SEO Tactics to Drive Traffic and Boost Rankings of a Website

However, SEO is not the name of a single one-time action; it is a never-ending process that comprises various strategies and tactics. If you want your website to rank higher on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), you need to consider various factors and work on them.

Previously, websites relied on stuffed keywords and backlinks to stay on top of search results. However, things have changed significantly these days. With an ever-increasing number of websites on the web, search engines prefer quality over quantity. 

Moreover, search engines are more concerned about the user experience (UX) of people who wish to browse websites and search content online. Hence, ranking websites capable of offering optimum UX is the new objective of search engines.

Executing a well-planned SEO strategy can ensure optimum UX and, consequently, higher search engine rankings. In this article, we’ll discuss factors that play a key role in ensuring effective SEO and some relevant tactics that are powerful enough to drive traffic and boost the rankings of a website. 

Let’s get started…

1. Publish Valuable Content

You may have heard the saying “Content is the King”, which is dangerously close to becoming a cliché nowadays. However, it is true. Users tend to research details about the product or service they require before making any purchase decision. Hence, it is essential to pay attention to the creation of quality content that will inform the user.

Here are some tactics to help you ensure quality content for your website which will result in a higher ranking.

Keep the Content Unique

The first thing you need to ensure is the uniqueness of your content. It is worth mentioning that plagiarized content is an unforgivable feat. Neither audience nor search engines forgive it. The audience visiting your website to gather knowledge about a certain topic will find it off-putting to see plagiarized content and will deem your website to be of low quality and unreliable. Visitors want to see something fresh and unique from you.

Even accidental plagiarism goes unforgiven. Search engines penalize websites with plagiarized content by lowering their search engine rankings. Hence, it is better to ensure plagiarism-free content to avoid all the scenarios mentioned above.

You can use a plagiarism checker online to determine possible plagiarism in your content and eradicate it.

A reliable plagiarism detector with an extensive database will help you find all the sources with similar content and provide you with the URLs for easier comparison.

Link to Supporting Content

This factor is often overlooked, but it can play a key role in improving the search engine rankings of your website. Search engines look for websites that create content based on their topical expertise. However, you can focus on more than just one topic. Instead, if you want to showcase your topical expertise to search engines, you should create supporting content to guide the audience through a broader set of topics more thoroughly.

You can do this by creating topic clusters. A topic cluster can be referred to as a set of web pages covering the same/similar subjects. These topic clusters help search engines understand the structure of a website and the internal linking of various pages.

Upon noticing such topic clusters, search engines will endorse your expertise regarding a particular topic and rank your website higher. You must ensure that a pillar web page is present that details the main topic, then add other web pages with supporting content, and set up internal linking between those pages.

If you already have plenty of pages and posts on your website, you may wish to update your content periodically to improve its relevance and ranking.

2. Keep An Eye On Your Competitors

If you are trying to stay ahead of the curve and place your company, products & services in the minds of your potential customers, you need to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. Here are some tactics to help you in this regard.

Analyse the Best Performing Pages of Competitors

This tactic can help you understand the reasons why the best-performing pages of your competitors’ websites are doing so well. Simply use a tool such as Similarweb to find the best-performing pages of your competitors and analyze them to see why they are ranking so well in SERPs.

1. First, you need to check the length and quality of the content. Longer articles will likely be deemed better quality.
2. Check the keyword frequency. If the keyword is only mentioned once within an article of 1000 words, then Google will likely rank the post lower than an article with a higher keyword frequency.
3. Analyse the visual content. Are there at least several images that enhance the user experience and do those images include relevant meta tags?
4. Finally, you should gain an understanding of your competitors’ traffic sources. Are they all organic, or do they have lots of inbound links from other websites? 

Understanding and replicating similar SEO tactics as your competitors should enhance the performance of your web pages.

Perform Keyword Gap Analysis

No matter how advanced the SEO for a domain has become, it still revolves around a range of keywords related to a brand’s trade. Therefore, it’s necessary to turn every keyword into a channel that can direct organic traffic to your website and make it rank higher on the SERPs.

Different domains competing in the same industry may target different keywords. So, if you want higher rankings for your website, it’s essential to ensure that you are finding & including all the valuable keywords that need to be targeted.

The most effective way to find additional keywords that are relevant to your business is by performing a keyword gap analysis on your competitors. Tools such as SEMrush allow you to perform a keyword gap analysis and will reveal additional keyword opportunities for you to target as a part of your SEO strategy.

3. Obtain Backlinks

Like keywords, backlinks play a key role in ensuring higher website rankings. Overlooking them means limiting the chances of SEO growth of your website. Google and other search engines take inbound links (backlinks) pretty seriously when assessing the ranking of a web page or entire website. Here are some backlinking tactics that can help you rock the SEO game.

Pounce on Competitor’s Broken Backlinks

Most websites tend to include a number of Broken backlinks. Some of these result from the removal of old pages, outdated content or the transfer of content to new URLs without proper redirecting structure. All these issues can lead to broken backlinks.

Links that are trying to connect to your competitors’ websites but are failing to do so can be highly valuable for you. All you have to do is find those broken backlinks and make them link to your website instead. 

You can do this by asking the admins of the linking websites to update those links to a suitable replacement page on your website.

Doing so will give you an upper hand over your competitors and make your website rank better on search engines.

Eradicate Spammy and Toxic Backlinks

Another effective SEO tactic related to backlinks is the removal of spammy backlinks linking to your website. Gone are the days when quantity was preferred over quality. Now things have changed; search engines prefer backlinks from websites considered to be an authority in a particular niche.

In addition to link spam, you must also get rid of toxic backlinks. Toxic links can include:

• Exchanged or bought links
• Backlinks created through automated services
• Over-optimized links from forum comments.

All these links are considered toxic backlinks, and they will negatively impact your website’s search engine rankings.

Brand Mentions Can Be Valuable

You may come across a website or piece of content mentioning your product or brand but not linking it to your website. Such an instance is termed brand mention and you should request that a link be made from that mention to the relevant page on your website. This practice will help you earn plenty of quality backlinks that will also be considered high quality by search engines.

You can easily find unlinked brand mentions with the help of a brand monitoring tool. You just need to enter the brand or product name to display all the instances where your brand is mentioned. As a result, you will come across various blog posts, social media posts, listicles, and other content featuring brand mentions. You should then request the author to provide you with a backlink.

Gaining quality backlinks can be a bit of a minefield, so we created a guide to navigating the different types of backlinks here.

SEO Tactics: A Conclusion

Performing SEO on a website is a never-ending process, and you have to come up with effective tactics to compete with an ever-increasing number of rivals online.

You need to make your website as appealing to search engines as much as humans in order to perform better in SERPS. To do this successfully, website owners and digital marketers need to learn a range of tricks which will drive website traffic and boost the ranking of a website significantly.

This task is not as hard as it used to be thanks to a vast range of online tools created to help you achieve your SEO goals. You just need to know how to do it, and you will be able to achieve your desired targets and stay ahead of your competition.

We have discussed some of the key factors that should be considered when looking to improve the SEO of your website and the relevant tactics to help you boost the rankings of your web pages. We wish you the best of luck with the process of implementing these tactics, but if you would like some assistance, please feel free to get in touch and we’ll be happy to discuss your requirements.