Get more organic traffic in 2024
This post has only one goal– cover all the tips and tricks that let you gain tons of organic traffic every day all day.
These are actionable insights led to increase your site’s dwell time, get visitors and rake in conversions and sales. For traffic organic seo vs Google ads is always better.
Work on better titles
GotchSEO recently described a case study where he was able to score a top 3 ranking for the search term blogspot.
He said he didn’t need a lot of backlinks to get himself to the top spot. Only a few did the trick for him.
What he did was change the SEO title of the blogpost so that he averaged higher number of clicks and ranked without lifting a finger.
SEO is more than ranking. It’s about driving relevant traffic that converts and gets you monies.
It doesn’t matter how well you rank. If people are not clicking through you won’t be able to make anything with the high position you’ve so painfully scored. And that’s the reason why it’s important to make the search listing attractive to the end user. This in turn promotes higher number of clicks and consequently improved number of conversions.
Here’s how.
Two things impact the click through rate directly.
First is the title tag and the second is the meta description.
Since that’s the only thing you have to get people to click through here’s what you can do to ensure maximum number of clicks
The description should have power words included in it. Research shows that using power words markedly improves your CTR.
The selling proposition should be clear
The benefits should be clear.
The description should match the search intent.
To that end find which keywords are ranking on the first page for your site. You can do this with the help of Ahrefs or SEMrush. Both are excellent tools of repute that help you uncover keywords you rank for.
Now look for results that perform below the standard ctr or have a very low ctr.
These are the prime targets for improvement and hold the keys of improved traffic and rankings.
Now work at improving the title tags and associated descriptions of these pages.
Organic keywords report from Ahrefs and Semrush can assist you with this.
Enter your domain. Next go to the organic keywords report to get the complete list of organic keywords to your site.
Now sort through the report to get the ones that are ranking on the first page of Google.
This shows the pages where you stand to gain the most by improving CTR.
These are the ones you should aim to improve.
There are also results at position zero. Called search snippets, these show up before any other result on the SERPs and also get the highest traffic. The zeroth position belong to the featured snippets and hold the potential to bring in loads of traffic and clicks. It’s important to keep in mind that when zeroing down in on SERP positions that bring the coveted top spot the zeroth position is equally and most times even more important.
Finds those with lower‐than‐average CTRs given their ranking position
Calculates the potential traffic increase should you hit the average CTR
To give an example, imagine that we have a page that ranks for just two keywords:
Let’s say you have two keywords capturing the first position on Google. But keyword 2 brings markedly low traffic compared to keyword 1.
On an average you get 5% ctr compared to 10% that’s the norm with 1st page 1st position.
According to research on the subject keywords on position 2 average 15% clicks and on one get 27% of all clicks.
If you’re able to improve the CTR you will get at least a 100% increase in traffic and consequently higher number of conversions too.
Use internal links to boost pages that could use a little help
What are internal links?
Internal links are links that come from within the domain to other pages on your site.
When you use internal links you help conserve link juice and aid it to flow better throughout the site.
With internal links you’re effectively distributing link authority from the site to the entire page.
Internal links according to Google’s current head of webspam team Jon Mueller work at influencing Google rankings and as such are an important consideration to make when considering a site’s overall backlink profile.
Links whether internal or external are links and influence rankings in a powerful way. As such you should work at accruing them. Never underestimate the power of internal linking.
A silo structure can come in handy.
Here’s the step by step process to find and benefit the most from internal links
First find pages that you can boost. Copy paste them into a handy csv list.
Second find a list of keywords you want to ideally rank for on Google or other search engines.
You must already have a list of keywords you want to rank well for with the help of tools and the content you currently create.
Now use any free or paid rank tracking tool to find their current ranking. Export the list as a csv file to get digging into the keywords.
The main target keyword would be enough. Now separate out keywords that are ranking in the positions 1 or 0.
It would be better to arrange these keywords in a descending order so that the ones that send you the highest traffic are easy to spot and at the top followed by keywords that contribute the lowest traffic at the bottom.
You would get a lot more traffic if you ranked one position higher by leveraging internal links and other possibilities for your blog post.
