SEO Techniques are key. Any website owner, from a personal blog to an e-commerce brand, has one goal in common: more website traffic. The more targeted traffic you can attract to your site, the more of an opportunity you have to convert those visitors into whatever call-to-action you have in place.
Now, any website can attract large-scale traffic with essentially no limit on the amount available, but there is a catch. This involves paying per click and it comes with a high price tag. Most businesses and websites don’t have the budget available to open up the traffic faucet, and with rising pay-per-click costs it makes achieving an ROI while running these campaigns at scale very difficult.
Organic traffic is always preferred and when SEO is done correctly it can result in highly targeted visitors hitting your website around the clock. Imagine what an extra 200, 500, 1,000, or even 10,000 visitors a day on your website would mean — and what kind of positive impact it would have on your business and bottom line.
The traffic is out there — you just have to know how to position your website high enough in the SERPs to benefit from that exposure. A combination of the correct keyword targeting and a solid search engine optimization strategy can transform an online business.
SEO requires a combination of solid on-page optimization and link building, but some additional tips can help improve your organic traffic numbers — things that aren’t often mentioned. I want to review some solid tips that you can apply to your current SEO effort with very low to no cost.
Here are ten SEO techniques and strategies that many of the top agencies use to help drive more website traffic.
1. Get Booked on Podcasts: Cast a Wide Net Approach
Everyone and their brother has a podcast these days, and there are podcasts for every topic and niche under the sun. What is one thing podcasts need to survive and remain relevant? Guests.
If you are booked on a podcast you are going to get the chance to be heard by people that might be interested in your business and most podcasts hosts will mention your business and website during your introduction as well as throughout the interview, and may even allow you to give your website a little plug.
Additionally, most podcasts have a website and will link to your website in your episode’s description. Now, you aren’t going to get booked on Joe Rogan’s podcast, but there is an infinite number of podcasts you can easily get booked for if you just do a little outreach.
Go wide on this — send a pitch to every possible relevant podcast you can find. There are many directories and simply searching “[your niche] podcast” will pull up a lot of results. Keep your pitch short and sweet, letting them know who you are and why you would be a great guest.
A 15-20 minute podcast interview can earn you an easy link and is a solid seo technique. Do a few of these a week in your downtime and the link building from this can snowball quickly.
2. Dominate Page One Real Estate on Google
A lot of people assume the only reason to fill page one of Google with results you control is for reputation management purposes, and while it does serve that purpose not every website needs reputation management. Regardless, everyone should aim to control every result on the first page — and even the second page — of Google.
If someone is searching for your business and they click on a result other than your main website this gives you another chance to attract that person by having a call-to-action and a link to your website available on these other seed pages.
From an Instagram profile with a CTA and a link in the bio to an author profile on a self-publish blog, you want to find high authority website properties that you can create easily and provides the opportunity to include a link to your site.
Some examples of properties you can create that will help you dominate all of Google’s real estate:
- Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, etc.
- YouTube Channel
- Medium Blog
- Wikipedia
- App Store
These take just a few minutes each to set up. Search top brands and blogs on Google to get even more examples of web properties you can create to help you control the top of the SERPs.
3. Co-Create a Massive Content Asset
Nothing is stopping you from publishing a massive guide or resource or having a great infographic designed. The only thing stopping you from getting viral traffic and shares is reach and exposure. Sure, you could run a paid campaign and drive traffic to it, but for the sake of this blog, I want to talk about ways to get results without breaking the bank.
Team up with a partner that has a large audience — both email and social media — and offer to create the content asset and include their branding on it in exchange for them promoting it. It’s a win-win situation. They get a great piece of content to share without having to spend money and time creating it. You get to benefit from their audience without having to pay for each visitor.
At the very least you will earn a nice link from the partner, so target accordingly. I’ve seen some brands secure links this way that would have been otherwise unobtainable — as buying a link wasn’t even an option.
4. Create Original Images, Charts, Graphs, and Industry Data Resources
Rather than search the free image sites or re-purpose an existing resource, create your own anytime you have information to share in a blog post. From charts to graphs, creating your own allows you to earn links from websites that use the image in their content and have to link to you, giving credit to the image.
If you get creative there are ways to create data images for any niche under the sun. Doing this for random blog posts isn’t the best use of your time, but if you are creating a massive content asset that you plan to put some marketing behind, or are co-creating content like mentioned above, this is a great strategy to use.
You can even create a blurb under each image with a link to download a high-resolution copy of the image while mentioning how you would like the image credited and where to link to. You can even provide image credit via HTML that has your link credit they can copy and paste.
5. Use GIFs and Animated Images to Increase Your Average Time on Site
Keeping your visitors on your website for as long as possible greatly improves your SEO, as Google places a lot of weight on this data. Why? If a website has a high bounce rate and low session time they assume it’s either not relevant to the search query or the content is low quality.
That is the last thing you want Google to think, so you need to do things to keep visitors browsing and reading for as long as possible. As a society, we are obsessed with GIFs and animated images.
