With over 200 Google ranking factors, there are at least that many SEO tactics you can apply on your website. But not all tactics yield the same benefits. There is always that one, specific tactic that can bring the most to a website; taking into account it’s advantages and disadvantages.
I set out to discern what was that one, major tactic that brought people the biggest growth. Here are 37 replies from SEO practitioners and website owners:
Keyword research and content creation
Gregory Golinski, Head of Digital Marketing at YourParkingSpace.co.uk:
A good idea is to try to find keywords that your competitors are ranking for, and that doesn’t appear on your website. Create content around these keywords to try to rank for them, and launch a link building campaign to build backlinks to these new pages of content.
This combination of content creation and link building helped us acquire more organic and referral traffic, and new customers.
Lee Savery, Content Executive at Ricemedia:
As a content executive, I’m always looking for tools that benefit my clients. By feeding content already on a website into SEMRush’s Content Marketing Tools I was able to identify the keywords needed to give these pages the visibility they required.
Situation before the tactic – The client is a provider of training programmes for businesses and were restrictive in terms of how content was written, with little regard for SEO.
Traffic – there was little traffic at all going towards their service pages with barely any organic traffic because the content on the page lacked important keywords and little understanding for how people search for their services.
After the tactic – once the pages had been rewritten, optimised and targeted towards the right audience, organic sessions to the service page increased by 2,875% and the business started getting enquiries from large businesses in the UK and abroad. The client now creates content with SEO and search intent in mind at all times.
Aleksandra Simovic, Marketing Manager at Vacation Tracker:
As a SaaS company, our primary focus was becoming a trusted source of knowledge in the HR and leave management industry, and informing our users about Vacation Tracker’s features and updates.
In the beginning, we were only ranking for a few keywords which didn’t really bring us any traffic. We quickly realized that SEO is something we have to focus on. And we did. A few months after putting SEO as one of the top priorities, we started ranking for thousands of high-internet keywords, and naturally, our organic traffic increased as well as our conversions.
How did we achieve this? By doing detailed keyword research and understanding our audience. With the data gathered, we created the ultimate blog on all things Slack, HR and leave management related. It’s important to note that this does not happen overnight, and it’s something that needs to be updated constantly.
After a few months in, we noticed progress but didn’t stop there. We still regularly update our blog with quality articles and topics our audience is interested in.
Chris Love, Love2dev:
A few years ago my site was attracting a few thousand scattered visits each month.
I decided to fix this and get serious about SEO. Today I have 300k-350k monthly visits from search engines.
I think the most important change I made was producing content with a purpose. This required real keyword research, looking for what my target audience wanted to read. Before I was writing content I thought they wanted to read or needed to read. I was wrong about that tactic.
After changing to a purpose driven approach my organic traffic exploded and continues to grow.
Joanna Vaiou, SEO Specialist – Owner of Remote SEO Company: JoannaVaiou.com:
The fastest way to increase organic traffic and brand awareness for an eCommerce store with a blog is to religiously check what the top organic traffic pages are each month and see what type of long-tail keywords they rank for in Google 1st page near the bottom between spot 5 through 10.
If the topic of the long-tail keyword justifies the creation of a new article or page, then I go ahead and have my copywriter write one that I then optimize and publish on the website of interest.
I then promote it organically on the brand’s social media pages and my private social networks and build (or acquire) some links to it with relevant anchor texts (link titles).
If the long-tail keyword is closely relevant to the topic of the page that ranks in Google for, I do the following:
1. optimize the page itself by adding the keyword with its variations throughout the page
2. add the keywords in the on-page SEO elements
3. create strategic internal links with the same terms to increase the page’s relevancy to the term
4. promote it externally on social media
5. acquire and create links to it (if needed)
The situation before the tactic for the eCommerce shop was good when it comes to the organic traffic it was getting from the already existing pages that rank high on Google.
The thing is there is always room for the GOOD to become BETTER.
By creating new valuable content that educates people who are thinking of buying a product but are on the fence, Ecomm business owners can win the trust of their near future customers by addressing their concerns and struggles through the content they publish and distribute online.
The above tactic, not only brings new monthly organic traffic to a website from Google users who want to be educated before making a purchase decision but also builds trust and intimacy.
When these users will be ready to buy, they will choose the specified brand because people buy from brands they like and trust.
