11 Smart SEO Strategies to Increase Organic Traffic

SEO strategies are the most crucial part of any website to get traffic. Because search engines drive 300% more traffic than social media. However, the implementation is not that easy. It requires SEO strategies, implementation, and time. In this article, I am going to reveal 10 smart SEO strategies that will help you to get organic traffic.

Most of us believe that quality content can attract more traffic but content alone can’t give you enough traffic and make you rank in the top search results in search engines. I have seen many websites with low-quality content and even grammatical mistakes, but getting good traffic and making money from online programs like Google AdSense and other affiliate marketing programs.

Today, I’m excited to reveal a set of smart SEO strategies that have consistently delivered outstanding results for my clients. These proven techniques can significantly boost your website’s visibility on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Without further ado, let’s dive into these effective SEO strategies:

11 Smart SEO Strategies to Increase Organic Traffic

1. Keyword Research: The foundation of Search Engine Marketing

Keywords serve as the bedrock of every search engine marketing endeavor. When a user inputs a query into a search engine and hits the search button or presses “Enter,” the search engine promptly generates a list of web pages that are pertinent to the entered keyword, presenting them on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

If you want your website to rank in the top search results, it is imperative to engage in thorough keyword research. In this process, your objective is to pinpoint the most suitable keywords for your web pages and blog posts.

Furthermore, it’s essential to discover the keywords that your potential customers are likely to enter when conducting searches on a search engine.

For conducting keyword research, you have some excellent options including the Google Keyword Planner Tool, SEMRush, and Ahrefs. Among the plethora of tools available on the internet, these three stand out as the most highly regarded for this purpose.

2. Meta Tags

Meta Tags: Meta tags have been one of the most important elements of search engine marketing and SEO. Understanding their significance is imperative for anyone aiming to achieve a prominent ranking in search engines, as they play a pivotal role in SEO.

Title & Description: When a search engine looks up a keyword, you’ll notice that the most pertinent links appear on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Google relies on both the title and description as key signals of relevance for that particular keyword. The same principle applies to both elements.

Keyword Tag: When discussing keyword tags, it’s noteworthy that Google has openly acknowledged their diminished significance. This is primarily due to past abuse by webmasters who attempted to manipulate these tags in order to secure top search results for specific keywords.

3. Content

I have read numerous articles, and most bloggers have accepted one common thing, “Content is King”. You hear this phrase over and over again when it comes to SEO success. Quality content is the best way not only to rank for that particular keyword but also for the positive user experience that helps you in the long run.

Provide real value and something of substance to visitors, that is useful. It will make them come back to your website again and again in search of quality content.

Moreover, the potential for your content to go viral arises when it’s both unique and unattainable elsewhere, sparking the curiosity and enthusiasm of users.

4. Backlinks (Inbound Links)

For those who are new to search engine marketing and do not know the meaning of backlinks or inbound links, here is the definition:

Backlinks (Inbound Links)

It is the process of establishing links on the internet that direct users to your website which helps your website to achieve a higher rank in search engine result pages (SERPs).

Backlinks are the backbone of any SEO strategy. We know that it is the most significant but also the most challenging aspect of optimizing your blog or website for search engines.

Nearly 80% of the searches are performed on the internet using Google. If you are looking for your website to be a part of that 80%, you need to have a good amount of inbound links. The higher the quality of backlinks you have, the higher the chances are to appear in top search results.

However, all inbound links are not treated equally. Instead, you should focus on getting high-quality inbound links from websites that have high domain authority (developed by Moz) or Domain Rating (developed by Ahref) on a scale of 1 to 100.

So, what exactly do I mean by “Good Inbound Links”?

That’s an excellent question!

Fundamentally, the quality of inbound links is defined by three primary factors:

The links originate from an authoritative website: The websites that consistently offer high-quality, valuable information on a specific topic, earning trust from users. Alternatively, it stems from content across the internet that’s reputable and dependable.

Incorporates Anchor Text: Anchor text refers to the clickable and visible text that anchors the link.

Employs Descriptive Anchor Text: This is a form of anchor text that not only guides the user to click but also provides a brief description of the linked-to site within the link itself.

Google consistently evolves its algorithms and revises its terms and guidelines. In the case of Google’s Panda and Penguin update, it imposes penalties for engaging in unnatural methods to acquire backlinks for your website. Therefore, it’s of paramount importance to refrain from resorting to BlackHat SEO strategies when attempting to obtain backlinks.

5. Social Media

Having a website with exceptional content is not always sufficient. To enhance your business and website’s search engine results, a robust social media presence is equally crucial. If your business has not yet established its foothold on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter (now X), and Pinterest, now is the opportune moment to leverage the myriad benefits of social media.

