Top 10 SEO Techniques to Win the Traffic & Rankings Race in 2022

Investing big bucks on an innovative and fully-functional website encompassing interactive design and branded elements for your business is not enough! Ensuring that your website gains some traction and gets organic traffic is critical for your success. After all, you won’t get customers and make any sales without any traffic, which means no revenue.

It’s essential to make your site visible to internet users looking for a product or service that your business offers. It can be done with the SEO process, which displays and ranks your website and its content in search engines like Yahoo and Google. If you are unknown to the basics and technicalities of SEO, a digital marketing agency can help you optimize your website to be indexed by search engines and triumph the traffic game in 2022 and beyond. This article provides the best 10 SEO tips and tricks to get immense traffic from the internet and acquire new customers. So, without further ado, let’s get started!

10 Killer SEO Techniques to Supercharge Your Site’s Visibility and Traffic

Digital marketing and SEO agencies know that there are no shortcuts to SEO success, and it is an ongoing process, which requires effort and time. When it comes to improving a site’s traffic and rankings, certain factors contribute to determining where it appears on Google, such as keywords, content, website speed and usability, and backlinks.

1. Focus on Primary Keywords & Secondary Keywords

The first thing you need to do when optimizing your site for SEO is to pick the right keywords you want to rank for. A general rule of thumb is to optimize your site for primary and secondary keywords.

Primary V/S Secondary Keywords

a. Primary Keywords – Also known as head terms, these keywords define your page or product and have the highest search volume regarding your industry and niche. These can be derived from an existing page on your website, or they might be new terms that you want to target.

b. Secondary Keywords – Sometimes called long-tail keywords, these have a lower search volume and are contain more than one word. They are typically more general but also more specific to your business. Secondary keywords introduce other related terms into your content, often as sub-categories for specific types of content, which would otherwise not be covered by a broader keyword phrase. A digital marketing agency can help you derive these keywords and phrases from your primary keywords or with the help of cutting-edge tools like Keyword Planners.

For example, if you are an owner of an online clothing business, your main keyword would be “clothing,” and your secondary keyword would be “formal wear.” These need to be separate because people searching for formal wear are not likely to buy casual clothing from you and vice versa. With solid keyword research and planning under your belt and quality content created around these terms, you can start driving traffic with ease!

2. Create a Sitemap

An XML sitemap is an excellent tool for making your website accessible and navigable. It’s an electronic catalog of a website that lists the essential pages of your site. It describes the site’s hierarchical structure and content and helps search engine crawlers find and index a site more thoroughly and quickly. In addition, a sitemap makes it easier for search engines to follow links between pages on your site. That way, if one page is removed from the website or is no longer available via a specific path, the chance will be immediately identified by search engines.

A sitemap also ensures that your internal links work correctly and enables your website visitors to easily navigate and find the information they need. An SEO company can help you build and submit a sitemap to search engines so they know when and what type of new content has been published, increasing your organic rankings and traffic.

3. Setup Your Robots.txt file

For those unfamiliar with this file, the Robots Exclusion Standard (or robots.txt) is a text file placed on every web server. It is built to list all the pages on the server that search engine spiders or bots should not index. So, if you have any areas of your website that you don’t want search engine spiders crawling, your SEO agency will use this file to exclude them from being indexed by bots.

4. Create Good Title Tags

A page’s title tag is one of the critical elements in SEO. If it isn’t appealing to the search engines, your page won’t be listed. Here are several tips for creating an excellent title tag:

• Title tags should be unique. If you have multiple pages about the same topic, their title tags should be different.
• Title tags shouldn’t contain unnecessary keywords. They have to appeal to the search engines without being too “salesy.” Make sure they aren’t stuffed with keywords.
• Title tags should be as long as they need to provide relevant information, but no longer than necessary. As a general rule, try to keep it under 70 characters, ensuring it shows up on sites like Twitter and Facebook (which limit the number of characters in a post).
• Use a META description tag that’s natural-sounding and informative. Include keywords in this text, so people will easily find your site or web page.

5. Map Content Around Targeted Keywords

With millions of sites and high competition for top placement, the most significant factor determining your site’s ranking on SERPs is the quality and relevance of the content on your website. One must remember that SEO and content creation go hand-in-hand. If your content is high-quality and information, it will rank well in search results, which will result in more traffic to your website. That’s why you should craft and tailor your content relevant to both primary keywords and secondary keywords you are targeting. Doing so will help refine traffic and make sure people will find your business quickly. However, don’t try to “trick” the search engines by overusing keywords or using keywords that don’t fit well within your content. That’ll make your site or web page look spammy, and it can be penalized.

In addition, ensure that the content you develop and distribute should answer their questions in a way no one else has answered them before. We understand that creating engaging and SEO-optimized content is not as easy as it seems. If you have enough on your plate, hire a professional digital marketing agency to help you generate high-quality and informative content with proper keywords scattered throughout your page.

6. Understand User-Intent

Another factor that you should keep in mind when optimizing your website for SEO is understanding user intent. You need to figure out what people are searching for online and what details search engines keep an eye on when deciding a site’s relevancy to the user’s query. Doing so will increase the chances of your site appearing on top in search results and increase your organic traffic. You also have to ensure that your web pages are user-friendly, technically credible, and updated regularly.

7. Optimize Images With ALT Tags

Alt tags are an integral part of the search engine optimization process for images. Not only does it help in search engines, but if you’re using images on social media platforms or other websites, it also helps with image recognition.

8. Content-URL-Title Trio

If you’re seeking a way to grow your organic traffic, try using the Content-URL-Title trio to increase the likelihood of your posts being shared. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to share your content without any hurdles.

Titles are used in search engines and can be more helpful when containing relevant keywords. They help the reader understand what they will be reading without opening the page. And if you include the URL, you can automatically link back to the original source.

9. Boost Traffic Through Referral Traffic & Backlinks

Referral traffic refers to a website’s third-party links or backlinks. It comes from other websites, which are linking to your website. The amount of referral traffic you get will depend on the quality of the content on your site and how trusted it is by other websites. You will want links from relevant sites with a good reputation and authority.

Also, make sure that all of your social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, have links back to your website, so search engines can easily find them. That will help push up your ranking in search engines and get you direct traffic to your website. In addition, ensure that the backlinks you generate are not from spammy sources or link farms.

10. Optimize Your Website for Featured Snippets

Last but not least, it’s crucial to optimize your website for Google’s featured snippets because users often don’t scroll down past the first result, especially on their mobile devices. Featured snippets are boxes that answer questions directly in the search results, and they can be found in Google’s mobile app, too. The snippet box has been shown to outperform organic results and increase traffic because it’s more visible to users. If you have great content that Google isn’t picking up, your website might not appear in featured snippets. A digital marketing agency can help you optimize your site for featured snippets by using the following rules:

• Making your site is mobile-friendly;
• Ensuring your title tags are descriptive and keyword-rich;
• Using proper structure and format when developing content;
• Writing content aimed at answering questions users might ask when searching for a topic;
• Implementing targeted keywords in the title tag of each page on your site, and;
• Including relevant keywords and phrases in the content and URL of the page.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a tough uphill battle, and you won’t master it overnight. The chances are, you may never completely understand it, especially when you are running a business. Considering this, investing in professional SEO services makes sense and can reap significant profits.

If you are in quest of a professional digital marketing and SEO agency in Manchester to boost your website awareness, traffic, and Google rankings, contact us at (+44) 0 7912 02961.