People buy from brands that care to educate them and provide solutions and resourceful information about their products before they sell to them.
Mackenzie Deater, Content Strategist at Evenbound:
One of the SEO tactics that consistently and significantly drive growth for our clients is strategic content marketing. SEO tactics across the board can drive growth, but the content is especially effective because it’s easy to create content on which you are an expert, and because it’s multipurpose.
Strategic content marketing works to:
- Hit target keywords and phrases
- Drive organic traffic
- Nurture leads towards a conversion
When we work with our clients to develop quality content that hits target keywords and solve common buyer pain points, we’ve seen significant growth in organic traffic and conversions.
And since content can be used over and over in a variety of applications, from sales and marketing tools to posts on social media, it’s a multipurpose SEO tactic that continues to deliver value over time.
Sam White, Marketing Manager at GT Automotive:
It may not be the sexiest answer, but blogging from our website is a tried and true way to increase traffic. There is a reason so many people do it and that’s because it works in so many ways. When we first started blogging, in May 2019, we received 305 organic visitors to the site and ranking for 249 terms. At the end of February 2020, we received 1,307 visitors and now ranking for 1,920 terms. This represents a growth of 329% increase in organic traffic and a 670% increase in terms of ranking. Phone calls to the shop are up 77%.
Blogging is still a great way to bring traffic to your website and grow your website. You will find the most benefit in ranking long-tail keywords (Google search with multiple words). These are searchers who are already familiar with your vertical so you can focus on educating and providing useful information than closing them. A good blog builds trust with consumers who will reward you with business when they are ready to purchase. Our education pieces frequently draw a high volume of traffic to the site that converts more visitors to customers, as percentage, than any other page type.
Dustin Vann, Owner & CEO at Trusy Social:
An SEO tactic that I feel has given the most traffic is Optimised Content. Having the right people being able to know how to write is one of the best ways to drive traffic. While we all know that sometimes pages rank and they shouldn’t, time and age are coming where the better the content is, the better the rank will be.
Traffic was organic and steady, but after having more quality content the numbers did rise and are on a steady increase.
Brendan McConnell, Content Consultant, Premium SEO Melbourne:
In a previous life, I worked as an SEO Specialist for an international SaaS company in the HR tech space. This is a highly competitive field for SEO and content marketing, and one that relies heavily on thought leadership to drive lead generation. Trying to take on our top competitors for the most popular search terms in the industry like performance management was a losing battle.
Instead, we decided to roll up our sleeves and deep dive into the many different longtail and question queries that exist on the periphery of those core search terms. Terms like building a performance management template received much fewer monthly searchers, but also had much lower competition. So, our team compiled a list of hundreds of these low competition search phrases and began creating high value content for each one.
As can be expected, most of these pages on their own did not generate a game-changing amount of traffic. But cumulatively, the uptick in overall organic traffic was very significant. This strategy helped drive double digit YoY traffic growth for the duration of my two years at the company. It also helped us create a significant body of thought leadership content that covered a huge range of associated keywords.
This sustained traffic growth was then leveraged to ramp up organic conversions by providing complimentary gated assets on the highest performing posts. Overall, this round-about tactic proved incredibly fruitful, and sustainable, for the company.
Sumitra Senapaty, Wowclub:
Even though the results may take a little time, the best thing that we’ve done to optimize our site has been to implement keywords that will help us rank better. Even though we are successful travel company, there are certain destinations that we’d like to rank higher for on Google.
Implementing keywords to our content that will help us inch closer to Page 1 is imperative.
For example, select a main keyword, and be sure to include it in your H1, as well as your first and last paragraphs, the body of your content, and your meta titles and descriptions.
For supporting keywords, include those in your sub-headers and within the body of your content.
Seeing higher rankings begin is exciting, and the good news is that if your keyword selections need to be modified, you can quickly and simply pivot.
Don’t just create new content, optimize the old one as well
Oksana Chyketa, the Marketer at Albacross:
One of the most effective tactics we’ve used to gain more traffic is to optimize old content. In the blogging world, what is old can become new again – which means that if done right, your old content can still bring your great results.
We at Albacross have recently updated a few of our well-performing blog posts by making them longer and what’s more important problem-solving. By adding more unique stats, images, and interacted pieces of content, we’ve managed to make the blog posts to stand out above the rest. This resulted in a significant increase in organic traffic.
