7 SEO Tips to Increase Organic Traffic

In the last year, I’ve put into practice some straightforward SEO tips to increase organic search blog traffic, and I’ve seen excellent results. Naturally, as you know I like to do, I want to date a few of those top to help fellow bloggers. If you have been blogging for a while or even if you’re new at blogging, you’ve experienced that driving consistent traffic to your blog is no walk in the park., especially if your niche isn’t one of the big two, travel or finance.

In that time, SEO has improved my organic search traffic dramatically. Even more important than just that, my bounce rate is under 10%, and my average reading time ranges from one minute to as much as four and a half minutes. After I implemented the SEO tips I am about to share with you, all of this happened.

1. Determine Your Niche

I know. You’ve heard this over and over from the time your started blogging. Maybe you’ve even done it. That’s good. But do your SEO practices align with what’s best for your niche? When you’ve determined your niche, you will better understand what topics you want people to find your blog for. You want Google to rank your posts based on travel search terms if you have a travel blog. It’s simple, then. You optimize each post for a travel-related search term. The more you rank highly for specific keywords in your niche, the higher your post will rank on Google.

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If you have a lifestyle blog as I do, it’s a little more complex. Since I write on multiple topics like family life, parenting and home-making, and travel and product reviews, my SEO strategy must be optimized to bring in traffic for the specific topic of each post. That way, when a person visits my blog from that particular post, the CMS and internal links I use will suggest related posts to their original search. This has the added benefit of encouraging visitors to read posts from other topics (this will only work if your content is good).

2. Do a Keyword and SERP Search

Once you have an idea for the topic of your blog post, do some keyword research to find the keyword that is best for you to use. Additionally, do a SERP search to get an idea of the angle, freshness and length of the articles you will be competing with for first and second-page search engine real estate.

3. Do Not Use Misleading Keywords

Clickbait. Please don’t do it. When you optimize your blog posts, do not use unrelated headlines and keywords to get more visitors to your side. When you do that, visitors leave as soon as they realize your post is not what they are looking for. Doing this increases your bounce rate. Over time, it tells Google your content is not helpful, and the algorithm buries it.

The more pages on your blog that has this issue, the farther down your content will be on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) as sites with more relevant results outperform yours.

4. Don’t Oversaturate Content with Keywords

The key to successfully using keywords is to use them naturally to help users find your content without being a nuisance when reading your copy. Don’t just cram your copy with keywords to get eyeballs. The content must make sense when you read it without feeling like it’s an overly desperate ad piece. When you oversaturate, you diminish the value of your work because it leaves the reader wondering if you know what you are talking about or whether you just wanted to get hits.

5. Do SEO Content Audits

Every so often, do an SEO content audit. An audit means going over old content and seeing what you can do to update your blog SEO and drive more organic traffic to posts. That could also mean refreshing and reposting articles, adding more information, editing photos, including relevant backlinks, etc. Still, you’re really looking to improve headlines, insert more key phrases and so on. As the world of blogging moves, new content and the way people search is being published every day. The more pieces you can keep fresh using new SEO tips, the better.

6. Consistently Create Quality Content

This is easier said than done. No doubt, I would love to spit out eight pieces of content monthly. But sometimes, to ensure posts are of a certain quality, I put out fewer posts. Consistent, high-quality content results in direct organic traffic that stay and read, as well as move on to other related posts on your site. When readers visit longer, your bounce rate is lower, and Google recognizes your posts as relevant.

7. Write Longer Articles

Longer articles perform better on search engines. Studies are updated each year to communicate the ideal blog post length. For 2021, the perfect blog post length is between 1,500 – 2,500 words. Be careful, though, not to confuse quality with length. You want longer articles; however, an article of 2000 words that could have provided the same information in 500 words does not mean the longer one is better quality.

Writing longer pieces is something I struggle with, personally. In school, I am typically the one looking around in an English exam wondering why everyone needs extra sheets of paper, and I have some left. Very soon, though, I realized that despite that, I never failed. My writing style is a natural one of brevity. Longer sentences sometimes, but overall conciseness is my preference. If I can achieve that and clarity, all the better. I often struggle when writing with a word count limitation because I naturally aim to make my point most concisely.

As bloggers, SEO can be a little scary if you don’t know how to make it work for you, but once you learn, you realize it’s much easier than it sounds.

Do you currently use these SEO tips in your blogging strategy? Share some others in the comments.

Xo, Shandean

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