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7 Proven SEO Tips to Grow Your Traffic

The Internet is mission critical for operating a business in today's digital world and online traffic is the OXYGEN that fuels business success.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one of the best ways to obtain online traffic for business. The end result of a well-executed SEO campaign is that your website will rank high in the search results for relevant keywords and phrases, which will drive quality traffic to your business.

There are no secret SEO tips that your competitors are using to rank over you in the SERPs. 

Search engines want to give a fair chance to everyone to succeed and get high rankings. And Google has always given us clear clues about what we can do to boost our SEO rankings.

That leaves you wondering:

What are those clues? And how can you implement them to see quick results with your business website?

That's exactly what we'll teach you today. 

In this guide, you'll learn seven proven SEO tips to grow your traffic and how to apply them on your website.

Let's dive in. 

1- Quality Content

Content should be the starting point to any webmaster looking to grow his or her business the right way.

Google loves its users and wants to serve them the best results, and it will love you too for publishing valuable content that helps others.

There are endless questions your audience might have in mind. And they want to find answers to those questions as fast as possible.

For example, a potential customer might be looking to learn how to overcome a challenge or how to make a well-informed purchase decision.

What seems like common knowledge to you is a gold mine for your customers. And no matter what your business is, there is a lot of value you can offer.

You can produce any type of content you want, including written words, videos, podcasts, etc. Each method is valuable in its own way. Some methods work well with specific niches. 

But the general idea is the same:

You must provide value.

If you don’t know where to start, think of the most common problems your customers face. Then, create content around the solutions and how they can be implemented.

2- Keyword Research

The importance of keyword research has always been a point of debate among SEOs.

Some experts say that without keyword research, your content will never see the light. Others believe that keyword research is a waste of time and say that you should instead spend your time producing lots of content.

Both parties are right in one thing and wrong in the other.

Keyword research is crucial because it guides you into understanding your potential customers. It helps you get a better idea about their needs and struggles, which allows you to meet them where they are with your content.

But at the same time...

Many keyword research tools are inaccurate with their data. They'll give you unspecific estimates around keyword difficulty and search volume.

Keyword research SEO tips

So, our advice when it comes to keyword research is this:

Look for keywords that have enough search volume, that are not too competitive, that you can write about in a unique voice.

Next:

It's time to sit down and churn out quality content about the subject. Don't obsess over keyword density or exact match keywords. Google has evolved a lot in recent years. 

Now, the algorithms can understand search term variations in any way you write them if it's the same theme.

3- Link Building

Of all the SEO techniques in this list, link building is the hardest one to do, especially for beginners.

But...

As difficult as it is, it's a technique that you must learn if you want to rank better.

The process is a bit more complicated than how we're going to explain it. But this is a useful simplification as it will help you understand how backlinks work.

Backlinks are links coming to your site from other websites. They pass link juice to your domain to make it stronger and more authentic.

Search engines will then use those links to estimate the strength of your domain in the SERPs. And the stronger your site is, the higher your Google rankings will be.

There are many techniques to build backlinks, and it all depends on your growth strategy. 

You can, for example: 

  • Reach out to others in your industry to give you a link
  • Publish guest posts on popular blogs in your niche
  • Look for broken links online and offer a replacement
  • Land guest post appearances 
  • Create shareable infographics and images

4- Internal Linking

Internal linking is kind of similar to link building. 

But:

Instead of the links coming from other websites, they'll be internal pages on your site linking to each other.

Internal linking is a great way to connect all your pages together, which allows spiders or bots to crawl your website more efficiently. 

Think of it this way:

Since all your pages are linked to each other, a single bot will visit one page and end up crawling your whole site. That improves your site indexation speed and gets your content to appear faster in the SERPs.

Internal links also have link value. And they can help you boost your rankings in Google. Site pages with many internal links coming to them will get you better rankings. 