Let’s take this article for example: https://albacross.com/newsroom/reverse-ip-lookup/ After we have optimized it, the traffic increased by 265% and conversions – by 200%. Thus, our optimized article resulted in higher rankings, better conversions, and increased traffic.
Lisamarie Monaco, a National Independent Life Insurance Agent who also do all her own SEO for InsuranceForBurial.com:
One SEO tactic that has brought me massive growth was to touch my blog with SEO DAILY. Changing the year review from 2019 to 2020 makes a huge difference. Google loves that!
The situation before that was stagnant. I would lose keywords and not rank as I am now.
Since doing this, my organic traffic has increased. My conversion rate had tripled. I am on page one in many of my articles and ranking number one on Google and have more snippets.
Dakota Brown, SEO & Content Manager, Social Eyes Marketing:
Keeping your website current and following a Google E-A-T strategy seems to be the key! Recently, we have been updating the pages of our website with fresh content, including a vlog series, and in the last week alone we have seen our keyword rankings skyrocket. We have always had decent traffic, but the last month (as we’ve been rapidly updating these pages) has seen an uptick in calls, which has been great!
Getting backlinks
Jessica Traupe from Smunch:
We have tried many different things to improve our SEO over the past 2 years – longtail keywords, internal link building, language tags, etc. – the standard stuff.
However, the one things that really made a difference (and not surprisingly) was when we received a handful of external backlinks. We’d done a big survey and shared the results with various media outlets, who picked up on it and linked back to us when mentioning the source of their data.
As a result, the number of our pageviews doubled within less than a month!
Simone Colavecchi, SEM, Cashcow.media:
We had just acquired https://laptopunboxed.com/ back in January 2019 and we needed to start a link-building campaign in order to make the site rank again. The site did have some organic traffic but very little at that point.
At first, we managed to get some links from tech sites but that wasn’t really doing much in terms of rankings and it was an expensive tactic to sustain. We needed a different tactic at that point and we decided to give niche-edits a try.
What is exactly a niche-edit?
Niche Edits, Niche Edit or also known Curated Links are basically a contextual anchor link inserted into a quality aged guest post, blog post or page that already exists which means it has already been indexed by Google.
Niche edits allowed us to save money on producing content and add more links and drive traffic to our site effectively. For instance, we needed more exposure just before Black Friday or Christmas where most people start looking for bargains or presents.
What happened after this tactic? We noticed a nice increase in organic traffic just when it was needed the most.
Jitesh Keswani, CEO at e-Intelligence:
This is for one of the eCommerce clients of us for which we were not able to bring more organic traffic and online sales. It was very difficult for us to improve keyword rankings, organic traffic, and online sales. I was using all ordinary SEO tactics but was not able to improve the performance.
Later, I tried one of the tactics of Brian Dean – Use of Power page. I created an article with an in-depth guide related to the products. I added as much information as I could and made the guide one-stop solution for the particular topic.
Then, I created a list of industry experts and shared my guide with them. I outreached to the websites who would have given links to similar topic blogs. Such content promotion helped me to get backlinks from different domains and also helped me to get some social shares.
After some days, the authority of the blog increased due to backlinks and social shares. I then used authority sculpting and gave internal linking with product pages for which I wanted to improve the keyword rankings and traffic. This helped me to improve the keyword rankings and organic traffic and later online sales too. The client was really very happy with the performance.
Lysa Miller, Founder + CEO Ladybugz.com:
It’s hard to pinpoint ONE tactic, because all the tactics seem to work together to create success!
Along with doing a ton of on-page SEO and writing content, I started Guest Blogging and optimizing all of our online profiles on other websites. So basically high quality authoritative backlinking to get my company onto the first page of Google for Boston Web Design Companies. This changed my business as soon as the increased ranking happened.
I ended up with high-quality leads and exposure to potential business I never had access to before. In just 2 years, I more than doubled my business at the time (ladybugz.com) and merged my company with my current agency 3 Media Web. That was four years ago, and my site still holds that front-page position.
Wes Marsh, Director of Marketing at BCA Technologies:
One of the best SEO tactics to drive growth is a good old fashioned link building. When I started with this company, we already had lots of content, but our inbound link profile was terrible. Our site averaged roughly 6-8,000 uniques per month. Myself and another team member made a concentrated effort to build natural backlinks through earned media. We used HARO, SourceBottle, and LinkAssistant from SEO PowerSuite to find opportunities to contribute. We got pickups from industry publications (small and large), colleges, blogs, local journalists and more. We also tapped into our other employees to get their expertise, whether that’s for graphic design, web and software development, project management, sales, marketing, and insights from the C-suite.
