DIY SEO Tips for You
If you're searching for DIY SEO tips, you're in right place.
Your website traffic is what determines how much you can make every month. But here's the thing: not all traffic sources are equal.
When it comes to increasing your website traffic, search traffic is one of the highest converting traffic channels that can send you highly qualified visitors to your site.
So if you want to build a blog that makes money in the long run, you must find out ways to increase your "search traffic". That being said, increasing search engine traffic is not so easy especially when you've a new website with less domain authority.
If you're someone who's struggling to get more traffic from search, this post is for you where you'll discover few of the most powerful ways to increase your search traffic.
Are you curious to find out? Let's jump into the details without much ado.
1. Find out what keywords people are searching for
The first step to SEO success is this: find out what keywords people are searching for.
Then, you can create content they actually want to read.
One of the biggest mistakes most bloggers make while creating content is that they either don't bother about keyword research or target broader search terms with huge competition.
If you're also doing the same mistake, stop it right now. If you want to get better results with SEO, find those keywords which people are actually typing on Google to find information online.
How can you do that? How can you find what keywords people are actually looking for?
Long Tail Keyword Research.
Yes, long tail keyword research is the KEY. Long tail keywords usually have 4 or more words.
Examples of long tail keywords are;
- "Best iphone apps for fitness" is a 5 word long tail keyword
- "How to quickly lose belly fat" is a 6 word long tail keyword
- "Finance apps for London real estate agents" is a 7 word long tail keyword
As you can see above, all the above mentioned long tail keywords are very specific. In fact, they usually have low competition and you can rank higher when compared to broader terms like;
Are you getting it?
Long tail keywords are great for increasing your search traffic no matter what industry you are in. Here are few tools that can help you with long tail keywords.
- Long Tail Pro
- SEMrush (an excellent tool which we've been using for years to find highly profitable long tail keyword ideas)
- Ahrefs
- LSI Graph
- Keywordtool.io
- Ubersuggest (another incredible free tool by Neil Patel which is way better than most free tools)
Here are few quick tips you can use to find really profitable yet low competitive long tail keywords.
Focus on the search volume:
If you're doing keyword research, make sure to find those keywords which have low monthly searches. If you've a new site with less domain authority, I recommend you to go for keywords with 500 or less monthly searches.
That way, it becomes easier for you to get first page rankings by create quality content. Make sure to use 2 to 3 keyword research tools to analyse the monthly searches of the keywords you target as most tools don't provide accurate data.
Choose high CPC keywords: There's no point of using low volume keywords and increasing your traffic. You also need to pick those keywords which help you with sales. Here's where a keyword metric like CPC comes into play. High CPC (cost per click) keywords help you increase your overall conversion rates along with profits.
For example, if a keyword has a monthly search volume of 300 and giving a CPC of $10, you should definitely go for it instead of going for a keyword with 500 searches and low CPC of $1. There are tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs etc which provide you CPC information for every keyword you want to rank for.
Check out this awesome resource on simple SEO tutorial for newbies if you want to find few solid tips around search engine optimization.
2. Stop optimizing your blog posts like it's 2009
I've been blogging for more than a decade. Back then, you could easily get first page rankings by stuffing the same keywords again and again. Is it going to work now?
Definitely NO.
Gone are the days where you can use black hat SEO practices like "keyword stuffing" to increase your content visibility for specific terms in search engines like Google. Google can punish your site sooner or later if your website is filled mostly with "keyword stuffed pages".
So how to optimize your blog posts the right way?
Here are few PROVEN ways to optimize your content without sacrificing your content quality.
Target One Primary Keyword with Each Page and Use it Smartly:
Before publishing any blog post or page, make sure to come up with a primary keyword to target. So you can use that primary keyword in some of the prominent places on your posts to increase their organic visibility.
You can include your primary keyword in the following places for best results.
- Title tag
- Meta description
- Image alt tags
- Subheadings such as h2, h3, h4 and so on
Your Title Tags
Your title tag and meta description play a key role in optimizing your contents for search engines. So make sure to spend quality time in writing engaging titles and meta descriptions for your contents. Use unique and compelling descriptions which should attract more clicks.
If you're on WordPress, there's an ultimate free optimization plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast which you can use to optimize your contents (both pages and posts) for your target keywords. It also suggests you where to put your primary keyword to better optimize your content. So give it a try if you want to optimize your contents naturally.