From text messaging to all of the social media networks — GIFs are enabled as a way to communicate with each other and most people respond well to them. I’ve split-test dozens of content assets and those that used GIFs over traditional images had a substantially longer average time on site.
They make your content more relatable and fun, resulting in more attention. You create content for visitors to read it, right? Well, this keeps them more engaged and ultimately on your website for longer periods. This benefits your SEO while also naturally improving your conversion rates.
6. Find Low Competition Keywords from Google Search Console
You might be ranking on page two to three for some great low competition keywords that you don’t even know about. Since they are low competition and you are already ranking for them without doing any SEO, you can quickly reach the top of page one with a little on-site optimization and a handful of links by following this seo techniques.
Open up your Google Search Console and click “Performance” and you will see all of the search terms that are causing your website to be seen in the organic search results. You will see how many impressions each term received as well as the number of clicks.
From there, clicking on each term will then also show you the average position your website was shown for the term and what the click-through rate is. Look for the low-hanging fruit that has the potential to bring more traffic to your website.
Also, look for terms you rank for that receive a lot of impressions but have a low CTR. Change the page titles and meta descriptions to pull more attention and clicks. This little trick can result in explosive organic traffic increases in a very short time.
7. Rank for “Research Keywords”
This is a tip that requires a little creativity but can help you score links from some of the top news websites and blogs. In your niche, what are some topics that the media is writing about? Once you have this identified you have to put yourself in their shoes and think about what they are going to be searching for to research these topics?
Create a list and create content around those “research keywords” and use the keyword at the beginning of the article title and in the URL. Then, pack the article with information and data that a journalist searching for that will find useful and want to reference.
For this type of content, create it only with journalists in mind, as they are going to be the only people actively searching these terms. Blow them away with data and information. This is also a great opportunity to include an infographic at the end, giving them multiple ways they can reference and link t your website.
At scale, this is one of the best link building hacks for authority links.
8. Target “Question“ Search Phrases with an In-Depth FAQ Section
Knowing what your audience is going to search for in terms of questions relevant to your niche, or the products/services you offer, presents you with a great opportunity to attract high-quality traffic that has the highest probability of wanting whatever it is that you are offering.
Why?
Searches asking questions are looking for a solution. If you have what they need there is a great chance that they will purchase from you because you provided them with the answer. The easiest way to target “question” keywords is by creating a large FAQ resource on your website.
This is a strategy many large e-commerce brands use, and if you look at their FAQ resource pages they are massive. If someone just visited that FAQ hub directly they would be overwhelmed. But, since most of the traffic comes from search it does its job — getting highly relevant visitors on the site.
SaaS companies do this extremely well, and for the same reason — to attract question seekers that are looking for an answer to a problem. If the FAQ content answers their questions and provides a solution there is a high likelihood they convert.
9. Target Review and Comparison Keywords
This is a great strategy for SaaS, e-commerce, and even local retail stores and restaurants. Anytime someone is looking for information regarding a product, service, or company they will tend to search for review and comparison keywords.
They are looking for information that will tell them whether or not the product or service is good and if there is a better option out there that they don’t know about. If you control the narrative you can push the person towards your product or service.
Create a list of your top competitors and then map out all of the products or services you offer, thinking about what your target audience would be searching for to compare the different options available.
This is content that you want to optimize the same way I explained for the FAQ content — keyword at the beginning of the title and as the URL slug. You also want to make sure there is a huge call-to-action at the end. Paint the picture that you are the best option, present the offer right after, and watch your conversion rates skyrocket.
10. Create Topic + Year Blog Posts and Update Annually
I pay attention to the SERPs almost daily and I have seen a huge increase in the number of “How to … in 2020” and “Best … in 2020” results that show up at the top. Google is favoring content that features the year and even month in the title and first paragraph.
If you then look at these posts you will see they were created a long time ago, originally published several years ago. But, the website simply updates the year (or month) to keep them highly relevant and on the top of the search results.
This is a great strategy for large content assets that target money keywords. I would suggest if you do this remove the publishing date from the meta, as it might confuse the visitor down the line.
Conclusion
As you can see, these tips don’t require massive budgets and thousands of dollars. You can greatly improve your SEO and traffic numbers simply by doing more than your competitors. Know why the majority of your competition won’t do the things mentioned above? Because it takes time and effort — something most will avoid, regardless of how bad they want to see the results.
Sadly most websites would rather buy a $500 SEO package with outrageous claims (and no results) than spend a couple of days working on one of the abovementioned tips. That is the wrong mentality.
If you are serious about improving your SEO and increasing your website traffic you need to go the extra mile. I’m not saying you have to work 20-hour days and attack every line-item on this list right away.
Dedicate a block of time — whether it’s an hour a day or just 20 minutes — and be consistent. Over time you will make progress and once the results are noticeable in Google Analytics you will want to dedicate more time towards these strategies.
Do you have any specific questions about anything I mentioned above? What SEO technique are you most excited about trying and why? Let me know in the comments below.
