Digital Marketing Agency – TIS India Blog

Google dominates the flow of traffic on the internet. In fact, the tech giant’s three flagship products namely Google Search, Google Images, and Google Maps account for 92.96% of all global traffic.

So, if you want to direct traffic to your website, you can’t bypass the need for search engine optimization.

However, SEO is an ever-evolving discipline and the trends that influence its efficacy never adopt a sense of rigidity. That’s why they’re called trends, right?

But, the variable nature of SEO doesn’t violate the need for experts who hold a firm grasp on contemporary growth techniques.

Such techniques, when utilised properly, not only enhance your online presence but also help your businesses to grow in multi-faceted ways.

More precisely, SEO forces webmasters to think about their websites from a holistic perspective.

Thus, at the end of the day, the most effective SEO techniques share the agenda of cultivating the best possible user experience.

Let’s delve into three of these techniques and equip you with the means to skyrocket the influx of traffic to your website.

Focus on the intent, not the entry

It is true that the bulk of SEO still revolves around fetching the right keywords and working around them.

However, ever since Google’s RankBrain update (and now the BERT Update), the search engine has shifted its focus to understanding user intent.

Earlier, Google displayed search results by matching keywords in the queries with webpages in its database.

That’s why several websites have indulged in keyword-stuffing in the past and plagued the internet with subpar content. Prior to the RankBrain update, such pages were able to occupy top spots in several searches.

But, after the update, Google analyses queries from a semantic perspective. Here’s a surface-level breakdown of how RankBrain works:-

• User makes a search on Google.
• Google returns a list of webpages.

Thereafter, there are two distinct possibilities:-

• The user finds the search results to be satisfactory and clicks on a SERP of his/her choosing.
• The user doesn’t find anything of relevance and gives up on his query without clicking through on any website.

In case (a), Google finds no flaws in its algorithm and maintains the status-quo of search results.

However, in case (b), Google identifies that its current ranking methodology is flawed, and makes changes accordingly.

In short, search results that lead to user-satisfaction are ranked higher than the ones that don’t.

Now, there are a couple of things that you can do to capitalize on this knowledge.

But, the most actionable change that you can make here is to try to raise the organic click-through-rate for your website.

Given how RankBrain works, higher CTR visibly translates into higher rankings. But, how can you go about improving your CTR rates if you don’t even know what they are?

So, the first step that you need to take will involve the aid of Google Search Console. If you need help in setting up the tool, here’s a resource that will prove useful.

Once you’re done, identify webpages with abysmally low click-through-rates and conduct an audit to identify and fill discrepancies.

More often than not, there is scope for improving your title and description tags. So, start from there.

A clever trick here involves garnering information from Google Adwords ads.

Since the keywords used in such ads are adopted after extensive research, you can take inspiration from them to embellish your page titles and meta descriptions.

Another quick workaround here involves enhancing title and descriptions tags with numbers. Research depicts that users are instantly attracted to content that contains numbers.

For example, write ‘5 Proven SEO Strategies’ instead of ‘Proven SEO Strategies’.

(As you can see from the title of this post, we practice what we preach!)

Other factors that impact CTR are the ‘Bounce Rate’ and the ‘Dwell Time’.

The former gives you a metric to observe how often users leave your website within 3 seconds (which obviously isn’t good).

On the other hand, ‘Dwell Time’ denotes the amount of time a user spends on a SERP after clicking through (the longer the better).

But, the million-dollar question here is this: how can you orient the above-mentioned metrics to your advantage?

Well, the answer is simple. Don’t bore your visitors to death!

Welcome them with a strong, to-the-point, adequately descriptive introduction and make your intentions clear from the start.

Furthermore, break your content into digestible chunks that cater to speed-readers and skimmers.

(Brian Dean from Backlinko is a master at creating impactful introductions and following through with valuable bite-sized information chunks. Also, yet again, we practice what we preach!)

Well, that’s all we have for you as far as increasing organic CTR is concerned.

But, there’s yet another powerful SEO technique that we need to discuss. So, here goes!

Revive dying content and stop it from killing your website’s traffic

Let’s get one thing out of the way. If your website isn’t winning top spots in a Google search, your odds of driving organic traffic are not promising.

As indicated in this study, SERPs that don’t occupy the first 3 positions barely get any organic click-through-rates.

So, if you’re trying to identify underperforming content, look for pages that occupy double-digit ranks or single-digit ranks that aren’t high enough.

As a standard, look for pages that rank within the 7th and the 15th position.

To make this identification, you’ll need to play around with analytical tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

Once you have access to an analytical tool, identify the bottlenecks in your content. Look for trouble areas like outdated publication years, broken links, irrelevant screenshots, etc.

After identifying the trouble areas, make necessary changes, and instill a new life into your old content. If all goes well, you can hope to gain as much as 260.7% more organic traffic in 14 days.

Additional tip: You can also take inspiration from Gary Vaynerchuk’s Reverse Pyramid Model’ and repurpose new and old content in interesting ways (For instance, use an old infographic from a blog post to create a new Twitter post).

The Take-Away

As we said at the beginning of this blog, SEO is a dynamic endeavor. The best practices keep evolving with time, and nothing in this field is set in stone.

However, driving organic traffic is set to remain as one of the key objectives of SEO for a long time.

So, we sincerely hope that you’re able to attain it using the 3 actionable techniques detailed above.