12 Simple Steps to Increase Organic Traffic

These are 12 actionable steps that are “must-do” for any website that wants to improve search ranking for their chosen keywords.

They are specifically aimed at small business owners, service providers, freelancers, or anyone with a website who doesn’t have an in-house digital marketing team or budget to hire an SEO strategist.

This list was created to provide actionable steps for the smaller business owner to implement themselves on their website or take them to any web developer to implement. Even the most inexperienced web developer will be able to help you with these actions.

It is meant to provide easy, practical, actionable steps to boost on-page SEO.

They will prime your site for increased organic traffic.

I like to call these the “easy wins of SEO.”

Just so you know, this post may contain affiliate links. Meaning I receive commissions for purchases made through those links, at no cost to you.

Put your main keyword phrase in the URL of the page.
- Keep your URL short and concise. Short URLs perform better, ideally a max of 50 characters. Typically, the longer your URL length, the lower your rankings are.
- Google has stated the first 3-5 words in URLs are given more weight.
- Avoid using dates in URLs.
- Use a max of 2 folders/directories.
- Use hyphens (instead of underscores) to break up words. Never use spaces.
Make your page title extremely appealing and include the target keyword phrase you want to rank for.
- Your page title HTML <title> tag is what gets displayed on the search engine results page (SERP) and within the browser tab when your page is being viewed.
- Keep it somewhat short and descriptive. Too long of a title will cause it to get cut-off on the SERP.
- Because of the limited space on the SERP, keep your keywords as close to the beginning as possible of the title.
- Add words that act as modifiers such as Buy, Guide, Review, Online, Offers, Cheap, Year, etc.
- Treat your title as "clickbait" —as a way to entice users to click on the link when it appears in the SERP.
- WordPress plugins such as Rank Mathor Yoast will help you visualize how your page title will appear on SERP.
Write an enticing meta description that includes your keywords and related keywords.
- This is the description that appears below the page title on the SERP.
- It should be between 150-165 words.
- Generally speaking, it doesn’t improve your actual SEO ranking but its real value is in helping sell your page so people click on it when it appears on the SERP.
- Use keywords in the description to help reassure users that this is exactly the information they are looking for.
- Experiment with your meta descriptions by tweaking them to see what will increase the click-through-rate (CTR) and help drive engagement. Keep in mind that both the meta description and page title have a big impact on click-through-rate (CTR). They sell your webpage to users when they are looking through search results on Google. Make sure they are relevant to the search query and entice users to click.
Put your target keywords in the page’s main headline (HTML <H1>tag).
- Ideally a max of 60-70 characters. Aim for 6-10 words. It’s more effective to be concise, short, and to the point.
- You can use The Headline Analyzer which will score your overall headline quality and rate its ability to result in increased traffic and overall SEO value.
- Write headlines that answer a question or solve a problem.
- Use words that will entice people to engage with your content and share it on social media.
- Tips for writing headlines:
  1. Use numbers and interesting adjectives.
  2. Consider using “How To” in your headline which generates more shares than any other 2 word phrases.
  3. “X Amount of Ways” also does well (5 and 10 do the best). For example: 10 Ways To Effortlessly Sell Your Home
Add a featured image to your pages.
- This is a page’s main image and should appear at the top of the page near the headline. (<h1>)
- Place the target keywords in the image filename. For example if one of your keywords was "long island mexican restaurant", you could name the images that appear on the page:
  - long-island-mexican-restaurant.jpg
  - mexican-restaurant-long-island.jpg
  - mexican-restaurant-on-long-island.jpg

Bold and add your target keywords within the first 100 words of your page.
- This should be natural – you shouldn’t have to force them in.
- Google will use the first 100 words to get a good gauge of what the page is about.
Ensure proper interlinking between all pages throughout your website.
- Ensure your website has a clear, consistent, and easy to use navigation that appears on every page.
- Google uses this to determine the structure and hierarchy of your website.
Create internal links within the body content of your page.
- This allows you to send users (interlink) to somewhere else on your site to a related piece of content.
- Aim for 1 link per 500 words (on average 3-4 links per article).
- The link text should contain some of the target keywords.
  
  Tip: Head over to any random page on Wikipedia and observe how they do this. They are masters at interlinking.
Create external links by linking to another site of high authority and is trustworthy.
- External links tell Google that your site is similar to the website you are linking to.
- If a competitor has high-value content on their site, don’t be afraid to link to them.
- Here’s an example of how a local business can do this: Say you own a local hardware store and a big chain like Home Depot has a really good “how-to” article on their blog on the support section of their website. If that article is related to a piece of content on your website and it adds value to your visitors, linking to it can only help your site's authority in the long run.
Add a YouTube video to your page.
- Visitors to your webpage are much more likely to stay engaged with your content when there is a video.
- Google likes when you “place your content with your content”. In other words, YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine and since Google owns YouTube, adding video to your website is a way to leverage that synergy.
Resolve any technical issues with your website.
- Performance and speed play a big part in how search engines view your website, especially on mobile devices. It is important your site loads as fast as possible.
- Always optimize your images so they are displayed at the smallest file size possible. Images are typically the biggest culprit for slow page speed.
- Google favors HTTPS, so always run your website on HTTPS. Get an SSL for your website.
Ensure your website is mobile-friendly.
- Google has a mobile-first index—meaning the mobile version of your website (or the way your website displays on a mobile device) becomes the starting point for what Google includes in its index. It is the baseline for how they determine rankings.
- So if your site has a poor user experience or lacks content on mobile it will negatively impact your rankings for the entire site.
- Conversely, a site with a better mobile experience can potentially receive a rankings boost.
- To ensure your website is mobile-friendly, ideally, it should be using responsive design so it displays nicely on all screen sizes. Another option is to have a separate mobile-optimized website, however, for a small business, this is not a practical strategy because it entails maintaining two separate websites.

Next Steps?

Now that you know the “easy wins of SEO” to improve your website’s organic traffic, get started by implementing some of these things.

Yes, it requires a little bit of work, but these are simple, small tasks that can be broken down over time.

As always if you need help or have a question, please feel free to reach out.

Also if you need hands-on support, my company Long Island Web Design is available to help. At this time they are offering a relatively inexpensive SEO Recommendations Report.

Please reach out with any questions. I want to help your business succeed online.

Need some more business help, you can check out my recommended resources and tools for your business.