7 SEO Growth Hacks That Will Double Your Website Traffic

There was a time when people kept information booklets on their side tables for details about companies and people, believed that books are the only source of knowledge, and listened to the radio to get a gist about what was happening around the world.

Then came the 90s era, encompassed with technological advancements, boasting the power of the internet. Cut to Google, the most favourite and popular search engine. However, if you think that SEO is everything Google made it look like, you’re heavily mistaken. 

Every company that leveraged the power of Search Engine Optimization needs to thank the manager of rock band Jefferson Star ship who gave birth to it. 

SEO came into being in 1997. You see, ranking high on search engines was still a new concept back then, just like the World Wide Web.

But why am I telling you this?

Because, you need to know this backstory before you start practicing your tactics on the search engine landscape. 

Although modern SEO is a result of Google’s web crawler and PageRank algorithm, the search engine was hardly known during that time.

Since then, Google has constantly added algorithms after algorithms, making it tricky and uneasy for websites to rank top on its results page. 

How SEO helps in improving website traffic

In layman terms, you know how SEO impacts your website traffic, but how?

Well, the answer to that question is relevancy. 

With every update, SEO gets complicated, but one thing remains intact. And that is the relevancy of the content on your website with your website. Every basic SEO strategy revolves around relevant keywords, included in web page titles, header tags, meta descriptions, body copy, and other content pieces. 

Now, what SEO does is make your website feature in relevant searches on Google. 

SEO, therefore, makes your website easily findable on SERPs. 

For example, you own a sweet shop in a busy market. Now, to garner customer attention, you post intriguing banners at the most crowded customer points to increase customer attention frequency. And, some interested visitors might land to your sweet shop. Now, if your services and products are amazing, they will become your loyal customers, ensuring a steady and fruitful brand-customer relationship. 

Your shop is a website, and the banners are relevant keywords. When the content of your website includes the most searched keywords on Google, its algorithms crawl on the webpage, ranking it in the process. The more unique and user-friendly content you script, the better are its chances of getting ranked highly on Google or any other search engine. 

So, the key takeaways of how SEO can boost website traffic is through keywords and content. 

How does your website benefit from SEO efforts?

Google processes over 70,000 search queries every second, i.e., 5.8 billion searches per day and 2 trillion searches per year. 

According to the World Wide Web Size Project, the total number of webpages indexed on Google is at least 4.45 billion. Moreover, the total number of existing websites on Google is more than 1.3 billion. 

So, practically, your webpage competes with at least millions of similar ones. 

But, is there any way you can ace and pace the process?

Yes, with Search Engine Optimization. 

The idea behind the SEO is to make your website stand out from the competitors. Its job is to make your site worthy of SERPs to increase its occurrence in search results. 

But, its benefits do not end here. 

Higher search engine rankings result in more traffic, more leads, higher sales, better conversion rates, and improvement in revenue funnels. Quite simply, you can structure your entire business around SEO services. All you have to do is get your website ranked on the first page of SERPs otherwise, you will lose traffic and customer interest, and your website will be lost in the infinite arcade of Google websites. 

But why only the first page of Google?

Because over 80% of people looking for information related to a product, service, or a general query via search engines usually don’t go beyond the first page. 

Like first impressions, the first page counts. It makes all the difference to your business, both digital and physical. 

Learn Advanced SEO and become an SEO expert. Enroll in SEO certification course now!

How to improve your website traffic using SEO?

Unlike your traditional marketing approaches, SEO is completely free. 

So, you are better off devoting time and resources to search optimization than old marketing tactics, right! 

However, you should know that Google alone uses more than 200 factors to rank your website. With the changing SEO dynamics and the launch of new algorithms every six months, positioning your digital content and increasing organic search results is a tricky process. 

Assuming that you have an SEO marketing strategy in place, the following are seven growth hacks that will help you double the traffic on your website. 