And despite the page ranking for a high-traffic main keyword, there are also countless long tail keywords the particular page ranks for. By boosting with the help of internal links the positions for all those keywords rise in rankings.
Keep in mind two important things when it comes to ranking.
The url rating is a good measure of the authority of any page. If the page that ranks above you has a higher UR rating it means you’d need a lot of internal and external links to topple of that link.
And while it’s a useful metric to go by and understand why a page ranks with the help of UR metrics it’s not the end of the road. It might be a good guiding stick from time to time and isn’t always the best way to move things forward.
- b) Find relevant places from which to add internal links to the target page
Now that you have identified which pages would do better with the help of an internal link boost next find out suitable pages from where you can send out internal links to these pages.
In a simple manner you can discover those pages.
Google site: search
So if my site is seekdefo.com, the site search would be site:seekdefo.com along with the topic you want to provide a ranking boost to.
So with Google’s powerful search, you will be able to discover all contextually relevant pages for the particular phrase and discover dime a dozen articles you can use for internal linking.
Here’s a page that mentions the phrase “basic SEO”:
Discover dead pages and use them for your benefit
Backlinks are becoming harder than ever to come by.
It’s no less of an effort to acquire links. Apparently no one wants to give them for free. If you go for guest posting you’ll be met with so many roadblocks asking you to pay up at every turn. And the ones that are for free rarely have the required metrics to move the needle.
Time and effort to build links should therefore never end up on dead pages.
That wastes your link juice almost in entirety.
Use the best by links from any keyword research tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush and find out which links are getting the highest link juice.
The site explorer tab often lists out the best by links growth for pages which you can sort out by the number of referring domains.
By adding the 404 filter you will find out the links that are dead
There are a number of things you can do at this juncture.
You can revive the dead page if its deleted by accident.
Redirect to another page thus preserving the link juice in totality.
If the backlinks aren’t great leave it as such.
Build links to a secondary informational page to rank higher
When you create an informational piece of content it’s easy to build links to it.
I’ve tried this often and the demand for paying up for linking to commercial intent pages go up as I try to reach out.
But informational content has an easier pass.
Because money page content is harder to acquire links to you can adopt this strategy to help build links and rank your site.
Add internal links from that page to your “money” page.
What you’re doing in essence is directing the link power of this informational content to the money page and provide a boost in authority and link juice.
Informational content that’s relevant to the money page you want to rank for is easy to build links to. And you can then build internal links from this middleman page to content you want to rank the site for.
If you don’t already have such content, then you need to create something that has the potential to earn a fair few links.
This requires research and lots of work.
This can be easily done by searching for informational topics in your niche and find something that already has a lot of links.
Then create something that’s much more relevant and better compared to that which is presently existing.
Convince others to replace the existing link with links to your own content so that you can gain backlinks courtesy of them.
That’s because the middleman takes a cut of “authority.” Not all the link juice gets transferred to your money page via internal links. Some of it flows through other internal links on the page, and some will remain with the page itself.
But while this may seem like a negative, that often isn’t the case.
And the page also ranks for informational long tail keywords which means a lot more traffic will come your way.
This will do a world of good for your business.
Get more featured snippets
Featured snippets are the zeroth result. Consequent of their position they often hog the most traffic online.
Ahrefs in their 2016 study of 2 million searches found that 12.3% searches show snippets of which 8.6% of clicks go to snippets.
Now it’s 2019 and the numbers would have increased manifold today than before.
Only sites that are in the top 10 get their snippets featured and not others. And most likely if you rank in the top 5 the chances go up.
There are ways of owning and totally dominating the featured snippet so that you get twice the traffic than before.
For every keyword you’re ranking for and where you see competitors outcompeting you with a featured snippet is an opportunity for you to capture the snippet.
The best strategy to steal the snippet is by going back through what your competitor is doing and optimizing it the right way so that you can capture the ranking.
Sometimes just including a table suffices. Other times there needs to be a more detailed guide to help the reader make a choice and so on.
