For businesses, large or small, it is never enough to have a website. How many people visit and interact with their websites matters the most. SEO traffic, a metric suggesting how many people visit a website from organic search results, has always been an important driver of overall business success.
Traffic generated through SEO is different from paid traffic, as it offers long-term benefits. Direct traffic always translates into better SEO ranking in SERPs, and better rankings mean your website becomes visible to a larger audience. Various SEO strategies can help boost traffic to a website, but finding what suits your business matters a lot.
Conduct Comprehensive Keyword Research
The aim of websites these days is to form and implement an SEO strategy that increases traffic. This means asking what is SEO traffic, where it comes from, and what drives it.
SEO traffic is attracted by keywords, making comprehensive keyword research critical among SEO best practices. Thorough keyword research reveals two things: the search behavior of the target audience and its preferences.
The research provides valuable insights into how the target audience phrases their search inquiries. How the audience words their inquiry often reveals their intent and reason for searching, not just what they are searching for. It also explains their frequency of use, revealing the keywords and phrases needed to create relevant, high-quality content that meets their audience’s needs. This includes conversational queries to capture the voice search traffic.
Comprehensive keyword research has several components. For instance:
- Seed Keyword Identification – a process that starts with deciding which broad search terms are related to the website’s niche.
- Long-tail keyword analysis – focusing on the specific short phrases used as search terms to reveal those with the lowest competition but highest potential for conversion.
- Search Intent Analysis – categorizing keywords based on whether they are informational, commercial, or transactional.
- Keyword Difficulty Assessment – focusing on how competitive keywords are to establish which to give priority.
Keeping track of your competitor’s keyword and SEO strategies is equally important. This helps identify any gaps and missed opportunities. Various tools, such as an AI Overview Checker, can assist with the process. These tools are designed to provide daily insights into competitor visibility and keyword tracking, especially in AI-driven search results. This dynamic analysis puts you in a better position to identify the keywords your competitors are targeting to tweak your strategy accordingly.
Optimize On-Page SEO Elements
Website optimization includes on-page SEO, the practice of optimizing the individual elements of the site’s web pages. It helps with indexing and ranking, with a higher rank earning more traffic from search engines. On-page SEO also enhances the user experience (UX), prolongs engagement, and increases conversions.
In SEO digital marketing, some things are not under the control of the website, but the on-page SEO is. Its content and HTML source codes can be optimized to improve the chances of ranking high on SERPs (search engine results pages), increasing organic traffic.
To optimize on-page SEO elements and rapidly drive more traffic:
- summarize the page’s content in compelling meta descriptions that include relevant keywords
- structure the content logically using the H1, H2 convention including keywords where appropriate
- position the target keyword at the front of a phrase 60 characters or less when optimizing the title tags
- include keywords in short descriptive URLs
- ensure critical mobile-responsiveness
- provide the search engine crawlers with additional content using structured data
- Read further about on-page optimization in the guide written by SEO HERO.
Create High-Quality, Engaging Content
The success of every SEO content strategy depends on the quality of the content. The best SEO content is characterized by depth, accuracy, and relevance. It’s well-researched, insightful, and engaging, encouraging visitors to stay on the site longer through comments, shares, and backlinks.
High-quality, optimized content, a major ranking consideration for Google, plays a pivotal role in driving traffic to your website. However, SEO content must be clearly organized and have a well-defined structure for optimization to be recognized by the search engine crawlers.
The benefits of offering high-quality content include:
- Engagement, signaling the site as credible, improving ranking, and encouraging organic traffic.
- The site’s key user metrics, such as time on site and the bounce rate, are enhanced. They relate to metrics in Google’s Core Web Vitals.
- The site earns authoritative backlinks and social shares, boosting its domain authority and visibility.
Focus on Enhanced User Experience (UX)
An important factor to realize when considering how to increase SEO is that the user experience has priority over everything. It’s Google’s primary motivator and encompasses everything about the websites their leading search engine is recommending, such as design, functionality, and content.
The UX impacts rankings directly, and being well-crafted enhances and boosts present and future SEO. Overall satisfaction with the site lifts its visibility by influencing key user metrics. These metrics have a strong influence on ranking.
To improve UX and drive more traffic:
- optimize page speed by browser caching, compressing images, and minifying code
- implement responsive design for functionality across a range of devices
- improve site architecture and internal linking for logical navigation
Leverage Technical SEO
To increase website traffic, SEO can be enhanced technically by optimizing the site’s infrastructure and foundation. This technical SEO makes the site easier to crawl, index, and understand by search engines.
Technical SEO includes:
- Site speed optimization – for fast load times that enhance UX
- Mobile-friendliness – responsiveness on mobile devices
- XML sitemaps – for crawling content and efficient indexing
- URL structure – with keywords incorporated in short descriptions benefiting indexing and UX
- SSL security – implementing HTTPS for security, building trust with users and search engines
- Structured data – the schema markup aids indexing by providing additional context
- Crawlability and indexation – it ensures the crawler has easy access to the site’s most important pages
- Site architecture – link distribution facilitating easy navigation
Build High-Quality Backlinks
The more quality backlinks a site has, the better rankings it gets, making backlinks essential to the White Label SEO strategy. Backlinks play a crucial role in SEO, as they act as authoritative endorsements, signaling reliable and trustworthy content. By leveraging White Label SEO services, businesses can efficiently build high-quality backlinks, enhancing their clients’ search engine rankings while maintaining a seamless and professional brand presence.
Check any high traffic website, and you will notice a robust backlink profile. Backlinks drive traffic in several ways, spreading the website strategically across the web, increasing visibility, and attracting wider audiences.
Quick ways to build backlinks are:
- offering linkable assets such as data-driven studies or in-depth guides
- guest blogging and posting on authority sites
- broken link building
- developing existing content using the skyscraper technique
- HARO (Help a Reporter Out) press mentions
Leverage Local SEO for Traffic
A local business with walk-ins or even an online business serving a particular geographic location must leverage local SEO to boost website traffic. Various strategies can be used here, beginning with creating and optimizing the Google Business Profile (GBP) listing.
A box of GBP listings appears when someone looks for a product or service in their local area. This is usually triggered by a user typing in phrases like “in [city]” or “near me” – like “the best bakery near me”. It suggests that creating optimized content for these “local keywords” is vital.
Also, it is vital to claim your GBP listing by sharing vital business information like contact, address, and hours of operation. Additional information can also be added to explain a business to potential customers. Be sure to pick relevant categories and add videos/photos to make your listing more visually appealing – it also makes a business look more authentic.
Besides using GBP, social media platforms can also be leveraged to reach new audiences in a particular geographic location. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram are all useful for building relationships with local followers. When these followers share your content, it sends Google a signal about the authenticity of your business, which helps your local SEO efforts and boosts rankings and traffic.
Monitor SEO Performance Regularly
Doing everything right and seeing your rankings or traffic without budging at all is possible. Therefore, SEO campaigns should be monitored regularly to identify areas of improvement.
The most important metrics to track are keyword rankings, CTRs, dwell time, bounce rate, and overall traffic increase. Also, include competitors in your research to see what works for them. Sometimes, simply replicating their strategy coupled with better quality content can outrank them. Use SEO tools to monitor and analyze your performance.
Conclusion
SEO traffic determines the success of a business online. Paid traffic may help, but not as much as organic traffic, which is free, targeted, sustainable, and measurable. Many strategies are available to increase website traffic but be sure to get the basics right. Don’t forget to take advantage of SEO tools to research, tweak, and track the success of your SEO campaigns, which will directly impact how much website traffic you get.
