When you want to drive traffic, search engine marketing can help set you on top of your competitors for a while, but nothing beats SEO in the long run. For this reason, search engine optimization remains the one true efficient strategy that businesses utilize to draw traffic away from their competition and to themselves.
But SEO is so broad. It has many intricacies, so mastering and implementing all the SEO techniques will take you years of practice. Well, with search engines updating their algorithms from time to time, so much will still change. However, some SEO techniques will never burn out as the importance of quality content still carries the same value.
Conclusively, let’s look at some key SEO techniques that can help you pull organic traffic easier and faster to your blog from search engines. These techniques will contain practical insights, which will show you how to get it all done while drawing examples from blogs that have practiced these techniques consistently.
Setting Up Your Site For Optimal Performance
A lot of websites possess quality content that can make them show up on the top of SERPs, however, poor site structure and optimization can crumble their chances. Testing your page ranking using Keyword Rank Checker is a very important step. When you input your URL, you can have access to see certain keywords where you’re ranking.
If you truly seek to sit on top of the result pages, then you have to start with understanding the keywords you have and what other keywords you need to rank for. For checking the overall health of your site, simply head over to GTMetrix, where you get real-time analysis on your site speed, bounce rate, and a lot more.
10 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic in 2021
There are a lot of techniques that can help you draw organic traffic from the search engines to your blog. However, these we are about to list here are the best and easiest strategies to implement that will give you the highest results in less time. So, the strategies include:
10. Invest in Long-Form Content
According to Neil Patel, long-form content offers you a higher number of backlinks than short-form content. Now, this doesn’t mean that writing long-form content is the best strategy every time, however, it simply acts as a signal to a lot of individuals that long-form content means the writer has a firm knowledge of the subject.
Long-form content isn’t perfect for all forms of content. Certain contents require an immediate response or a well-outlined set of directives. These directives can lead any user to their goal, and this is vital, as satisfying user intent has greater importance compared to pleasing search engine robots.
For example, when a user makes a search query on “how to drive”, the user isn’t looking for well-detailed content that analyzes all the key aspects of a vehicle. The user isn’t completely interested in knowing about the different car engines, transmission processes, and even characteristics.
As a blogger, you might think that writing exhaustively on this topic will make you rank for the keyword. Well, I hate to break it to you that a set of clear directives on how to start and move a vehicle well will trump all your hard work.
On the other hand, a topic like this one you’re reading demands a stronger level of detail, hence, you can address it as a long form content. And long form contents can help you target over one keyword, which is an age old SEO technique. But when you need to use bullet points, use them as search engine easily pick them off.
Optimizing Older Posts
When you probably don’t want to write another 2,000 words for an article, an excellent strategy would be to check if you have anything similar to what you want to write on your blog. When you find something with a high level of similarity, you only need to edit it and expand on the content with your new train of thought.
In choosing a content to update, you must ensure it has enough authority – people have constantly read it and found it interesting. Of course, the content needs to be in line with your current research. You would need to use a tool like Google Search Console to check the behaviour of the content and apply the vital changes immediately.
9. Utilize YouTube SEO
YouTube remains the platform with the second biggest traffic in the world. When you have a video, that solves a certain problem, uploading it on YouTube will make it reach a wider audience and build you a strong list of subscribers that can help you build your brand and fan base.
YouTube results show up on search engines as much as results from other normal articles. So, you must ensure you can optimize to show up for results that demand the presence of a video before any sort of article. To get visible on search engines, you need to:
Create Playlists
Playlists help users find videos that are closely related. For example, you can create a playlist for copywriting videos that will outline subjects such as “6 Copyrighting Hacks For Any Beginner” and “How To Start Your Copywriting Career” instead of leaving them as stand-alone videos.
Optimize Your Video For Search Engines
When your videos cannot show up on search engines, then you’re losing a lot of traffic and money. So, you must do better for yourself by ensuring you optimize your videos to rank for select search engine queries in your specific niche or area of interest.
A good way to optimize your videos would be to use the right hashtags, keywords, and other SEO techniques that are peculiar to the platform alone.
