Category: SEO

There’s so much more to search engine optimization than simply publishing content and hoping for the best. But until you’ve sorted your organic traffic, there’s no point in ploughing money into ads.

DRIVE MORE ORGANIC TRAFFIC

Organic traffic refers to people who visit your site without having to pay to use their device.

Measuring Organic Traffic

You probably know of organic traffic from the report within Google Analytics. You may assume that because traffic to your website is declining, organic traffic is declining, but this isn’t always the case.

If a paid campaign has been paused, traffic will have decreased but your organic traffic may have still risen which is why you should monitor the sources of traffic.

1. Avoid Keyword Cannibalization

The first tip to drive more organic traffic to a website is to avoid “keyword cannibalization” which occurs when two or more pages on your website are competing for the same keyword with the same or similar search intent.

2. Appear On Podcasts

The obvious way to get involved with podcasts is to start your own. But it can take a lot of equipment, skills, and resources to begin a podcast.

However, you can simply take advantage of 2 million pre-existing shows and appear on one that’s already established.

Appearing on a well-researched podcast that your target audience listens to can do wonders for your brand awareness and authority.

In this video, I’ll tell you how to find appropriate podcasts for you to appear on to drive more organic traffic.

3. Optimize Meta Data

Metadata is all the code that can be added to your web pages to describe the content on the page to search engines

The metadata is not only vital for encouraging click-throughs in the search results, but for providing additional information to search engines.

This increased engagement and better optimization will help to boost your web pages up the search results, improving visibility and organic traffic as a result.

4. Fix Non-Performing Content

We look at fixing existing content that is failing to drive organic traffic. These pages may even be harming your overall SEO performance.
This is where a decision needs to be made. Do you want to remove the content altogether, by consolidating the pages as you would have done with your duplicate content? Or do you want to update and improve the content so it can position better in the SERPs, winning more organic clicks long-term?

5. Featured Snippets

The final tip to drive more organic traffic is for those who are already ranking on the first page of Google, but may be struggling to get as many click-throughs.

Appearing in featured snippets can greatly increase the organic traffic driven to your website.

Smart structure and content are key to increasing organic traffic with featured snippets. You’ll also push competitors down the search page rankings, increasing brand exposure.

Internal Linking Best Practices, An internal link is a backlink that navigates away from the page that the user is currently on to another page in the same domain.

Internal links are of course useful for users by helping them to easily navigate towards other relevant content on your site and keep them moving through your website.

Why Are Internal Links Important For SEO?

► They can help you to propel yourself upwards in SERPS.
► They’re also crucial in helping search engines discover new content.
► Help your users navigate your website and find similar content.

Best Practices For Internal Linking

Like all things SEO, internal linking needs to be implemented strategically.

Implement a crawlable link structure

Your website needs an internal link structure that allows crawlers to move back and forth in an intentional manner. Implement a structure that not only makes it easier for users to navigate around your website but for crawlers to understand your content, passing authority throughout your pages.

How To Choose What Page To Link To

You’ll want to place your internal links in prominent places on your website. By making them easier for users to navigate towards you’ll also demonstrate to search engines that these are the pages that generate the most interest and rank them accordingly.

Use relevant anchor text

Your anchor text is the text you attach the hyperlink to. The more relevant your anchor text to the page it represents, the more likely users are to click on the link, navigate to the page, and actually engage with it rather than bouncing straight back. Search engines will also rank you higher in those search results for the anchor text used and other variations.

Avoid using the same anchor text

Don’t use the same anchor text for different pages. You want to make sure that we’re giving both Google and our users as much context as possible surrounding the content of the linked page. This will help to ensure that the pages are being ranked for the most relevant search terms based on the search intent.

Link new pages from existing pages

Every time you add a new page or post to your website, it can take a bit of time for Google to acknowledge, or ‘index’ this new webpage.
Creating internal links as soon as the page is published helps search engines index the content faster in their search results.

Link to & from the most important pages

Link strategically by finding the pages with the most authority. Finding the most authoritative pages and linking out to the other less authoritative pages is a great way to boost any new content on your site and pass on authority.

Remove links to the unimportant pages

You want to make it super clear to Google which pages you consider to be the most important so that it knows which to rank. Remove the internal links pointing to non-valuable pages or replace these links with more useful pages.

Don’t use too many internal links

This is because in an SEO sense, with our internal linking strategy, we’re kind of flowing authority from one page to another and you have to be mindful of not spreading that too thinly. Not only that, but in not being intentional with your link choices and simply bombarding your users with too many internal links, you’re causing a distraction and adding confusion to their experience on the site.

Fix Broken Internal Links

Broken internal links are those that link to pages that either no longer exists or return an error. Having broken links on your website, not only creates a bad user experience but creates a dead end for search engine crawlers.

So if you can master internal linking yourself, you’ll find that your web pages see a speedy and definitive improvement in rankings.

Why SEO URL Structure is so important?

A URL, also often referred to as a web address, specifies the location of a resource on the internet and they serve many purposes.

Sure, they aid your SEO. But they also provide additional benefits such as establishing and reinforcing trust.

Having a clean URL structure also maximizes the chances of users clicking and sharing your links.

10 Tips to Improve Your URL Structure for SEO.

Here are our 10 tips to improve any URL structure for SEO.

1. Use hyphens to separate words

When a URL contains more than a single word, you have a few options in how you can separate them:

• Combine the phrase into one word
• Use underscores
• Or use hyphens

2. Keep it Short and Sweet

As a rule of thumb, you should avoid creating URLs with more than 60 characters.

It’s likely that a URL is automatically generated from the page title whenever you create a new page on a website.

Shorter URLs are more likely to be clicked and shared which is, of course, great for SEO!

3. Stop With The Stop Words

A stop word is a commonly used word (the, and, or, it) that search engines have been set to ignore.

Stop words aren’t indexed by Google and including them will add unnecessary length.

4. Don’t Stuff URLs

Adding a keyword multiple times into your URL won’t offer any SEO benefits, and may even negatively impact your ranking and click-through rate.

The keyword for your page should also be included in the page title, URL, and meta description.

5. Don’t Have Too Many Folders

A folder in this context refers to the number of forward slashes you use within the URL. We recommend limiting folder use to a maximum of two.

6. Say NO to Dynamic URLs

Dynamic URLs contain a query string within the URL that assigns values to specific parameters.

They are most commonly used in e-commerce businesses where products are going in and out of stock or prices are changing. So if something changes within your CMS, so will the URL.

But Dynamic URLs provide absolutely no SEO benefit, and due to their structure, they are less likely to be shared.

7. Merge Similar Pages Together

For larger websites, it’s common to have pages that are very similar in content and keywords.

If you keep them separate they will compete against each other in the SERPs, so the best SEO practice is to merge them together using a 301 redirect to avoid losing any link authority the other page has.

8. Use a Mobile Sitemap

Google now takes a mobile-first approach to index websites, which means it will take the mobile version of your site for indexing first as more people search on mobile than on desktop.

Very few businesses are using AMP and mobile sitemaps, so implementing this tip correctly could see your mobile rankings improve greatly.

9. Add a Favicon

A favicon is a little icon that appears on your web tab or bookmark.

Adding a favicon to your website doesn’t have any direct SEO benefit, but it adds social proof to your site and many forums and search engines like DuckDuckGo will display your favicon, making it more predominant on search.

10. Stick to Words and Numbers

Using any other character type besides letters and numbers comes across as negative and it’ll impact click-through rates.

Not only that but some characters don’t work with certain web browsers, causing them to crash.

// Follow these best practices to optimize any URL structure for better ranking and to establish and reinforce trust amongst both users and search engines.