As we continued with these efforts, we saw the growth. Within three months, we had crossed over 12,000 visitors per month. By the six month mark, we were topping over 30,000 uniques. A year into these efforts we were reaching the 60k mark, and finally 18 months after starting these tactics, we had generated over 100 do-follow links yielding us over 80k uniques each month just from our organic traffic. That’s a 10x impact of when we started!
It’s not easy, and it takes time to devote to these efforts, plus time to see the impact, but it works. The key is to set aside a little time each week to look for opportunities, and then track your efforts so you can see for yourself what works well and what doesn’t.
Ben Walker, CEO and Founder of Transcription Outsourcing, LLC:
Guest posting has brought us massive growth with our website. It is hands down the most effective thing we have done in the past two years without a doubt. It is not easy and 90% of our guest post requests go unanswered. You have to keep going and change up your pitch and test new things though, because it will pay off for sure in the long run. We are now getting twice as much organic traffic and conversions on our site than we were two years ago. We noticed that when you guest post on relevant sites it makes a huge difference in relevant traffic and conversions.
Andrew Taylor, Director at Netlawman.com.au:
Backlinking has worked for me. For a variety of different pages and websites that I work with and own, I have found that within the one site, if I link a lot of my blogs to one another as well as link out to other blogs or webpages that I have invested interest in, that I have been able to see some significant growth in the traffic to many of my sites and pages.
It was really an overnight thing once I started, I believe that bumped up my ranking perhaps and that contributed to the added interest, which I am very thankful for.
I have always been right into the development of software and the availability of resources via the internet in general, ever since computers were first thought of as being readily available to the public. The fast pace that it changes these days I believe is difficult for many, not just boomers like myself, where many of my clients can testify this statement who feel overwhelmed with battling to get ahead online.
A few tricks, like the one I have mentioned, can really give you a lot of bank for your buck – as every minute of a small business owner or entrepreneurs time is very precious.
Lennart Meijer, co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Theotherstraw:
Our SEO strategy involved building links from relevant, niche blogs that had a high domain rating from 30 to 90. We sell reusable, eco friendly straws, so we were seeking links from sites that have content related to sustainable, eco friendly living. By creating relevant content, and building our links, we ranked from #50 for our main keyword, to ranking #1. This in turn drove a significant amount of traffic to our website and increased our sales revenue vastly.
Bryan Stoddard, Homewares Insider:
One of the most important things I always say about SEO is to gradually build links to your website. Try to link your site with web directories, forums, social networks, other blogs, and even pages on your own site.
Having lots of different sources leading to your website can only positively affect the number of visitors, as it is important that your website is able to be found not only on search engines. Search engines are very important, but in my opinion, it’s also good to be connected with your community at a social level.
As for the On-site aspect of SEO in this case, when writing an article on your own website and an article uses a term that appears in a previously published article, use that term as an anchor between the two pages of your website.
Before I implemented this tactic I honestly had trouble with visitors, as they would come and go from time to time, and it was very difficult to get them outside of search engines. After a while, I realized I had to do something about it, so I opened social media accounts, as well as used different chatrooms like Discord to connect with people and help them reach my website.
Meg Marrs, Founder of K9 of Mine:
I’ve had immense success with the guestographic / infographic outreach approach. Infographics have fallen in and out favor over the past few years, but I find that most blogs continue to be interested in re-publishing high-quality infographics, especially ones that compile interesting data.
Just because this tactic isn’t popular anymore doesn’t mean it won’t still work (very well even)!
While I had some light traffic before my first few major guestographic pushes, my traffic went up a solid 20% after I earned 20-30 high-quality links by pitching my infographic to various relevant websites. I still use guestographics to this day!
For established sites, Tech SEO might be really important
Andrew Gillespie, Director at Paramount Digital:
After spending over 8 years in SEO and working on over 400 client websites in a range of industries. I have found carrying out onsite SEO tasks to increase relevancy from high DA websites. If you resubmit the page to Search Console, you can see results instantly! Clients are often shocked after being told for many years that SEO takes time, if you spot the quick wins, it doesn’t.