Find Relevant Secondary Keywords:
This is the most important thing if you want to avoid keyword stuffing and still optimize your contents naturally for search engines like Google. Find all the relevant keywords (which are also known as LSI keywords) for your primary keywords.
That way you can start using those keywords within your content to optimize naturally for search results. You can use Google autosuggest or dedicated LSI keyword generation tools like LSI Graph to easily come up with dozens of LSI keyword phrases for your content.
3. Start ranking for Google featured snippets
Did you know that Google started giving more preference to featured snippets?
Google featured snippets are "selected search results" that appear on top of Google's search results. These are helpful for users to get direct answers to their questions.
According to Ahrefs, 12.29 percent of search queries have featured snippets in the search results. Only 30.9 percent of featured snippets rank at the very top placement in the organic results. 99.58 percent of the featured snippets are already in the top 10 positions in Google.
So how to start ranking for featured snippets?
Know how featured snippets work:
There are basically 3 types of featured snippets which appear in Google search.
- Paragraph snippets are showing up in 82% of featured snippets
- List snippets appeared in 10.8%
- Table snippets in 7.3%
If you want to get featured snippets for paragraphs, use "question based subheadings" and write its corresponding reply in the immediate paragraph. Then, try to keep the paragraph length between 40 to 50 words (Approx 300 characters).
List Snippets
For list snippets, try to add 10 or more listicles to the post as they properly show up in Google search. Coming up to the Table related featured snippets, Google shows 3 columns and 9 rows in a featured snippet table.
That means, add 3 three columns in your table and 9 rows to your table as in that case Google will add more rows link which will point back to your original post.
Come up with Questions to Answer
Make a list of all the important questions your target audience might type on Google. Then, create direct answers to the question in the introduction (or beneath your h2 tag).
Create Detailed Content
Whether you know it or not, long form of content with over 2000 words rank really well in search engines. Not only that, long form of content usually attracts more social shares, links, comments and what not?
Try to cover A to Z information about any topic you're going to cover and spend quality time in research. That way you can add as many subheadings to make your content compelling and detailed.
Structure Your Content Nicely
Make sure your content is structured in a nice way using a hierarchy.
Here's an example of a heading structure which is nicely structured:
- H1: SEO is great
- H2: Why is SEO great?
- H3: You can get long lasting traffic for free
- H3: There are lots of ways to optimize your site
- H2: How to conduct an SEO audit
- H3: What is a site audit
- H3: How to do it?
If you're creating long form of contents, you can use Table of contents plugin which can help you display the table of contents hierarchically (as mentioned above).
4. Backlinks matter a lot
When someone else links to your website, Google considers it as a positive signal and treats your content as "informative enough to show in the first page results".
If there's too much competition for topics you want to get into the first page results, you definitely need more than 1 backlink though!
3 Types of Backlinks for DIY SEO
There are generally 3 types backlinks and all of them are equally important (external links matter even more especially when they are coming from high domain authority sites).
- Internal links (links which you use to link to your own blog posts)
- External links (links coming from other sites)
- Outbound links (whatever links going from your site such affiliate links, linking to other bloggers posts, social media profile links etc)
The great thing about building backlinks is that, you can build traffic generating niche sites too. For instance, we recently launched Hosting Monks that covers hosting related deals.
High Quality Links Count for Your DIY SEO
If you want to increase your site's search traffic, start attracting high quality links from other sources. You can use the following ways to build links.
- Guest posting on other sites
- Blogger outreach (reaching out other bloggers to share and link to your stuff)
- Participating in weekly roundups (there are blogs that do weekly roundups where they include best contents)
- Broken link building
- Using Quora (although they are nofollow links but they are equally good especially when they are coming from a great platform like Quora where engagement is more)
- Skyscraper technique (which was introduced by SEO expert Brian Dean from Backlinko where you find popular content in your niche, create 10x content around that topic and promote it to the right people to get more shares and backlinks)
Final thoughts about increasing your search traffic quickly with DIY SEO tips
Search traffic is the lifeblood of any profitable website that generates a ton of traffic from search. But increasing your search traffic takes a lot of time. Therefore, by using the RIGHT SEO strategies, you can definitely bring more visitors from search engines like Google.
So, what are your thoughts on increasing search traffic? Do you to do SEO yourself? Please share your views in the comments below.