5(a). Social Media & SEO Improve Organic Traffic

Social media and SEO are two intertwined pillars of modern digital marketing. Their synergy is paramount for driving organic traffic to websites.

Search engines have increasingly recognized the significance of social media signals in determining a website’s relevance and authority.

Social media platforms, with their vast user engagement and content sharing, amplify a website’s online presence, making it more discoverable.

Search engines factor in social signals such as shares, likes, and comments as indicators of content quality and user satisfaction. This interplay between social media and SEO bolsters a website’s visibility in search results, contributing significantly to enhanced organic traffic and overall online success.

5(b). Google uses Twitter to discover new content

Google compiles web pages through its meticulous crawling process, subsequently building an index. This operation, however, can be a rather laborious task.

Fortunately, the inclusion of Twitter (X) can significantly streamline this process, as Google leverages Twitter to discover and index new content swiftly and efficiently.

5(c). Social Media Boost Authority

Google elevates the ranking of your website’s web pages when it recognizes solid domain and page authority. Achieving these high levels of domain and page authority is contingent upon receiving traffic from reputable sources. The measure of your credibility is largely determined by the number of high-quality websites that link back to your content.

5(d). “Social shares” the new link building

Link building undeniably stands as a crucial element in obtaining organic traffic from search engines. Unfortunately, this process has fallen victim to abuse by webmasters employing Black-Hat SEO techniques, such as keyword stuffing, hidden text, and even websites that link back to the very site being optimized.

In response, Google has taken the initiative to examine the influence of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Long gone are the days when a link-building strategy was enough to get organic traffic from search engines.

Today, the combined efforts of backlinks and social media shares work in tandem to furnish your website with the essential links required for organic traffic.

5(e). Share Consistently

Simply set aside 5-10 minutes during your morning tea or coffee routine, and you’ll begin to notice a significant difference. Consistently investing this short amount of time can work wonders for your SEO strategies.

5(f). Share The Web Pages and Blog Posts

Promote Your Web Pages and Blog Posts

Boost your online presence by actively sharing your web pages and blog posts. Additionally, engage your audience by sharing compelling links that foster new connections. Utilize LinkedIn and Reddit to discover and participate in communities pertinent to your industry, positioning yourself in front of individuals sharing your niche.

By sharing your expertise and cultivating a reputable online presence, you’ll naturally draw people to connect with you.

5(g). Engage your audience

This principle holds true across the spectrum of social media platforms. The size of your network and the depth of your engagement directly correlate with heightened user engagement.

In essence, a larger and more active network generates a more vibrant and interactive community. As you expand your reach and actively participate, you create a dynamic ecosystem where discussions thrive, content resonates, and connections flourish.

By fostering a robust presence and actively engaging with your audience, you not only attract their attention but also establish a genuine and valuable rapport, driving increased user engagement across social media channels.

6. Google Authorship

Google Authorship remains a crucial factor in the digital landscape due to its direct connection to E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness), a fundamental framework for evaluating content.

Notably, for content categorized under YMYL (Your Money/Your Life), encompassing subjects like health, finance, news, and personal well-being, the role of authors becomes even more pivotal.

Google’s guidelines instruct raters to scrutinize E-E-A-T, with the addition of “Experience”, signifying the degree of experience demonstrated in the content, and “Expertise”, emphasizing the author’s competence in the field.

Furthermore, “Authoritativeness” considers the credibility of both the content creator and the content itself, while “Trustworthiness” encompasses the overall reliability of the content creator, the content, and the hosting website.

In this context, Google Authorship remains indispensable in affirming the credibility and trustworthiness of web content, particularly within the critical realm of YMYL topics.

7. Content Curation

A common misconception prevails that content curation equates to duplicating content and offers no SEO benefits. Contrary to this belief, numerous websites have significantly enhanced their SEO performance by leveraging content curation tools.

For instance, Keith Ward, the Director of Global Marketing at d-Wise, reported a remarkable 200% boost in SEO results through content curation tools. In fact, several others have shared similar success stories, with some even tripling their SEO effectiveness solely through the strategic utilization of content curation tools.

This underscores the valuable role that content curation can play in optimizing your online presence and search engine rankings.

There are several other benefits of content curation. Here are the 5 good reasons to curate content.

• Discover great content.
• Increases Inbound Links to your site.
• Generates Social Signals.
• Optimizer for the long-tail.
• Optimizes Short-tail keywords.

Now, we know the advantages of content curation but what are the available tools that help us to curate content?