Use Custom Thumbnails
Picking up videos without copyright can get you a serious ban from the platform. So, I’m sure you know about that and wouldn’t want to dabble into such practice.
Creating original videos that will get you traffic would have to be on vital popular topics. In this case, you need to personalize your video to stand out from the crowd and you need custom thumbnails. A great thumbnail influences click-through rates by a large margin.
8. Focus on Topic Clusters Instead of Keywords
Search engines are skyrocketing. They’re introducing ways that ensure every user’s intent is satisfied. By gauging a user’s search path, they offer results that attune to the user’s original intentions. And this desire has made search engines like Google introduce a featured snippet box that directly answers the user’s questions.
The truth remains; you can’t show up for certain queries which need a direct and immediate answer, and not a long list of directives or steps to take. So, your keyword targeting has to expand from just keywords to clusters of topics, so you can get to rank for them on all search engines.
In creating this kind of content that will help you achieve this goal, you need to:
i. Know Your Audience
Every content is not for everyone. Many people want to get more website visitors for their platforms, so they believe by drawing more people, they can easily achieve it. For example, when you draw men to a platform where they sell women’s clothing, what do you think will happen? Well, to say the least, you’ll make little or no sales and you’ll have an increased bounce rate.
So, you see that knowing your audience is vital to your success. You must understand their personalities, desires, confusions, problems, etc. With this data available to you, you will make wiser decisions regarding your content which will spur growth on your platform.
To get information on your audience, you can use so many web analysis tools. These web analysis tools will help you get data on your audience’s activities on your platform, which is a key indicator to show what’s working and what you need to eliminate immediately.
ii. Turn Content into Clusters
This strategy was introduced by Hubspot, and it’s efficient in helping you rank by taking many similar content pieces and turning them into a cluster. This way, your keywords can combine their unique strengths to help you rank.
For a cluster, you need two types of pages. They include:
- A pillar page: These are basically the core pages of your platform (for example, on an educational site, this will often be top-level categories) which give you heavy traffic and where you can rank for a broad range of keywords.
- Cluster pages: These are pages that strongly connect to your most relevant pages. They basically answer questions or cover topics related to the pillar page in greater detail and with stronger emphasis.
iii. Keyword Research
I guess you have figured out that you can’t create a cluster when you don’t know your audience and the keywords they’re searching for. Keyword research will forever remain important in the chain of command when it comes to content. And I mean every form of content you can find.
Keyword Research is vital because although you might fully optimize your content for the best user intent, search engine robots still need to find it appealing and ensure you follow the right SEO techniques, and inputting your keyword is one of them.
In doing keyword research, there are so many tools you can find. However, some of the best tools I highly recommend include:
- Ahrefs
- Moz
- SemRush
- Ubersuggest
- Buzzsumo
In choosing a keyword tool, you need to check your budget as most of these tools come at a premium price with Ahrefs being the most expensive and arguably the most efficient.
7. Create A SetUp For Unique User Experience
User experience is vital. When a new user comes to your platform and leaves with a poor experience, the user will give you bad reviews that will make you lose traffic and a lot of potential customers. And any of this can be cause of slow site speed, too many broken links and much more.
To create an exceptional user experience for your website visitors, you must implement key SEO techniques that will help your platform. And some of them include:
Create Original Readable Content
Creating original readable content is one of the vital SEO techniques you must use if you want to be visible on the internet. With quality content, your bounce rate will be largely reduced, causing you to gain the trust of search engines and improve your user experience.
Utilize Softwares
With the right software, you can strongly improve the user experience of your website. Some key tools include Optimizely, Crazy Egg, and much more. For a detailed understanding of key software that will give you a unique experience, you can find some useful tools for UI/UX designers.
Adopt Content Writing Style
A content writing style will make it easy for you to create content that will show up on search engine result pages. While there are a lot of styles you can use, it’s vital you adopt a style that suits you, and you can always manipulate. This is one of the strongest SEO techniques you can use.