Hack #1: Audit your website and optimize it using Google Page speed Insights 

Learning how Google algorithms work is one way you can boost your page rankings. Out of the 200+ ranking factors considered by Google, user experience secures the topmost position. 

But, it isn’t like user experience is itself judged by Google. There are several other aspects like the site speed, page layout, mobile-friendliness, etc., directly connected with it. The process is similar to auditing your website and finding reasons why it isn’t securing enough search traffic and sales. Several SEO companies in India offer such services, but it’s up to you whether you want to outsource the process or do it yourself. 

Auditing your website will answer several questions like

These are some of the essential SEO starter tips for every website. 

To kickstart this tedious process, first, check how Google grades your website on Mobile and Desktop using Page speed Insights. 

Most of the websites do not achieve an appreciable score. This tool will let you know what parts of your website need to be optimized or corrected. 

Prepare a list of all these points, get them corrected one-by-one, and you’ll see a visible change in your rankings. 

Note, receiving 100/100 scores on Page speed Insights is next to impossible, but if your website scores 80 or above, you are good to go. 

Hack#2: Optimize your website for Google Rankbrain 

Rankbrain might be five years old, but it is the first step Google took into machine learning. It shifted Google’s algorithms from strings to things. Instead of focusing on queries like characters, words, and strings, Google started referring to them as an entity. It completely changed their game and reputation too. 

Before Rankbrain, Google had no answers for 15% of its search queries. Although Google did display a results page, it was unsure about the relevancy of it, and if that satisfied the search intent of the users. And, since Google holds its users to be of dearest importance, Rankbrain came into existence. 

Through Rankbrain, Google has answers to all the questions missed before. It started reviewing search queries as entities and things, and not just strings. It started understanding queries like a human being, improving speed, and enhancing its efficiency. Hence, every entity was reviewed as a whole, and voila! 

But, you don’t want to know the story behind Rankbrain. 

Well, let’s get to the point. 

How can you optimize your website for Rankbrain, and is it truly that important as a search factor?

Well, just a few years back, Rankbrain was a part of the top 3 search signals prized by Google, and SEO experts were practically going crazy about it. The gusto might have lessened, but Rankbrain is still an important factor for Google, which directly makes it imperative for your website. 

Understand it this way, if a website’s click-through rate (CTR) decreases, the amount of user data for the website decreases, and Rankbrain then has fewer data points to judge its relevance, therefore, dipping your website’s rank.

Get it?

Now, the next part. How to do it?

First. With high-quality content. 

Rankbrain prizes user-intended content more than anything. If your content is good, your CTR will not drop, and readers will come back to your website. But, here’s a pick. 

For suppose, if you are writing content about digital marketing, Rankbrain will pick up terms like marketing, SEO, affiliate marketing, social media marketing, marketing strategy, email marketing, internet marketing, etc. as relevant keywords too. So, focus on semantic or user intent keywords in your content. 

Second, optimize your website for keywords.

Voice search, if not right now, but in the coming years, will be the only way users would like to search about a query. And Google knows that. 

Therefore, Rankbrain is built in a way to understand your medium and long search queries. Say, for example, you type to search for the best speakers for computers. 

Now, for voice search, it will be like, OK Google! What are the best speakers for my computer?

But you don’t have to worry about it. 

Rankbrain understands both search queries. It will give the same search result. 

So, the best way to optimize for Rankbrain would be to enhance your content for medium and long-tail keywords. 

Third, increase search volumes and CTRs using social ads.

Search ads improve your webpage CTRs by 2x.

So, an ingenious method to increase your organic CTRs is with Facebook and Twitter ads. Facebook ads will lift your mobile traffic to an advertised webpage, and Twitter ads will improve your reputation. 

With more than a billion user searches daily, a social network can help you cut through the clutter and spend more awareness about your services. The trick is to improve your CTRs to beat Rankbrain. And don’t forget to create SEO optimized landing pages for your social ads. 

