14 Fundamental SEO Tactics to Increase Organic Traffic
In the world of SEO, hundreds of changes are made to Google’s ranking algorithm every year. Therefore, SEO strategies that worked last year may not work this year and vice versa.
Organic search engine optimization consists of smaller sub-strategies like keyword research and link building, which help your website rank at the top of an organic, unpaid search engine results page.
Optimizing your site for organic search is crucial because 75 percent of searchers don’t even click on the second page of results. If you’re not ranking highly on search engines, your website won’t receive any traffic, making it hard to bring in sales and leads.
Well-established digital marketing companies can keep you updated on search algorithm updates and new strategies for the latest and greatest SEO tactics.
We’ve listed the top SEO techniques you need to use to increase organic traffic to your site in 2022. You can improve your visibility and traffic by implementing these SEO best practices. We cover both basic and advanced SEO techniques for 2022 so that you can maintain and increase the quality of your organic search presence.
1. Find the Best Performing Pages of Your Competitors
Finding your competitors’ best-performing pages is an effective way to understand where their organic traffic originates and how it is driven.
You can gain insights from analyzing your competitors’ top pages by looking at things like –
- The content/keyword gap
- Link gap
- Improving existing content
- Cannibalizing keywords
Think of opportunity analysis as a shortcut to discovering where your most significant wins might be. Identify potential pages to focus on based on competitor activity rather than keyword research.
2. Implement Content Optimization
SEO refers to publishing content regularly, targeting new keywords, and gaining links for the pages.
SEO practitioners know, however, that improving your existing content with the assistance of a process called “content optimization” will increase your organic traffic more strategically.
A content optimization process aims to improve a page’s on-page meta tags, such as:
- The correct density of primary and secondary keywords
- Appropriate word count
- Ensuring excellent readability
- Optimal meta titles and descriptions
3. Gain Authority Backlinks by Using Digital PR
Getting backlinks from authority websites at scale is one of the most challenging aspects of SEO. Several strategies are available to generate relevant backlinks, but not all of them can be scaled effectively.
Backlinks are one of Google’s most important ranking factors. A digital PR strategy is used by businesses to gain a more substantial online presence. It is one of the key tactics used to gain editorially placed links on your website by creating excellent content when modifying the website.
Digital PR is about creating content for journalists and publishers that they want to cover and link to in their articles. For example:
- Infographics
- Research studies
- Expert insights
A well-written story can deliver several editorially earned links from publications where your next customer may be lurking online. Aside from links, digital PR has many other benefits –
- Increase brand awareness
- Increase referral traffic
- Create social engagement
- Increase sales
4. Deliver a Flawless Page Experience
Almost 70% of consumers said that page speed influences their willingness to buy from a website. A page’s load speed is measured via the Core Web Vitals, including the following metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Aims for an LCP of fewer than 2.5 seconds after page loading.
- Interactivity is measured by First Input Delay (FID): Google recommends an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
- Visual stability is assessed by Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Google recommends a CLS of less than 0.01.
5. Create Quality Content
A successful content marketing campaign is about creating thorough, valuable, and unique content that meets the needs of your visitors. We’re not talking about 500-word articles here. It’s about creating data-driven content.
You can also utilize AI writers to generate high-quality, keyword-rich content quickly and save a lot of time and effort simultaneously by taking their assistance.
Tips for creating high-quality content –
1. Format your content accurately for readability
2. Understand your search intent and call to action
3. Diversify your content with multimedia
4. Identify what’s trending and generate content ideas.
5. Review and edit your content before publishing
6. Measure and adjust your content strategy based on analytical data
6. Click-Worthy Meta Descriptions
In search engine results pages (SERPs), meta descriptions succinctly identify a web page’s content. The meta description serves as a preview of the specific page and allows users to decide if they want to click on it or not. Many people read meta descriptions to learn what the page is all about.
Creating an optimized meta description for your page is essential to improve search engine indexing and click-through rates. If you don’t, the search engine may create one for you, which may or may not be as accurate or compelling as your own.
7. Pay Attention to Topic Clusters
In this evolving digital world, Google’s main objective is to understand the intent of its users — what they want, what they expect, and, more specifically, which search results would be most helpful in answering their query.
With the help of digital marketing companies, you can build a robust online presence that helps to engage and nurture your customers. There are three things that you must keep in mind:
- Know Your Target Audience – Your content strategy will be driven entirely by your target audience.