6. Optimize for Voice Search
Reports estimate there are 111.8 million people in the US using voice search features—a 9.5 percent increase from the previous year. This means that currently, nearly 40 percent of all internet users in the US and a third of its total population are users of voice search (eMarketer, 2019).
With this sort of statistic, you would understand that people are gradually inclining to the use of voice search rather than typing, which is the predominant method of communication. This is one of the few SEO techniques you cannot fail to ignore.
Here are some interesting facts to further prove what voice search is doing :
- 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020, per comScore. (Is it even a post about voice search if you don’t lead with this stat??)
- About 30% of all searches will be done without a screen by 2020, per Gartner.
- 13% of all households in the United States owned a smart speaker in 2017, per OC&C Strategy Consultants. That number is predicted to rise to 55% by 2022.
- The voice recognition market will be a $601 million industry by 2019, per Technavio.
- One-in-six Americans (16%) own a voice-activated smart speaker, per Edison Research and NPR.
So, you can see that although texting remains the most dominant communication force, voice search is gaining credence and more people have found it easier to use. Of course, you can use voice search to set your alarms, reminders, and make local orders, but that’s just the scratch of the possibilities involved.
Voice search is vital when users when you want a particular keyword, and when this keyword is long tail, it adds an extra layer of advantage. According to Backlinko, 40.7% of voice search results are taken from featured snippets but remember this figure will constantly be changing. The remaining results can be gotten from anywhere on a web page.
5. Measure SEO Performance
When you consider SEO, reporting and critical analysis form two aspects of its metrics. Without getting the number from the numbers, you won’t make structured decisions that will improve your search and make you rank for several strong targeted keywords.
In understanding analytics, you must find out certain key things. They include:
- Pages that your customer loved
- Places Where They Spent Time
- Pages That Gave Them a Poor Experience
- Type of Keyword That Draws More Traffic etc.
It’s difficult to keep tabs on all this data without the help of certain tools. I would have loved to list all the tools for you and give brief explanations, but I have done something better – I have written a complete article on some great tools that can help you keep track of your data while offering you automated insight reports.
Kindly read our article on 9 Tools for Easy Competitive Website Analysis.
4. Target Local Searchers with Local Landing Pages and Listings
When anyone wants to make a purchase in an unfamiliar community, they seek local listing that can house the type of product they want to buy. About half (46%) of all searches on Google are from people looking for local information. And with Google focusing on helping local businesses get online visibility with Google My Business, the process simply gets easier.
In targeting local searchers effectively, you need to do three key things effectively. They include:
A. Crosscheck Your Listings
Search engines are powerful and highly intelligent, however, their strength depends on certain pieces of data they pick up from unique sources. Without this data, they won’t achieve so much as they won’t supply any searcher with the necessary information.
When a search engine finds data, it immediately adopts it into its system without checking the timeline of that data. Hence, you can always encounter search engine result pages that backdate to contents that have spent about five years on the internet, yet still rank for a relevant keyword.
So, you have to a responsibility to ensure that every information they pick from you is updated. With up-to-date information available, your listing becomes original and your leads don’t suffer getting redirected to another platform after they believe they’ve found a solution.
To achieve this, you need to utilize the listing features of Google. You must edit each aspect of the listing, filling it with current and correct information. With such an update, the search engines easily pick up the data and reflect it to users who are seeking to patronize your brand.
B. Create & Optimize Local Landing Pages
Now this might strike a level of similarity with the first, however, this has a lot to do with search engine optimization and not just listing. With quality search engine optimized result pages, you can always show up in the face of visitors without a list.
Many factors influence local SEO results, although the quality of links remains optimal. But you can’t get genuine quality backlinks when you’re not the pride and joy of searchers within that community for a keyword or keywords. When you show up for a keyword, you can and should rank for, you can boost your chances. This remains one of the strongest SEO techniques that a lot of professionals still implement.
For example, when you run a laundry based in Ohio, you can show up for keywords such as “best places to do laundry”. However, in optimizing for local SEO, adopt the following key strategies:
- Executing well-detailed and comprehensive keyword research to find local keywords relating to your product or service.