Boyd Norwood, VP of Marketing at Nozzle:
Making sure pages are indexable: Checking to see if all of the pages that should be indexed are, in fact, indexable. One time, I worked on a site that had thousands of informational pages with useful information for college students about each college and university across the U.S. Unfortunately, you could only get to those pages by doing a site search and therefore the search engines didn’t know they existed. We added an organized navigation menu to help with indexing and the results were fairly immediate.
The number of indexed pages for this site changed from 30 to 10,000 pages and their organic traffic shot up from a few hundred visitors a month to several thousand.
Image optimization + catching a wave of a popular trend
Federico Degan, Italian freelance SEO consultant:
During the new coronavirus outbreak in Italy, I’ve written an article about face masks. Which masks can protect people against the new coronavirus? How to choose them? How to wear them? Then I placed a couple of referral links pointing to masks that were sold on Amazon.
But rank higher for these terms when there are hundreds of newspapers that are writing about this topic, is really a tough job.
I had no chances to rank on the Google organic search, so I tried to better optimize the images to rank on the Google image search.
How did I optimize the images?
I’ve downloaded the products’ images from Amazon and created an image template with:
- search term as the main headline (for example “Face mask ffp3”)
- product’s brand and model as a subtitle (for example “3M 99332”)
- product’s image (the mask)
- purpose to contextualize the product (for example “for coronavirus”)
I renamed the images’ files. For example “face-mask-ffp3-3m-99332-for-coronavirus.jpg”, then I uploaded the images and set titles and alt tags using the same logic. (Title and alt tag example: “Face mask ffp3 3M 99332 for coronavirus”).
Once I submitted the page to Google with the Google Search Console, I started quite immediately to rank high on the Google image search and I started getting a lot of traffic (also due to the first coronavirus confirmed cases in Italy).
Before the images optimization, I got 4 or 5 sessions per day, after this tactic I reached 627 sessions on the peak day. After the peak day, I started getting an average of 120/130 sessions per day, most of them from the Google image search.
From the conversion side, every 100 sessions I’ve generated 30 clicks on the affiliate links, and every 100 clicks I’ve generated 8 sales on Amazon. So the sales conversion rate was approximately 2,40%. The big issue was that there was limited availability of face masks on Amazon.
Use the competitor’s popularity
Anastasiia Khlystova, Content marketing manager at HelpCrunch:
I’d like to say a few words on the SEO tactic we used at our blog that helped us grow it from 0 to 12k monthly visits: Writing detailed articles on alternatives to your competitors.
This tactic is only going to work if you have famous competitors in your niche. Their brand keyword is usually quite popular and so are the keywords related to their alternatives. That’s why you have good chances of getting highly targeted traffic to your website if you write thorough detailed comparisons. Optimize your articles for keywords like ‘competitor alternatives’ or ‘alternatives to competitor’ — and their conversion from a visit to a registration can reach 4-5%.
Manish Dudharejia, President and Founder of E2M Solutions Inc:
One of our clients, an e-commerce tire company, was struggling to compete with bigger tire companies when it came to highlighting popular tire brands. Although the company was able to gain good traction on some pages, they wanted to stand a better chance against their competition.
So, the online tire retailer came to us and asked us to try a new tactic: create an in-depth resource that would mention all of the top tire brands and have the capability to attract high organic traffic, then redirect this traffic to popular brand pages.
Our challenge was to attract high traffic – without any promotional link building activities.
What happened after this tactic?
Essentially, our company came in and did just as the tire company asked. We prepared an in-depth resource that mentioned all of the top tire brands by finding the right keywords to target, especially two: “best tire brands” and “top tire brands.”
Based on the recent success of long-form content, we knew that we needed to rank well for the top keywords from competitors’ posts in lengthy blog posts and resources. Our thorough research allowed us to present readers with extremely helpful information while ranking organically for the top tire keywords.
By embracing this tactic, we were able to outrank some tire competitors in terms of the authority and authenticity of our content. This led to immense success for our online tire client – within just two months, the content started ranking as #1 and even snagged a Google Featured Snippet for the keyword “best tire brands.”