- Cluster Content – Instead of focusing on individual keywords, group all your content under different categories.
- Conduct Keyword Research – You can easily create blog posts or other types of content that answer customers’ specific questions by doing keyword research, which will lead to higher brand recognition.
8. Creating Voice Assistant-Friendly Content
With 4.2 billion voice assistants worldwide, searching has become faster, more conversational, and more complex. Running cloud infrastructure for voice systems will be expensive, consider a solution for gcp cost optimization. Moreover, your website must be optimized for voice search. Here’s how:
- Use long-tail keywords
- Utilize structured data
9. Use The Right Headings
Catchy titles and headlines are another simple way to boost organic traffic. The *title> HTML tag defines a web page’s title. It should serve as a concise description of the content of the page.
Please pay attention to the headings of your on-page content since they give structure to your content and help Google better understand the content. The primary subheading is enclosed in the *h2> tag within your HTML document and further subheadings are held in *h3 and *h6> tags.
Include your secondary keywords in your subheadings. This signals to the search engine that your content covers not just the primary topic but also other areas, hitting the subject from multiple angles. Thus, organic traffic increases.
10. Update Your Old Content Regularly
In some cases, existing content has authority and an established readership. So, rather than creating something from scratch, boosting an existing post’s performance in the search results can be made simpler by adding new information and extra content.
As soon as you are ready to update an older post, follow these guidelines:
- Rewrite the introduction and conclusion
- Remove/combine any weak parts
- Research and add new content
- Update any stats, facts, and quotes
- Replacing any outdated or irrelevant images with current
- Updated examples/case studies
11. Consider Optimizing for ‘People Also Ask’
In 2022, Google’s first page will encompass a lot more than just a few blue links, and search engine optimization experts need to update their techniques and strategies accordingly.
People Also Ask (PAA) is another feature that SEOs should utilize. PAA is a Google-rich snippet that displays additional information based on a user’s search query. In other words, these are questions appearing on your SERPs.
According to Semrush Sensor, the average percentage of SERPs with PAA is between 40-42% for desktop and mobile.
12. Improve Image Search Optimization
Visual search plays a significant role in traffic generation, so if you’re not optimizing for it, you could be overlooking opportunities to gain traffic from a source that your competitors aren’t considering. Let’s also not forget that visibility is essential.
According to web statistics, visual content gets 94% more views than non-visual content:
By reading our guide to image SEO, you can learn how you should optimize your images for search engines, but in brief, you should be paying attention to
- Alt tags
- File names
- Resizing images to the correct size
- Reducing file sizes
- Making a sitemap for your images
- Using a CDN to host your images
13. Eliminate Irrelevant Links
Getting suitable backlinks will increase your Google ranking, but the wrong ones can hurt your order. Therefore, if your site has toxic links in its link profile, the first thing you should do is remove them. Different digital marketing companies specializing in SEO can help their clients’ websites rank highly in search results.
It is recommended that you clean up toxic links on your site if they are present in its link profile. But first, let’s look at why you might have harmful links on your site in the first place:
- Link building using exact match anchor texts
- Links purchased
- Low-quality directory or bookmarking sites
- Low-quality article marketing or guest posting campaigns
- Negative search engine optimization
You can find toxic links using different backlink audit tools where you can set up your domain and view a clear breakdown of how your profile breaks down according to risk.
14. Optimize Your Internal Links
The importance of internal links for SEO has been evident for years, and it will remain so for the foreseeable future. Optimizing internal links for your priority pages is a low-cost SEO technique that doesn’t require too much time and staff resources.
Internal linking has two primary purposes:
- To distribute the value of your backlinks to your pages
- To help users navigate to the most relevant content on your website
You can maximize the effectiveness of your internal links by following these three tips:
- Top of the Funnel (TOFU) & Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) content should include internal links that drive the readers closer to conversions and revenue-generating pages.
- You must use descriptive text anchors for internal links to guide users and search engines around your site.
- Google recommends a reasonable number of internal links, so your content shouldn’t contain too many of them.
Wrapping Up
Google’s algorithms change every year, forcing business owners and marketers to keep up-to-date with the latest changes. To stay on top of these changes, focus on technical trends, backlinks, and site speed.
You have a lot to consider, but remember that you don’t need to be an SEO expert overnight. However, make an effort to understand even the basics of SEO, and you will see significant improvements in your website’s click-through rates, engagement, and rankings.