without having to check out all the other search results.
For the business whose site is featured, it will give them a lot of exposure, and make them look credible — all of this without spending a single penny on ads.
- Use a tool like SEMRush and Ahref to find out the featured snippets of your competitors
- Know that the three major types of featured snippets are Paragraphs, Lists & Tables
- Use keywords that visitors search for the most
- Answer questions relevant to your industry
- Use headers, images and videos
- Create an entire section of “how-to” guides and tutorials
3. Competitor Analysis
The reason behind doing competitor analysis is to reverse engineer the best things that your competitors are doing in their search engine optimisation strategy. It involves researching links, content, and keywords to see what is already working for them.
Use Google to find out who your competitors are, for 5-10 of your most popular keywords. Track all of this and observe the websites that keep appearing for most keywords. They are your true SEO competitors.
Identify valuable keywords that your competitors rank highly for, but you don’t. Find out where you rank for these keywords and analyse how your competitors rank for them. Also, discover your competitor’s top content and the methods that they use to distribute it.
4. Focus On User Intent With Right Targeted Keywords
When you target keywords, the usual tendency is to go for those which have the highest search volumes, but it is more important to find the intent behind a search.
Based on credible research, search intent can be segmented into two:
- People looking to find information relating to the keyword used
- A user looking for more general information about a topic
A specific search will have a narrow intent and they are not looking for anything else while a general search will have the user looking at other related topics as well.
By leveraging keyword intent for intent-driven marketing, businesses can drive more sales, attract more traffic, drive more sales and generate more leads.
5. Constant Content Updates
When your website gets frequently updated, fresh content and new sources of information are available for search engines. Because of this, the search engine’s web crawler will discover and access the updated content. This will improve your website’s indexability which means that you are in a position to achieve higher rankings with fresh content.
Every time you update your website with new content or regurgitate old content, search engines take note of this, and as a result, when you check Google rankings of your website, you would see the change in your website position as well.
Write content for the reader and not around your keywords. Do add meta tags, title tags, and descriptions, but do not forget to sound natural.
6. Build Contextual Links
There was a time when backlinks were the go-to thing for SEO. Thankfully, things have changed and Google has started placing more importance on contextual links. Links that are embedded within your content and point to contextual text and information are valued. It will give you more traffic, visibility, credibility and authority.
You can earn more contextual links by doing the following:
- Guest blogging, a powerful link-building strategy
- Getting links from high-authority sites that focus on your niche
- Attaining editorial links from well-respected magazines like Entrepreneur, Forbes, Inc Magazine
- Getting your leadership team interviewed by relevant magazines
- Finding broken links on high-quality websites and replacing broken ones with your contextual links
7. Mobile-First Approach
Google uses a mobile version of your content for indexing and ranking. If you do not have a mobile-first approach, in some cases your website might not even be crawled by search engines.
Here are things you can do to achieve mobile-first indexing:
- Make sure your mobile version has high-quality content, images, and videos
- Include the same structured data markup on both mobile and desktop version
- Ensure that the titles and meta descriptions are equivalent on both the versions
- Do have your social metadata included on the mobile version as well
- The UX of the mobile site is important if you want search engines to index it
- From mobile menus to design patterns, keep an eye on user-friendliness
8. Image Optimisation
Pictures speak louder than words — it brings the text to life. This is why you need to add relevant images wherever possible when writing a blog post or any piece of content. The images should add value to your content and make readers attracted to it.
The images used should be well-optimised and used in the right context. The file size, as well as length and breadth, should be as per the design and layout of the website.
Here are 5 ways in which you can optimise images for SEO:
- Pick the right file format. Use JPEG for images that have lots of colour and PNG for simple images.
- Use the following WordPress plug-ins for image optimisation: Yoast SEO, ShortPixel, ImageRecycle, Optimus Image Optimizer, and TinyPNG.
- Check your website’s page loading times after you’ve optimised images using the following tools: GTMetrix, WebWait, Pingdom, and WebPageTest.
- Use alt tags, optimise the image title, include captions, and use unique images.
- Add structured data to your images as it helps search engines display your images as rich results.
9. Local Search — Don’t Miss The Low Hanging Fruit
Being available online is now almost vital to businesses. Local businesses want a piece of the pie too. You will find local businesses trying to rank on search results, thus making local search mainstream. A business that has a brick-and-mortar location or is servicing in a specific geographical area, will find local SEO beneficial.
If you look at the above example, searching for a “Salon in Birmingham” you will find pages ranking at the top which are optimised for local search. The beauty of local search is that the competition is relatively less as compared to broad search.
Here are a few things that a business can do to appear in local searches:
- Select the correct category for your business and include keywords in the description and content
- Create relevant content for your business
- Use title tags and meta descriptions
- Get contextual links from local and industry-relevant websites
- Build up mentions of your business in local magazines or on government sites
- Create landing pages for specific keywords and phrases
- Leverage Google My Business and each of its features
- Get citations for your local business
10. Local Citations
Citations play an important foundational role in local SEO (read our article on Citations to learn the basics). When you’re just starting out, you need citations in order to appear in local search results, and therefore, building citations as well as citation management are key activities that search marketers include when managing a local SEO process.
Google’s local algorithm always tries to return the best local businesses for each local query. Sites are returned based on their relevance and prominence, and citations are a key factor for relevance.
Your citations help Google verify that you’re actually located where your website says you’re located. As Google crawls the internet and sees that a number of different reputable sites list the same business information, including your NAP (name, address and phone) details, it’ll learn to view you as a legitimate local business.
With that increased trust comes a higher likelihood that Google will show your business in its local search results.
Conclusion
If you want to take your business to the next level, search engine optimisation is going to be an important factor in making that happen.
When you are looking at increasing your website’s organic reach, some of the above steps we have mentioned are good to start with. But once you have found a footing with your SEO results, you might want to dive deeper to maximally benefit your business.
Remember — SEO is not a one-time thing to ‘do and forget’’. Rather it’s an ongoing process that gives the highest return on investment compared to any other marketing strategy.