Hack#3: Keywords roadmap using Google Webmaster tools 

Well, you know how keywords can add action to your content, but this hack is different. It’s about how to find the right keywords for your blog posts. So, there are tools you can use if you want to check the competitiveness of your keywords, and then there are Google Webmaster tools that help you with the process. 

Many people wonder what keywords to use in their blog. With Google Webmaster Tools, you can look at the keyword roadmap, entailing all the keywords your site is shown up on Google for, called impressions. Some keywords are relevant for your business, but you might not be ranking on them. So, you can focus your marketing department’s content on those keywords, considering their search volume, and improve your ranks. 

Time for the trick. 

You can also spy for the right keywords on your competitor’s website and create better content using them. A little research can help you produce some great new strategies, all of which work in your favour. 

Hack#4: Optimize for featured snippets  

Google snippets are featured listings on the first page of search engines. Being in the featured snippets section is a big thing for any website. Mostly, users reading through snippets land on the main page too. Snippets improve the visibility of the content and your website’s traffic.

As per research, 30% of 1.4 million tested queries contain featured snippets. The report also shows that snippets steal clicks from the pages ranking first on SERPs. So, if your pages always grab lower positions, then snippets are your way out. You can add relevant keywords to your summaries and achieve good ranks on SERPs. 

When creating snippets from scratch, target queries tend to get more featured in snippets. For example, How in the questions earned 51.11% paragraph featured snippets, and 46.91% of list-based featured snippets. 

Hack#5: Add to the mobile-friendliness quotient of your website

Your websites are not just what it seems on desktops. It needs to be good-looking on mobile devices too. Google’s previous search algorithm update has even boosted organic search result rankings on mobile-friendly websites. 

More than 60% of the searches are performed on mobile devices. With the increasing adoption of smartphones, it is no wonder that people will be more hooked up to their mobile devices. 

E-commerce has boosted the mobile presence of websites. But, making your website look amazing on mobile is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. 

Hack#6: Optimize metadata 

Just like back-office operations ensure the efficient operations of the front-end employees, metadata is the backbone for your website’s traffic. It includes title tags and meta descriptions in the backend of your website. It is used by search engine crawlers to understand the intent of the web page and verify its information as a credible one. 

While every SEO expert uses meta tags to their advantage, they need to keep a few points in mind when doing so. 

First, the title length.

Title length should never exceed more than 65 characters otherwise, it will be truncated by Google and shown as an incomplete result. The length of the meta description should not be more than 160 characters. Now, remember than Google does not take the number of characters in mind but measures its length in pixels. 

Second, the relevance of the metadata. 

The title tag and its description should be relevant and unique for each webpage. Also, it should relate to the content. 

Third, add keywords to your metadata. 

Always add targeted keywords to your metadata. Make sure it occupies a space in the beginning. 

Hack#7: Improve domain authority by off-page SEO

Domain authority is everything you build it to resemble. And surprisingly, there is so much than SEO that you can do for your website. 

How do you do that?

Link-building is the answer.

Add more trusting links that point to your website improves your website’s relevance and authority. 

Link building is, however, measured by the quality and not quantity. But it requires hard work. Believe when I say this, but even the most experienced of digital marketers struggle with link building. So, you will have to focus your time and attention to build high-quality inbound links from good domains and complementary URLs. 

As your domain’s authority for good backlinks increases, your search rank improves. 

For Google, the relevance of the links, its manner of appearance, and the status of the referring domain matter during link building. 

With every update, SEO gets complicated, but one thing remains intact. And that is the relevancy of the discourse content on your website with your website. Every basic SEO strategy revolves around relevant keywords, included in web page titles, header tags, meta descriptions, body copy, and other content pieces.

Conclusion 

A good website is the best marketing tool. 

These 7 SEO growth hacks will help you boost your search rankings and keep it running for a long time. These growth hacks are more than the basic keyword searching and link building process. These are incredibly effective too. Using these strategies will double your search traffic. 

However, while scripting content, follow a storytelling pattern to make it more compelling and attractive. 

Focus on the user intent and improve your website’s traffic with these growth hacks.