These are 10 effective tips that you can implement that should, hopefully, improve your website’s organic search traffic. These are some of the most helpful tips that we’ve gathered over the last year. Many of these we will use for our own SEO strategy.
Increasing Organic Clicks
Let’s begin with clicks, particularly earning more clicks from Google without actually increasing your ranking since that’s one of the nice things about SEO. You don’t really need to have a higher rank to get more traffic if you can increase the clicks from the rankings and listings that your website already has. So let’s discuss some distinct strategies for generating more clicks without increasing your true rankings.
1. Meta Descriptions
Now it’s time to optimize those infamous meta descriptions. This is a pretty old-school SEO hack. However, a recent study shows that 30% of websites today don’t utilize meta descriptions. But if we write clear and concise meta descriptions, it can actually entice users to click, and that means using descriptions that include your focus keywords that people are really searching for, so when Google uses your meta description, it’s encouraging those clicks and acting as additional marketing for your brand and website.
2. FAQ & How-to Schema
The next tip is related to schema, specifically FAQ and how-to schema. Google recently began to introduce these in search results. FAQ schema gives websites a ton of SERP real estate. You won’t win it every time, similar to how you won’t always win the how-to schema, but when you do, that can positively influence people to click on your pages. Expand those FAQ schemas out (but don’t force it).
It’s not appropriate for every page. You want to make sure that you actually have those FAQs on your pages. But it is one way, in appropriate situations, that you can increase clicks without increasing your actual Google ranking. All right.
Content Marketing/On-Page SEO
Now we’ll discuss some content marketing and on-page SEO tips.
1. Bring Back Top-Performing Content
Content can become outdated after a few years. Here’s how it usually goes. You have a blog, you add new content to it, and you share that content on social media. The majority of people will forget about it after that. So go back and review your top content over the last few years, you can go back as far as you want, and see what you can relaunch by updating it, without changing the existing URL. You can see big improvements in organic clicks just by relaunching some of your older content with a few new updates.
So review your old content and bring it back in 2022!
2. Increase Internal Linking
There are usually two things that SEO agency focus on when they’re trying to increase clicks. Number one is title tags and meta descriptions, which typically generate more clicks, but second is improving the website’s internal linking.
There are probably some opportunities for you to introduce internal links on your site that you just haven’t explored. So let’s talk about an easy way to do add internal links that doesn’t require too much work.
3. Add New Links to Old Content
Updating your old content with new links is tip number 5. We often see people skip this step over and over. When you launch a new blog post or publish a new piece of content, make sure you take the time and go back to update your old content with those new links, especially top-performing older blog posts.
4. Remove Unnecessary Links
Tip Number 4, remove unnecessary links from your website content. Now this is a form of PageRank sculpting. People have mixed feelings when it comes to page ranking for SEO, but it actually works to a certain degree. It’s not the same as nofollow link page sculpting.
This is simply removing unnecessary links. Is it necessary to have a link to your team page on every page of your website? Is it necessary to link to your contact form on every page of your website? In most cases, the answer is no. But there are times where’s it makes sense. When you remove the unnecessary links, you make it easier to pass more link equity through the links that actually count, and those links are a better Google ranking signal.
5. Use Topic Clusters
Take advantage of topic clusters. Don’t simply launch a single piece of content. Be sure you write about various pieces of content around the same topic and link those together. When that is done right and the content is connected effectively, you can increase engagement because people are reading the different posts and pages.
Technical SEO
Just one pretty technical SEO tip.
1. Core Web Vitals
Tip number 1 is investing in your core web vitals. These are some of the page experience signals that Google has brought to the forefront recently and will continue to hone in on in 2022. This will probably be an actual ranking factor in the near future. This one can be summed up as site speed and delivering a great page experience. Some of these things are really technical, so Google provides tools, like Lighthouse, to try to help with website development.
Link Building
Most people don’t like link building. Link building is extremely hard. However, there are some professionals in the industry who do truly love it and are great at it. With that being said, link building is very important to improving SEO and increasing organic traffic.
1. Passive Link Acquisition
By using tip number 1, passive link acquisition we’re able to effectively build more links. Passive link acquisition means creating content that passively gets links as people discover it in the SERPs.
This means that when people find the content they naturally want to link to it. This is accomplished by creating the types of content that bloggers, journalists, and web creators are searching for. These types of content are usually data, guides, how to, definitions, or thought leadership, kind of like this blog post. When you produce that kind of information, it generally gets a lot of links as more people find it and use it. Passive link building is one of the most efficient ways to obtain links over time.
2. Be The Last Click
The final tip as you plan your strategies for 2022, be the last click.
This means you need to satisfy your users!
Of course, you want to be the first result that people click, but you should also aim to be the last click. That indicates you provided what the user was searching for. User satisfaction is Google ranking signal number one, and it should be your overall goal.
That’s the beauty of SEO. People are searching for something, and you can deliver it to them at the exact moment they need it and are searching for it. When you’re able to be the last click, you can just about guarantee a rise in rankings and the organic traffic that you deserve.
Okay, those are 10 tips. These are your SEO objectives for 2022. We hope you enjoyed reading.