If you have been trying to rank high in the search engine results pages without any luck, then you need to rethink your SEO strategy.

Whether you’re just starting out or if you are looking to build on your current traffic generation campaign, the SEO tactics outlined below will help you start to see some real results in your marketing efforts.

When it comes to search engine optimization, there is a lot of misinformation out there. Everyone seems to have become an SEO expert in the past few years, and the problem for most struggling marketers then becomes how to know who’s information to trust online.

This is a really big concern and the best way to handle this issue is by testing out anything that you read online before you validate the idea.

In this post, we’re going to look at some of the most effective SEO tips that have worked for a lot of successful bloggers and online business owners.

Use them to increase your organic search traffic and boost your sales. These tactics work whether you’re a huge multinational company or a single blogger just starting out.

You don’t have to do them all, but pick one that you can get started with right away so you can immediately increase your traffic and grow your business.

7 Actionable Strategies to Boost Your Organic Traffic

1. Link Reclamation

The effectiveness of this particular tactic will depend on the type of business that you have. Larger brands need a relatively small amount of effort to generate thousands of new links, but for small businesses, a bit more work will be required.

What you need to do is find anyone who has mentioned you, your business, products, or content without linking to you.

Simply get in touch with that person, and request that they include a link to your site. This is a simple yet effective method with an extremely high conversion rate and a great return on the time you invest in it.

There are free and paid tools that you can use to monitor any mentions of your business.

These include BuzzSumo and Mention. Simply log in and set up alerts with keywords pertaining to your business and products and you will be notified by email whenever there is a relevant mention.

To check for links, conduct a bulk search of the URLs to see if there are any that link to your pages. You can do this just as quickly manually if you’re checking the links on a daily basis.

2. Community Hijacking

This is a favorite technique that is used by a lot of marketers to increase their organic search traffic.

Although it’s more effective in some industries than others, it will still give your search traffic numbers a significant boost no matter what type of business you have.

This tactic involves finding any online communities consisting of your target audience or people who can reach your target audience (you can build relationships with these people and ultimately get them to do the promoting of your content, business, or product).

Product Hunt is a great example of how to make use of this tactic effectively. Product Hunt is a sort of daily Reddit feed for exciting new products.

People submit products and the community votes on them, and every day those products are placed in order of popularity.

This means that if your product ranks at the top of that daily list, it could result in hundreds or even thousands of potential customers flocking to your site.

3. Acquire an Existing Website

Acquiring another website doesn’t have to cost a lot of money, but it can be one of the best SEO techniques for boosting your organic traffic and sales.

You could pick up sites for almost the same amount that you spend monthly on a modest SEO campaign, but when executed correctly, this strategy will give you a massive long-term return on your investment.

The benefits of getting an existing website and migrating it into yours are many.

They include:

• Absorbing all the traffic from that site
• Bringing in all the links that the site had accumulated
• Getting a huge influx of content to your site
• You will also inherit all of their current keyword rankings

You may even be able to take over that site’s social media accounts as well as their list of email subscribers. All in all, you’re going to see a site-wide rise in organic traffic.

But how do you find the sites to target?

The answer to that alone could turn into another blog post, but here is a brief overview of what to look for when trying to determine which sites to acquire:

• The blog has a good amount of original content which is highly relevant to your customer avatars or buyer personas
• The site also has a good ratio of linking root domains to backlinks (max. 1:20)
• There is a steady stream of organic traffic to the site each month (min. 10,000 unique visitors) – There aren’t lots of banner ads on the site

If the blog owner hasn’t published anything on the site in the past few months it’s more likely that they are ready to sell.

Blogs are a great target because they typically have low income levels and high volumes of content. As long as you can get it for a reasonable fee, the content alone will make it worthwhile when you consider what it would cost you to produce and promote that same content.

4. Boost Your Blog’s Underperforming Content

A huge portion of the total organic traffic to your site comes from just a tiny percentage of your entire site content.

This presents a lot of opportunities for smart marketers. Often you will find that you have tons of content ranking on the second or third pages for the targeted keywords.

Find these ‘low-hanging fruit’ pages using the Search Analytics tab in your Google Search Console, and determine which keywords are bringing in the highest numbers of traffic.

This report will also show you which ones get the highest number of impressions in the search engine results pages as well as the average position of each one.

