Skyrocket Your Organic Traffic With These Advanced SEO Techniques!

With competition in the market getting increasingly stiffer, the think tanks of most businesses these days find themselves occupied with brainstorming ways to enhance their visibility. In today’s climate, the quality of your offerings is not enough to earn you the spotlight. Along with developing stellar products and services, you must put in ample effort to bolster your reach. Only then will your target audience notice you ahead of the dozens and scores of competitors who are also vying for their attention. 

Now, how to climb the rungs of that visibility ladder? You know it, I know it, everyone knows it- SEO, of course. Formulating a foolproof SEO strategy holds the key to your business securing top billing. That said, the SEO landscape is deviously dynamic, which means the blueprint that had driven soaring results for you a couple of years ago will, in all likelihood, fail to deliver the same success today. With algorithms constantly evolving, marketers need to be constantly on their toes to have a definitive shot at ranking their business on top of SERPs. What this also means is that businesses need to look beyond traditional SEO techniques and embrace novel, more advanced tactics to gain a competitive edge.

Not sure what these latest SEO techniques are? Worry not; we’ve got you covered! In today’s blog, we dive deep into a host of advanced SEO strategies implementing which is sure to give your organic traffic a boost. Eager to get started? Dive in right away!

Optimize Your Page for Mobile

Approximately half of the internet’s traffic comes from mobile devices. Therefore, should you fail to make your website mobile-friendly, you stand to dent your business opportunities by a significant margin. Moreover, with Google now adopting a mobile-first approach (Google will index and rank the mobile version of your page preferentially to its desktop one) to crawling and indexing pages, ensuring responsivity (a website with a responsive layout renders appropriately across diverse screen sizes) has become all the more critical. 

Besides, responsive web design offers an array of other benefits as well, such as:

• They make websites easy to navigate. On a responsive page, users face no trouble finding the information they are looking for. By fostering improved usability, responsive web design encourages users to spend more time on the page and gives them a reason to visit over and over again. And the memorable user experience that responsivity facilitates ultimately translates into greater conversions for your business.
• Websites that are mobile-optimized load extremely fast (more on this shortly); this goes a long way toward enhancing the user’s customer experience.
• By emphasizing responsivity, you invariably get into the habit of scrutinizing your page’s UX and content with uncompromising rigor. As a result, you find yourself becoming increasingly alert to pitfalls, such as the presence of duplicate content, which can prove to be detrimental to your SEO efforts. 
• Responsive web design paves the path for greater social sharing. When a page can engage its visitors successfully, it inevitably nudges them to talk about it amidst their circles. And as any marketer will tell you, this word-of-mouth marketing is way more effective than any paid campaign they run.

Now that we know the merits of mobile-friendly websites, let us take a look at some pointers we should keep in mind while designing one.

• While adding images to your website is a must, for it helps to enhance its visual appeal, you must take care to compress them. Failing to do so will result in your page having a high loading time, which will then invite a high bounce rate. There are multiple tools available online that allow you to compress the file size of images without compromising their quality. Opt for file formats such as AVIF, JPEG 2000, and WebP rather than JPEG and PNG because the former allows for smaller file sizes. Additionally, you can also consider lazy loading, in which the images only load once the user scrolls down to it. 
• Choose HTML5 in favor of Adobe Flash for your website. Although Adobe Flash is incredibly popular for animations, it doesn’t receive support from mobile devices. Besides, HTML5 is no compromise either. It lets you execute a host of actions without relying on browser plugins.
• After wrapping up the design of your website, assess its mobile-friendliness before making it live. No, you don’t have to do this manually. You can take the help of Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. All you need to do is provide your site’s URL. Following that, the tool will generate a comprehensive analysis of your page, visualizing it across various mobile devices to help you obtain a clearer idea. What’s more, it also offers actionable tips to optimize your site’s performance. 
• Deploy media queries. They allow your website to adapt automatically to different screen sizes. With media queries, you have to make sure to configure them for all device sizes and not simply the most popular ones.
• Utilize AMPs (Accelerated Mobile Pages). They help accelerate your page’s load time (on mobile devices) significantly. In comparison to non-AMP pages, AMP sites load nearly 85% faster. That’s quite some margin, you’d agree!

Improve Your Page Loading Speed

A decisive ranking factor (across both mobile and desktop), page loading speed is governed by multiple factors- the number of media files, the website’s coding and server-side scripts, plugins, and themes installed on the page- which makes getting it right all the more tricky. And visitors are extremely unforgiving of even marginal increments in load time. In fact, should your loading time happen to increase from one to three seconds, the probability of visitors bouncing from your page increases by 32%. Therefore, optimizing your page speed helps you not only go up the search rankings but also deliver a satisfactory experience to your visitors. Moreover, page speed plays a crucial role in influencing brand perception, too. Businesses with slow-loading websites are very likely to be regarded as unreliable and lousy by customers. 