Also: 

Internal linking helps you keep visitors longer on your website. A potential customer may land on a post in your blog and end up reading multiple articles around the subject. 

Now, you may be wondering:

What's a good strategy to link all my pages together?

Keep things simple.

Be sure to have at least one link leading to each page on your website, and another one leaving from it.

Internal linking SEO tips

Meaning:

Each page you publish must be linked to another page, and it must receive a link from another different page.

This way, you'll create a big loop that interlinks all your content together and covers every single page on your site.

5- On-Site SEO

This one might be obvious, but we've seen many webmasters neglect it in the past.

You must optimize your web pages for SEO in order for you to get the highest rankings on Google. The process includes a few simple techniques that will become second-hand knowledge as you do them more and more.

Here's a list of the most crucial on-site SEO practices:

  • Write short, relevant, and catchy title tags that include your main keyword.
  • Optimize your meta description with keywords and attractive copy.
  • Include your main keywords in your page headings and body text.
  • Create shorter URLs that include your main keyword.
  • Include your main keyword in your image file name and the alt text of the image.
  • Compress your images for faster loading.
  • Use LSI keywords in your content to increase relevance and semantics.

Google wants you to optimize your web pages this way because that helps their algorithms serve more accurate results. And the reward for you is huge boosts in rankings and highly targeted traffic.

An on-page ninja SEO move that you can use is to create a relevant video that would fit well the content on the page. Once you’ve created the video you can perform SEO to rank the video the main keyword that you are targeting for that page. Then you’ll need to embed the video somewhere on the page. This will give you a boost in your rankings for that targeted keyword. 

6- Mobile Friendliness

According to Statistia, mobile devices accounted for 59% of search traffic in the United States in 2019. And those numbers are only going up.

Search engines have always valued the importance of mobile traffic. 

What this means is:

If your website isn't mobile-friendly, more than half of your traffic will be lost. Even worse, Google won't even give you rankings once the robots see that your website doesn't serve mobile users.

If you're wondering what mobile friendliness is, it's simple:

A mobile-friendly website is a site that changes its' design and functionality to fit smaller screens. That helps mobile users have a great user experience without sacrificing any value.

There is a free tool on Google that you can use to test your website for mobile-friendliness. 

First, go to Mobile-Friendly Test.

Enter your website URL and wait for a few seconds. And the tool will scan your web pages and give you the results.

Mobile friendly site test

If you get a green text, it means that you’re good to go.

If not, here’s what you’ll get in the results.

Failed mobile-friendliness test

The best thing about this tool is this:

Mobile responsiveness report

You'll get a full report about your website if there are any errors. And that will help you understand the problems with your design and how you can fix them.

7- Website Speed

Website speed is a huge part of providing great user experience. 

Ask yourself:

When was the last time you waited for a web page for more than 10 seconds to load? 

We all click away when a site takes long to give us what we're looking for.

Google is all about user experience.

That's why, in today's SEO, page loading speed is a crucial ranking factor. If your website loads fast and gives users what they want, you'll be one step closer to being able to rank well.

If not, you'll never hit page #1 in the SERPS.

To test your site loading speed, go to Pingdom or GTmetrix.

Next, enter your website URL and wait for a few seconds.

Site Speed test

Your results will come back with everything you need to know about improving your site speed.

Site Speed reports

Get this:

If you're using WordPress, everything you have installed on your website matters. Your themes and plugins play a major role in loading speed.

So, try to stick to a quick-loading, error-free theme that goes with your brand. And be sure to install the minimum number of plugins possible. 

Wrapping It Up

We've given you everything you must know to grow your traffic! Now it's your turn to do the work. Follow the SEO tips from our list above. And then, it all boils down to consistency in providing value.

Ready to take your business to the next level with the best SEO agency in the Midwest? 

HighMark SEO is a team of dedicated professional marketers and SEOs. And we'll guide you through each step of the process until we hit your goal. 

Get started now by scheduling a call with us here.

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