How to Optimize Your Website to Boost Organic Search

Let’s assume a user faces a problem. They Google a solution (isn’t it amazing that Google controls the search market so much that we’ve turned their brand name into a verb?), resulting in page after page of search results—we call these SERPs for search engine results pages. If the user is like most users, they’ll explore a couple of links near the top of the first page of SERPs before making a purchase decision. If your link isn’t among those near the top of the SERPs, you likely won’t see much traffic (called organic search traffic) to your site. Thus, when you boost organic search traffic, you drive more prospective buyers to your site, which translates into more opportunities to sell your products. There’s a strong correlation between organic search traffic and sales volume. So, today, let’s explore the ways to boost organic search traffic to your website.

Why you should boost organic search

You might accept my premise that an increase in visitors from organic search translates into higher revenue, which, by the way, is supported by most experts in the field, so you don’t have to take my word for it. However, efforts to boost organic traffic, termed SEO for search engine optimization, is only one of many digital marketing tactics open to website owners and online businesses. Maybe you think you don’t need SEO but can concentrate your efforts on building social media traffic or beefing up your email marketing campaigns.

Well, surprise!

Nothing can replace the value of organic search for your results because 53% of all visits come from organic search. Less than 15% of your website traffic comes from paid digital advertising, and only about 5% of your traffic comes through social media if your website adheres to norms. If you run a B2B website, the percentage of traffic from organic search is closer to 75%, making efforts to boost organic search an imperative.

How to boost organic search

A well-optimized website attracts more visitors by ranking well in the Google search algorithm, giving you more opportunities to make a sale. It also enhances user engagement meaningfully, leading to higher conversion rates.

As you can see in the image below, SEO involves strategic decisions that match your website and its content with a complex search algorithm designed to provide high-value results to users with the highest-value links shown first.

Below are some effective strategies to boost organic search on your website.

Implement SEO best practices

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical for any website’s visibility so there is no way to get around crafting and implementing a sound SEO strategy. To rank higher in search results, use targeted keywords related to your products that reflect user intent to find these products. Due to the increased use of voice search using devices like Alexa, keywords is a misnomer. Instead, keywords today are longer, commonly 3-4 words. That’s good because you should only use each keyword to create a single post. Using long-tailed keywords, you can make a unique keyword for each piece of content while capitalizing on voice search.

Be sure to use keywords naturally throughout your content, especially in titles, headings, image alt tags, and the content meta description. Use the keyword about every 200 words in crafting content.

None of this involves anything technical, and you’ll find lots of insights on building this strategy on these pages and by searching the web. Expert plugins available to enhance your website offer the tools you need to optimize your content, as well.

Publish high-quality, relevant content that consistently provides value to visitors, focusing on user intent to boost organic search. Try to publish at least once a week and focus on long-form content such as blog posts (that exceed 900 words), ebooks, and videos. However, it takes time before you’ll see meaningful results.

Gain backlinks

Backlinks, along with social media engagement, are a vote of confidence from the internet community supporting the value of the content you produce. There are lots of ways to gain backlinks, including the following:

• Producing graphics (like my SEO graphic shared earlier), stellar content (especially research studies), and videos that other bloggers might deem worthy of including or referencing on their websites. Since these are your intellectual property, bloggers are supposed to include a link back to your original content.
• Guest posting on websites related to your content areas.
• Reclaim unlinked mentions. Sometimes, a website owner might refer to your content without a link. Most owners will provide one by reaching out to ask for attribution.
• Scan the competition to find gaps in their coverage of topics or weaknesses in their posts to create content that fills those voids.
• Become a source for writers and reporters. Several sites can help you connect with these sources for backlinks.
• Reach out to bloggers in your niche to pitch a guest post to them or suggest they link to your published content.

Optimize page load speed

A slow-loading website can significantly deter visitors from coming to your website. Research shows that users expect a page to load in under three seconds. If it goes on any longer than that, visitors are likely to leave, which is reflected in your website’s bounce rate. A high bounce rate lowers your search rank. Plus, visitors who leave your site because of slow load speed (or any other factor that negatively impacts the user experience) don’t stay long enough to buy something. They may share their negative experiences to discourage others from avoiding your site.

You can check your score on a variety of SEO factors, including site speed, using your Google Search Consol, which is a free tool, or using one of the online speed checkers. Suppose you want to improve page load speed, consider compressing images, using browser caching, and minimizing code (like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). These tools can help improve your site speed. A faster website not only enhances user experience but also positively impacts search engine rankings, so if you want to put your website in front of the right people, this is the way to go.

Mobile optimization

With the growing use of mobile devices for browsing, ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly is crucial to attracting the traffic you need to secure conversions. A responsive design that adjusts seamlessly to different screen sizes is a must for keeping visitors on the site and lowering bounce rates.

Use tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to ensure your site looks good on various devices. This is critical, so don’t overlook it. Mobile optimization improves the overall user experience and enhances your ranking in mobile search results, so it is worth spending some time getting things right.

Site search optimization

Site search optimization is essential for websites with extensive content. A robust and accurate site search function can significantly enhance user experience.

When this is available, it will allow visitors to find specific information quickly on your website, reducing your bounce rate by a wide margin. Optimize your site search by ensuring it indexes relevant pages.  An effective site search can also reveal valuable data on what visitors are looking for, and this can guide content creation. This guide to content creation can be a critical step in ensuring that you get the right eyes on your products and services.

Monitoring and tweaking

Attempts to boost organic traffic aren’t a spray-and-pray strategy. Instead, you must identify key metrics that you use to monitor your performance. Track those metrics, such as visits, source of visitors, bounce rate, top-performing pages, site speed, backlinks, and domain authority, to provide valuable insights to guide the development of new content as well as use insights to tweak existing content to improve performance.

Conclusion

If you want to boost organic search, recognize that you need to build a strategy that employs several of the tactics mentioned here, then implement them seamlessly before you see much improvement. Even then, it takes time to see a significant improvement in your search traffic. But, by tracking key metrics, you should see a steady increase in your organic traffic and sales revenue.

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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.