Be analytical
Sarah Franklin Position, Co-Founder of Blue Tree AI Company:
Mastering digital marketing and SEO skills can be challenging and take time, they require a sense of understanding in technology and societal needs/ wants. For a business, they can be extremely beneficial and improve leads/ sales drastically. With many years of experience, I have learned that by including SEO in a business’ marketing plan they will receive an increase in their target audience and great financial gain. Before applying SEO software and expert skills, our company was just making enough to survive through regular online advertising. Our traffic was very slow and did not come from a large audience, it was predominantly in the location of which we lived. This limited our opportunities so we knew we had to make a change. That’s when we integrated a highly advanced SEO software. By having the ability to record, analyze and manage data from your business you can view which unit is not working and discuss how to alter the system.
Luke Davis, an in-house SEO Executive for Adzooma:
I would say combining technical aspects of SEO with high-quality content writing has helped our growth at Adzooma.
Since starting with Python in October, I wrote a script to analyse the content from links on Page 1 of the SERPs for keywords we wanted to rank for. I looked at common themes and opportunities to try something new.
Our ranking keywords have gone up by 426% in 6 months, which has contributed to more conversions and sales. By leveraging the power of Python and data analysis with the more traditional forms of content writing with authority and expertise, we’ve helped the website and business grow and there are no signs of stopping.
Basil Larios, SEO Content Creator at Falcon Marketing LLC:
Working in digital marketing it’s important to always stay updated on changes in Google rules and adjust your strategy in order to get ahead. With the implementation of Google BERT and the number of voice search queries increasing it was a no-brainer to hone in on hyper-local intent targeting. Making sure that our clients are optimized for local searches such as near me, Nearby, and close by has helped our clients with small businesses increase clickthrough rates exponentially over a 6 month period. By adjusting existing content, updating ads to be more intent focused, and formatting content to win featured snippets for keywords, we helped our clients that had nearly zero web traffic really start ranking and grow their conversions. This tactic has helped us with clients who work in construction as well as law offices.
Think about the future of SEO
Adeel Shabir, Content Marketing Executive at Centriq:
SEO is the best way to put yourself, your business or product/service on the search engine. This has been proven fact that SEO can help you achieve some major revenue. But, it keeps changing with time.
Follow those tips:
1. Voice search will be and is going to be the topmost trending product or service search. Amazon has already implemented and some other big tech giants have been going to do it. For any startup to mark their entry into SEO, they should consider the voice SEO aspect of the business and the product or services they are selling.
2. Faster and fully optimized websites are the future. It has been researched that any unique visitor to a website spends 2 seconds in the loading of the website, on the third second, if the website is not loaded fully or properly, they tend to leave or move forward with their decision. There are many tools available on the web on which you can optimize your business website to load much faster.
3. Include product reviews. Search engines have these few words snippet that shows the topmost affordable laptops in 2019 that show the reviews and the product itself on the search engine page. Make sure you end up in that category. This way the customer will surely click on your website and will see the reviews posted by real individuals.
Featured and rich snippets
Tarun Gurang, Digital Marketer, iFour Technolab Pvt. Ltd:
One of the successful tactics which work for us is optimizing for Featured Snippet.
For example, when we wrote the blog ‘Differences between ASP.Net and ASP.Net Core – ASP.Net vs ASP.Net Core’, we were not getting any traffic for the first 15-20 days because our blog was not showing up in the featured snippet.
Once our blog showed up in the featured snippet, our blog started to get the traffic approx. 30-40 per day that was only hardly 1-2 per day before this.
Currently, we are not getting significant conversions from it because we have only provided an informative article and we don’t have any intent of getting a call to action from this blog.
Cyrus Yung, Director of Ascelade Pte Ltd:
I have a client who does a fast personal loan to those who need it in Singapore. The problem is that they are ranked on page 5 for their main keyword, yet their average inquiries are about 25 to 35 monthly.
I was going through the list of keywords that are relevant to them, a particular keyword phrase pops up when I was doing keyword research. The keyword is list of licensed money lenders.
So I decided to create a list of licensed moneylenders on a blog post, their details like company name, license no, address, phone no and clickable website URLs were in a table form. It took me about 2 days to complete it with all the best on-page SEO practices.
After about 3 weeks, I began to notice that the inquiries coming has increased to 2 to 3 a day, so I decided to check out their Google Search Console and found out that the list of licensed money lender blog post was on the first page of SERPs.
Although the blog post was not the top 5 positions, we were able to have a table snippet of all the licensed moneylenders appearing as part of the SERPs description. I think this helps to create attention to the searchers.