- Building a new page on your website and optimizing it for those keywords. Inputting the phrase in key areas of your blog such as meta description, page title, heading tags, image alt text, and on-site content.
- Drawing links from local directory listings to that page to strengthen location-based keyword rankings
C. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is similar to our previous conversation, however, there’s a difference between the two important strategies. For technical SEO, you must understand the use and importance of schemas.
Schemas are small snippets of data that give extra information pruning down to details to users and search engines. In fact, you don’t need to possess any knowledge of coding to use a schema as many platforms, especially search engines can help you generate it.
To strengthen your position, you can add a JSON (Javascript Object Notation) injection through Google Tag Manager. This is a familiar form of data that both humans and search engines can read. However, to effect this, you would need a basic knowledge of foundational programming.
3. Mobile Optimization
Mobile phones remain the fastest and easiest means to connect with people and the internet. Majority of internet purchases are done through a series of mobile transactions and this is something that even Google pays attention to.
Let me show you some statistics from Single Grain.
- 77% of Americans own a smartphone
- 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile device in the last 6 months
- 40% of all e-commerce purchases during the 2018 holiday season were made on a smartphone
- 80% of shoppers used a mobile phone inside of a physical store to either look up product reviews, compare prices or find alternative store locations
With search engines focusing on accelerated mobile pages, ensure that mobile optimization remains one of the SEO techniques you’re giving rapid attention to.
2. Focus Strongly On Technical SEO
Technical SEO is one of the SEO techniques that you must utilize if you want to thrive and remain relevant in a large pool of competitors. Although many people find technical SEO somewhat confusing, it boils down to a few key things that I will list here.
Fix Errors
Errors on your site will reduce your traffic and make a lot of your pages irrelevant. You should seek to address this problem by correcting such errors. You can fix these errors by using a simple redirect, or you completely erase all the broken links on your pages.
Invest in Crawling
Google automatically crawls content from every web platform and creates a uniform arrangement for every link. But you wouldn’t want them to keep coming to your site seldomly when you can get them to come immediately you drop a fresh post. You can do this when you invest in softwares that will automate crawling certain pages on your website.
Ensure Site Security
When your site is unsafe, anything can happen. You can get attacked by hackers and even by a virus that you didn’t know existed. A secure site would make you trustworthy, as search engines can display your results for users and they never get hacked.
Enable AMP For Mobile
Mobile phones will keep trumping every other device in terms of usage. Hence, candid attention would be given to mobile pages when it comes to search results of different kinds and categories. So, optimizing for accelerated mobile pages would give your technical SEO the great boost that it truly desires.
1. Build a Strong Diversified Backlink Structure
Links can never lose their importance. According to Page on ePower, links are a currency, a primary means of navigation, citations of information, a symbol of trust, a method of promotion, and on and on it goes. When it comes to the value and importance of links, the list is probably endless.
Although links are vital, certain links trump the other links. For example, links from a website with higher domain authority would be better for your young platform than links from websites that don’t have any serious authority or command on the web.
When you understand this, the next temptation would be to target high ranking web platforms and disparage the smaller ones. Well, if you were to do this, Google would penalize you and you know what harm that penalty can bring to your platform in a matter of days.
So, you need to ensure you keep putting out high-quality content that will draw back links for you without you making a fuss and you try to disavow links consciously. When you unnecessarily disavow links, you’re walking on the very deep part of caution.
Conclusion
SEO is rapidly evolving. When you don’t understand and implement the right techniques, you get left with the pack. As a business owner or marketer, you must challenge yourself to be in line with the latest strategies.
Ensure you keep developing yourself in creative content writing, copywriting and preliminary SEO. This way, you’ll stay on top of digital marketing trends and maintain a highly relevant position in your marketplace.
A good way to kick off would be to know and utilize all these SEO techniques. However, you don’t think to bother yourself with all this technical knowledge which would demand more time and money from you. Simply, let us handle the complete process for you from setup to completion. Book a free consultation session with us today by clicking “I want a Free Consultation Session” so we can help you put all the SEO techniques in place.