Here is the list of some of the most-used content curation tools:

Pocket

Save, organize, and access articles, videos, and more with ease. Tag and search for content effortlessly. Discover the power of digital curation today.

Curata

Collaborate, discover, and curate engaging content effortlessly. Use browser plugins for instant additions and unlock blog publishing and marketing integrations. Optimize your content strategy with Curata.

Triberr

Harness analytics to amplify your content’s impact. Streamline social media scheduling with ‘queue’ and grow your audience through ‘tribes.’ Unlock the full potential of content distribution with Triberr.

List.ly

Create and publish curated content lists on the go. A versatile tool with a user-friendly Chrome extension and bookmarklet for seamless content curation from across the web. Explore the power of collaborative list-making.

Feedly

Effortlessly categorize and manage content by interest. Save articles for later reading and share boards with your team. Discover a smarter way to curate and stay informed with Feedly.

8. Competitive Analysis & Research

One of the key aspects of any SEO is the initial competitive analysis. This process should be identified as soon as possible, depending on the type of industry and the scope of the SEO process.

The competitive analysis has four phases:

8(a). Identify your potential SEO competitors

Make a list of your competitors and make sure you do not only limit yourself to companies that offer the same type of products, and content but it can be any website that competes with you in search results for that particular keyword.

Dive deep into their profile and grab the general metrics for them. You can use the Google Keyword Planner tool or SEMrush to get the general metrics. Once you get the details, download their backlink profile.

8(b). Validate your SEO competitors

Once you download their backlink profile, make a deep study and validate your SEO competitors. Analyze the keywords for which they are already ranking and to which degree, for which you are targeting.

You can even expand your targeted keyword list after analyzing the backlink profile. For the keywords, you are not ranking in search results might represent a new opportunity.

8(c). Compare your SEO Competitors

Compare your website with your competitor using all the relevant data. You can identify those keywords for which you want to rank in the top search results. Make a list of those keywords and prioritize them. It is likely to include link popularity, current ranking, search volumes, ranked pages, and content optimization.

8(d). Select your keywords

Now, it’s time for the implementation. Analyze the previously gathered data for your own website. Choose the keywords and make your short-term, mid-term, and long-term SEO goals.

Here is a list of some of the great tools that will help you throughout the Competitive Analysis and Research.

To identify competitors

SimilarWeb, WooRank, Followerwonk by Moz, SpyFu.

To identify keywords

SEMRush for keyword data, you can also use Ubersuggest to gather Google suggestions for particular keywords.

To identify rankings

Authority labs, Positionly, Advanced Web Ranking.

To identify popularity

The Moz SEO Toolbar, Link Explorer, CognitiveSEO Backlink Explorer, and MajesticSEO are for link-related data and easy-to-develop popularity analysis.

To identify page optimization

Moz On-Page Grader tool for a quick on-page content optimization analysis.

To semi-automatize the process

Moz Keyword Difficulty and SERPs analysis tool, Ahref’s Keyword Difficulty Tool.

9. Google Search Central SEO Strategy

Google Search Central (formerly Webmasters) is a powerful collection of resources for webmasters and website owners to monitor their website activity in Google Search Engine. It is free and gives you a bunch of information about your website.

If you haven’t signed up for Google Search Central then just go to Google Search Console and sign in with your Google account.

Once you are done with the sign-up process, submit your website to Google Search Console.

During this process, you will be asked to verify your website. You will be provided with various options to verify your website.

Once you’re done verifying, you need to submit the sitemap of your website.

There are various plugins that help you to generate an XML sitemap. Here are some of those:

• Google XML Sitemaps
• Rank Math SEO
• Yoast WordPress SEO

Rank Math SEO is my personal favorite. You can install it from the WordPress plugin directory. Once the plugin is installed and activated, navigate to the XML sitemaps settings in the Rank Math Menu. Check out the how-to guide on its official website.

Once you enable it, you will see a link for XML Sitemap from where you can grab the XML sitemap link and submit it in Google Search Central.

Once the web pages of your website get indexed in Google, you can use various tools in Google Search Console to improve the SEO of your website.

9(a). Setting up Google Search Central

• Sign in to your Google account.
• Visit Google Search Central.
• Click on “Add a property.”
• Select “Website” from the drop-down menu and input your site’s URL, ensuring it matches the one in the browser bar.
• Select your property type: You can choose a Domain property for your whole website or a URL prefix property for specific parts.
• Domain property: Ideal for simple websites or when you want to see data from your main domain and subdomains in one place. To set up a Domain property, enter your root domain (e.g., example.com).
• URL prefix property: Use this to gather data from particular domains or subdomains. Simply add the URL as it appears in your browser (e.g., https://www.example.com).
• Note: If your site has both www and non-www versions or supports both http and https connections (which it shouldn’t), you may need multiple URL prefix properties to cover all these variations. URL prefix properties offer various verification methods if you can’t use DNS records.