So, what measures can you take to boost your page’s loading speed? Before we dive into that, let us discuss, only briefly, how you can measure your site’s speed. After all, to fix something, you first need to understand what’s wrong, right? Now, there are quite a few popular tools for you to avail of, such as GTmetrix and Pingdom Website Speed Test. However, if you are new to this arena, you might find Google PageSpeed Insights to be the most useful. To begin with, it is extremely user-friendly- you simply have to feed your URL and click on “Analyze.” After that, the tool will score your page on a scale of 0 to 100. Along with the score, the tool also serves up a bunch of suggestions aimed at optimizing your page speed. The best part? You get separate scores and suggestions for each of your mobile and desktop sites. 

Next, take a look at what you can do to make your page load in an instant. 

• Pick your hosting solution wisely- Cutting corners in this regard is only going to burn a larger hole in your pocket in the long run. Hosting solutions that come cheap are typically those that offer shared hosting, where resources are divided between multiple websites, with an overloaded server bearing the load. Rather than boosting your page’s speed, such solutions will only cause it to bog down. On the other hand, reliable hosting solutions that prioritize performance steer clear of shared hosting, preventing other websites from cashing in on your resources.
• Try to get rid of unnecessary redirects- The more redirects there are, the more extended the HTTP request will be, ultimately resulting in a slow-loading page. Start by making a note of all the redirects on your page and the destinations they are leading to. This will allow you to eliminate redundant and duplicate redirects. 
• Enable caching on your web pages- Doing so will allow the server to load your page by using fewer resources, thereby drastically reducing the load time. You can cache your page either at the server level or by employing a caching plugin.
• Minify Javascript, HTML, and CSS- Reduce file sizes by discarding white space, line breaks, unnecessary comments and characters, and other undesirable elements. As you might have already guessed, this endeavor requires you to scrutinize your code with unwavering dexterity, a task which, if attempted manually, can consume a great deal of time. The wise course of action, thus, is to take the help of a plugin.
• Employ a CDN (Content Delivery Network)- It is essentially a cluster of interconnected servers situated across different locations. A CDN helps improve page speed by minimizing the distance a data request has to traverse between the host’s server and the browser.

Engage Your Users

A surefire way of rising to the top of SERPs involves fostering user engagement on your website. You can accomplish this through several means. Let’s take a look at some.

• Leverage video content- Naturally wired to process visual information, we are much more receptive to videos than we are to static images. However, keep in mind that inserting videos in your page will increase its load time. But given that they can make someone stay 2.6 times longer on a page, most marketers feel the reward is well worth the risk. 
• While using lead magnets to invite user engagement is not a novel technique, in 2023, you’ll have to make doubly sure that the content you are gatekeeping holds immense value for your visitors and is aimed pointedly at their interests and pain points for this strategy to pay off in the desired manner.
• Besides including visuals on your page, you can also consider leveraging micro-interactions to hold your visitor’s attention.
• Spruce up the content organization of your page, optimize the site navigation, use attractive images and illustrations, and do everything in your power to make sure that the user experience you are delivering comes second to none. 

Build Topic Clusters

Topic clusters refer to groups of web pages, all of which carry content relating to a particular subject matter. In this model, there exists one central hub called the pillar page. To this, all other content pages relevant to the topic link back. Because of this linking, the pillar page establishes itself as an authoritative entity for the topic in the eyes of search engines, thereby ranking higher for it compared to other pages, following Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) benchmark. Moreover, by facilitating improved navigation, topic clusters help you deliver a superior user experience, too (which, again, translates to higher rankings). 

Lay Emphasis on Voice Search Optimization

As conducting web searches with the help of voice assistants is slowly starting to become the norm (nearly 40% of internet users in the US use a voice assistant at least monthly), it is high time businesses devote equal importance to voice search optimization as the rest of their SEO techniques. The key to developing a pitch-perfect voice search optimization strategy lies in treating voice search as a unique entity and not as an offshoot of text search. In stark contrast to text queries, voice queries are significantly more conversational in nature, requiring you to infuse such phrases into your content organically. Additionally, targeting long-tail and question keywords will also help you optimize your page for voice search. 

Utilize Structured Data

Structured data helps boost the organic traffic of your page because it communicates to search engines what a piece of content or image is about, thereby giving them a clearer idea about your offerings and your website in general. A page that makes use of structured data makes itself eligible for obtaining search results with images and stars in the featured snippet. In this sense, structured data can help you zoom past your competitors and improve your visibility by leaps and bounds.

Wrapping It Up

The more sophisticated your SEO techniques are, the better your chances of cutting through the noise. We hope the techniques shared above will help you and the SEO experts in your team devise a holistic and bulletproof SEO strategy that will propel your business to dizzying heights of success.