The aim here is to find those keywords that are between position 10 and 30 that you can bump up to the first page and significantly boost your site traffic.

You do this by pushing some internal links from the most powerful pages on your site to those low-hanging fruit pages using anchor text that is keyword-focused wherever relevant. Powerful, in this case, means those pages that have the most inbound links.

Use link analysis tools like Majestic or Ahrefs to get this information.

After adding the internal links, scan the page copy to see if there are other on-page tweaks you can make to boost your SEO such as the title tags, H1 tags, and so on.

Use a tool like Accuranker to keep track of your results and all the improvements that you’re making.

5. Find The Questions That Your Customer Avatars Are Asking

Great content isn’t just about creating content around keywords that are relevant to your products or services.

Your content needs to directly resonate with your customer avatar. When creating a content plan, you have to begin by asking what your buyers are asking.

From there you will be able to align those questions with keywords on that topic in order to create content that not only drives growth but ultimately fulfills the needs of your potential customers.

The first step in finding out what your ideal customers are asking is to look on Quora.

This social network is full of questions that people are asking as well as answers that are being provided. You can use the information that you get from this site to help you craft your content strategy.

Another method is by using question-based search engines like Answer The Public. This free tool lets you type in a keyword that is relevant to you and it finds the questions that people are asking pertaining to that term.

The third option you have for finding the questions that are being asked by your audience is to use the data from internal searches on your own site.

Google Analytics will provide you with this information and once you have it, you can then align your content with these questions. Simply take a question and a keyword to target, and then provide the answer as a piece of content.

6. Transcribe Your Video Content

Video is an effective way of driving engagement from your audience, and the consumption of video content online is growing at a very fast rate.

On Facebook alone, over 100 million hours are spent watching videos each day and advertisers are shifting more toward video as an effective format for their businesses.

But, from the organic search perspective, there are a few issues with video content, particularly if you are not hosting it through YouTube. The biggest one being that the search engines don’t really understand your video content (yet…).

The best way to maximize the number of keywords that your video ranks for is by creating text transcripts to go with each of your videos.

But don’t just use a lot of text in your transcripts. Instead, include some useful links and intersperse your text with images from within the video itself. You can even add some extra information that the video does not mention.

By doing this, you not only get the SEO benefits, but you also improve the user experience for your audience.

There are a lot of great quality, cost-effective services for transcribing your videos such as Scribie and SpeechPad. If you are advertising using videos on Facebook, you can also use that transcription for closed-caption subtitles.

7. Consolidate Your Content

This concept isn’t a new one, but it’s misunderstood by most marketers.

The whole point with this tactic is to take two pieces of content that are related, and create one piece of content that will rank much higher in the search engine results pages.

To consolidate the two pieces of content, simply add a 301 redirect to the content that isn’t performing as well.

By doing so, all the links that were leading to your underperforming content will now redirect to the piece of content that is performing better, making it even more authoritative in Google’s eyes.

This is a quick and easy way of getting all the SEO benefits from both pieces of content. The new ranking will then bring more organic traffic than the other two lesser rankings together.

But how do you know when to consolidate your content?

Consolidating your content isn’t a decision that should be taken lightly, and if you’re trying to decide whether to consolidate a piece of content that is underperforming, use criteria such as how old the content is.

If you’re dealing with recently published content, you may need to give it a little more time to see if it performs well before jumping to any conclusions.

Also, you need to consider if that content brings in any other traffic besides the people who land on it from organic search. If the content has lots of referral traffic or social media traffic coming in then you could lose out on potential customers by consolidating it.

Another thing to consider is if that content also ranks well for other keywords in addition to the main one you’re targeting.

Maybe those keywords are performing even better than your main one?

Or maybe the content is an educational piece that brings much value to your customer avatar? Evaluate all of the areas outlined above before you start rolling out the redirects.

In Conclusion

These are just a few of the many underutilized tactics that you can use to grow organic traffic to your site.

Not all of them are going to be relevant to your business, but from the ones that are, pick one and implement it into your traffic generation strategy today.

Feel free to post your comment below.  An email address is required but it will not be shared with anyone, put on any list, or used for any kind of marketing, just to alert you if there are any replies. Thanks and happy hunting!

PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published September 19th 2018