Refresh existing content
The advantages are more than one. Google has been de-indexing old content for sometime now. The crawl budget and crawling issues are well known.
Search engines need content on a constant basis to rank sites properly.
If you witness monthly traffic dropping off a cliff regularly it’s time to re-optimize and modify your posts for better ranking.
After the content refresh and deleting old and outdated content the traffic would go up by leaps and bounds.
But the problem is we do not know which posts can be updated so as to achieve the best return in terms of fresh traffic, engagement and more eyeballs to the content?
If you pore over your analytics channel and see something dropping off in terms of traffic consistently over the past few months, chances are that the content is performing poorly because of it not being relevant to its target audience anymore.
Those kinds of content are good candidates for refreshing.
Sometimes the traffic drop may be due to seasonality of content or because an update shook up the SERPs sending rankings tumbling down.
Always investigate the cause and effects before proceeding to take any chances with the content.
Freshness is taking over Google SERPs and that means you need to update the last published date frequently to get things moving in your direction.
Also watch out for your competitors to have a close look on what they’re doing? If they’re consistently republishing content or refreshing the dates that means the topic leans heavily on freshness.
I’ve seen examples of in top 10 or best kind of content that need regular upkeep to maintain rankings.
Discover low-hanging opportunities you can use to prime your rankings
Organic traffic often goes higher if you have a large number of referring domains to your website.
So if you manage to get higher number of links, odds are the traffic to your site would improve.
You might be getting lots of traffic from pages that have little to no backlinks, just sitting there on the top positions solely on the authority of the domain. With some backlinks or higher number of links that existing you can get more traffic and get higher rankings to these pages.
Convert unlinked mentions to links
There are many other opportunities present as well to get more links for you. One of these is getting people to link to you who have mentioned your brand name but didn’t reciprocate with a link. To that end you need to search for brand name mentions and make a contact list of people who you can approach to get some link love.
Reach out to them and thank them for the mention asking them to convert the unlinked mention to a functioning link.
Discover content gaps and fix them
Use content gaps to identify what you can do to improve traffic further.
Content gap refers to content that your competitors have on their sites through which they’re ranking well but isn’t something you broached on your site.
You can do this with simple research by identifying sites that are your competitors or similar to what you do and then go through the content they created for their blogs.
Finally find out content that they have covered, is relevant to your blog but you haven’t done anything about it.
And there’s also content gap on a page level where your competitor has covered lots of extra points and you haven’t.
As an algorithm Google has become smarter at recognizing semantically relevant content. THe more you talk about things that are relevant to the topic at hand the more your chances are at owning the SERPs.
Take advantage of your competitors’ dead pages to build links
Competitors have dead pages from time to time. I discovered quite a few of my competitor’s dead pages when casually looking through some content. If they do, there’s a good opportunity at hand for you to use it for bettering your odds at ranking well.
When the link is dead you cannot see the content on it except through Google’s cached pages or through archive.org.
You might be surprised that even highly popular blogs with millions of readers make this mistake.
There are error pages with lots of links and nothing on them that can be redirected and used to rank your site if used well.
So let’s see if we have anything similar on the blog that might serve as a relevant replacement for those dead links. And… it looks like we do:
If you’ve not got something that can be replaced with the dead link, create it immediately. And create something that’s much better than the original.
Reverse engineer image links
The images that you own copyright to are sometimes propagated throughout the internet.
This is something you can use to build links to your pages.
And here’s a great way to find out all those images, get backlinks that are really yours and get your site to the top of ranking.
Here’s how.
If you have branded infographics that’s the first kind of image you ought to be searching for on the web.
Upload them to Pixsy.
Pixsy will automatically scan the internet and find out all the links that use the particular image you have on your site.
You might find that some of those sites give links back to you and a dime a dozen. Here’s a great opportunity for you to contact all these people and get them to link back to you.
If you don’t want to do it and hate the manual work hire someone who’s a virtual assistant and can do the job for you perfectly, you can do that easily with the help of an online recruiting system to save valuable time and resources.
Final thoughts
SEO techniques are plentiful. This post lists only a few of the many tactics you can use to increase traffic to your website.