9(b). Google Search Central Tool Messages

Google Search Central will send you some important notifications related to your website. Make sure you read those notifications as they might explain to you about the issues on your website.

9(c). Search Queries

Google Search Central tools give you the most holistic view that helps you determine just about everything related to search analytics. It doesn’t only show you the traffic on your website but also shows you the potential traffic via impression.

Let’s understand some of the terms:

Query

The query gives you the details about the keywords for which you are ranked in Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This is one of the fastest ways to know whether your targeted keyword is ranking and giving you the desired results in Google search or not.

These features will quickly help you identify relevant keywords that you can use further for content optimization.

Impression

If you are wondering how to find data for the number of times people saw your website in Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), then this option will tell you. This metric will help you find how many people seeing your website for any particular keyword.

Clicks

It is a metric that lets you find how many people are clicking on your website link while seeing Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

CTR

It is a percentage of people clicking on the website appearing in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

If the click-through rate is low for any particular keyword, then consider improving the meta description for that particular page.

You can also consider improving the relevance of the content on that particular page.

Average Positions

This metric tells you about the ranking of your website for a particular keyword in Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). It lets you identify the impact of keywords on your website traffic.

9(d). Monitor Your Most Linked Content

Google Search Central is an awesome way to identify what content people love on your website. Generally, the homepage is the top-linked content. By using this tool, you can find the number of unique domains that link to your website or content. A unique domain link to your content, the better it is.

9(e). Adjust Your Sitelinks

When someone searches for your website in Google search by putting your website name as a keyword in Google search box then Google displays a group of related links below the main link.

These links are typically popular pages underneath the main search results. These groups of links are called site links.

As we discussed earlier, Google selects your most popular pages as a site link. You can’t intentionally create site links for your website. But once Google displays your popular links as a site link then you can manage them in the Google Search Central.

You can take advantage of removing unwanted pages and displaying the best pages.

10. Build links with broken link opportunities on Wikipedia

This is one of the most powerful ways of generating authority backlinks but most of the SEO experts overlook this trick.

Did you ever think of that?

So how can you get links from Wikipedia?

Well, there are two ways:

Citation: When someone writes or edits something on Wikipedia and misses to link to a source.

Dead Link: This is something when a previously linked resource, page, or site is removed or doesn’t exist.

Finding these links can be a great headache for anyone.

But not anymore!

Thanks to WikiGrabber!

It quickly lets you find Wikipedia pages that need citations and dead links replacement.

In this example, I just randomly picked a keyword and searched for “Search Engine Optimization” which found me 10 citations and 5 dead links for the given keyword on Wikipedia.

Another method is Google search that you can use to search the term: site:wikipedia.org “Your Keyword” “dead link”

Now all you need is to open the Wikipedia article and scroll down through the article until you find [citation needed].

Click on the [edit] text and using the visual editor add the link and click generate.

These Wikipedia links are no-follow links which means they do not pass any link juice to your site. However, these links help you to build your domain authority which is still considered as a search engine ranking factor.

11. Use Multiple Keywords in Page Title

While analyzing my analytics I found one of my posts was getting organic traffic with multiple keywords.

At the same time, you need to be sure that it doesn’t appear spammy to search engines. This might affect your SEO efforts.

Spammy means the use of similar keywords like:

• SEO Strategy
• SEO Techniques
• SEO Guide

If you combine them together and use them as the title of your page, there is every possibility of getting penalized by Google.

Instead, you can use it smartly and wisely like:

Smart SEO Techniques: Strategies that Drive Search Engine Trafic

You can research some new combinations to get the desired results.

You may also like:

• How to Structure a Blog Post in 2023: 7 Effective Steps
• How to Start a Blog in 2023: Easy Steps

Final Words

In conclusion, the journey to boosting organic traffic through smart SEO strategies is a dynamic and rewarding one. By implementing these ten proven tactics, you are well-equipped to enhance your online presence, engage with your target audience, and climb the ranks in search engine results.

Remember, SEO is a continuous process, and staying updated with the latest trends and algorithm changes is essential. As you craft compelling content, optimize your website, and foster meaningful connections, you’ll not only drive organic traffic but also build a strong and enduring online presence. So, jump on your SEO journey with confidence, and watch your organic traffic soar to new heights.

Hopefully, these SEO Strategies will be helpful to you to develop more powerful SEO strategies for your website.

I’m eager to learn more!

Please share in the comments section below the additional aspects you consider and the tools you utilize.