Mike Khorev, SEO Expert and Marketing Consultant:
To answer this, we have to understand that there are several key changes in Google’s algorithm during 2018-2019 leading to the changes in SEO approaches:
1. Rich and featured snippets are even bigger than before.
2. Google now checks for a site’s “expertise” over a certain topic rather than just one single content for a keyword. For example, a site with a lot of relevant content in “digital marketing” is more likely to rank for “SEO” keyword.
3. Mobile-friendliness along with bounce-rate and other engagement metrics are now very important ranking signals, thanks to Google RankBrain.
With that being said, there are several “best practices” we have followed during 2019 and 2020 so far with great success (we have several content pieces ranking for the digital marketing keywords:
- Adding structured data markups to our site is now an essential practice, so our content will be eligible for rich snippets. Structured data will also boost our CTR (click-through rate), which will also affect organic ranking
- The technically perfect site is a must, especially regarding mobile-friendliness and load speed. Aiming for proper user experience is a must to avoid a high bounce rate and to encourage higher dwell time (important ranking signals thanks to Google Rankbrain).
- Our content strategy is to develop a content to cover a focus topic (i.e. digital marketing), and then develop various in-depth content covering related keywords (SEO, social media marketing, influencer marketing, etc.) that are linked to the focus content. This is a strategy known as “content clustering” and have proven successful for us to rank on certain topics.
- Backlinks are still important, but our main focus should be developing high-quality, relevant content for human readers. Also, we must consider the fact that link building using low-quality content is no longer effective (in fact, it can get you penalized). If our content is good, sooner or later we’ll get those links.
Using these four principles, we have successfully climbed the SERP during the past few months.
Merging the 2 domains
Joseph Piñeiro, SEO Manager, 360training.com:
The SEO tactic that has helped 360training succeed the most in recent months is merging together subdomains. Obviously, this strategy as a whole isn’t possible for every company, but many of the elements involved in it are. The main element I want to focus on is eliminating substandard content. Having lots pages with thin content hurts your rankings in two ways.
First, it labels your website as low quality in the eyes of Google. Simply getting rid of poor performing pages and 301 redirecting them to ones that are already ranking can drastically improve your traffic and conversions.
Second, it causes keyword cannibalization, which I’ll get to next.
What was your situation before this tactic?
Before merging together oshacampus.com and 360training.com, the two websites were competing with each other. This was causing a large degree of keyword cannibalization. Many people, even in marketing, think that having as many pages as possible for a priority keyword is the best way optimize the traffic for it.
This is not our hypothesis nor what we have found to be the case. The best way to get the most traffic our of a target keyword is to have one highly authoritative page that encompasses the entire breadth and depth of your knowledge about it.
What happened after this tactic?
Eliminating pages with similar content that provided less value than the pages we wanted to rank has improved our rankings for keywords like osha 30, which we currently rank 2nd for, up for 5th before the merger.
Don’t go to broad – niche down your website
Tom Crowe, founder of Definitely Digital:
Not only do I work with companies and individuals to grow their organic traffic, but I also own and manage a number of websites myself. Probably the most effective tactic I found for fuelling growth was to do with niching down. Essentially search engines like to understand that your website is an authority in a specific subject matter. When you have a site that veers off in too many directions it can negatively impact your topical authority as search engines struggle to identify exactly what the broad theme of this website is.
For example, I’ve been working with a blogger recently whose site is predominantly about healthy recipes. However, she has veered off substantially into topics such as gardening, current affairs and travel. For her site and for my own sites the solution was simply to take a step back and re-establish how all content relates to the overall theme. If it doesn’t fit in, delete it!
In both cases there was traffic trickling through, it was regular but certainly not impressive. A max of around 100 users a day with some conversions. Simply from auditing content and restructuring the site to be tailored to the main category, I have seen huge prolonged growth in organic traffic. Essentially very poor performing sites have become highly profitable long-term sources of income, regularly pulling in an excess of 50K users per month.
Conclusion
Each and every website is a story on its own and requires an analytical approach. Still, as you can see, the most simple and basic SEO tips give rise to highest growth. Make sure to target the right keywords, create good content around them and make sure to have authoritative pages (earn backlinks to them). Also, make certain that your pages are crawlable and indexed by search engines. After you’ve ensured all of the above, you can experiment with other SEO tactics.
