SEO determines the visibility of your website. As such, it directly affects the amount of new organic traffic heading your way. Working on it will lead to a traffic boost and, indirectly, to significant revenue growth.

Starting out in DIY SEO is not that difficult. However, if your field is competitive and you want to gain extra value, you’ll have to start using advanced tricks. Here are several such advanced tricks for maximum traffic boost to help you out.

Create SEO-focused content

As an SEO content creator, you’re writing for two audiences: human and robot. No matter how sophisticated, the algorithm has some rules of its own. By honoring them, you’re ensuring you get indexed much sooner.

So, you need to write content that is formatted right. Use proper subheadings (h1, h2, h3, etc.), keep your subheadings shorter than 300 words, and avoid using passive voice in your writing. The most crucial part is that you find the proper keywords. This is why SEO writing is more than just being good with your words. You must also excel at research and develop technical writing skills to achieve good results.

On the other hand, you’re writing content for humans. So, humanize your tone and voice. Use jokes, anecdotal evidence, and interesting hypothetical scenarios. Also, invest in readability. Split your text into shorter paragraphs, leave enough whitespace, and make the text as skimmable as possible.

Create SEO-optimized landing pages for products/services

Generally speaking, you want to approach this subject from the standpoint of programmatic SEO.

The first thing your landing page needs is a proper strategy. You need to do the research for keywords that you will use when you start publishing pages on your domain. You must optimize your URL for results and use these keywords as part of the given URL.

Next, you want to analyze your competitors. While the algorithm has its own rules, it doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Even if your SEO optimization is just outright terrible, you can still rank well if the rest of the industry is doing even worse.

Another thing to remember is that the algorithm changes, the rank changes, and your SERP position changes. So, you always need someone to track this and determine your current trend. This will allow you to make the necessary adjustments.

Lastly, your on-site and off-site activities are tightly intertwined. You can’t ignore your link-building and focus exclusively on technical SEO. At the same time, if your landing page is poor, your link building will suffer. Therefore, you need to assume a holistic approach.

Make sure your site is mobile responsive

The majority of people browse the internet via their mobile phones. Even though desktop audiences have higher conversion rates, the numbers still favor mobile users.

For starters, you want to directly optimize the speed of the website. You benefit both desktop and mobile users when working on the site’s overall speed (which we’ll discuss in the next segment at more length).

You want to compress images and use HTML5 instead of Adobe Flash. Just by making this switch, you’ll already make a huge difference.

Now, mobile friendliness is just as important. Use large fonts and much white space. This will make it easier to navigate the site and increase readability for mobile users.

The key to remember is that mobile devices come in all screen sizes. So, use multiple devices to check them all. This way, you’ll be sure what to do.

Pop-ups can delay loading speed quite drastically. You want to do something about it, and the quickest way to solve this problem is to avoid them altogether. Remember, it’s not just that they slow you down; they’re also not user favorites.

Optimize for speed

Google favors websites that are optimized for speed. This is just one thing that gives you both passive and active boosts. Actively, speed affects your rank. Passively, it affects your bottom line so much. About 25% of people leave your site if it fails to load within 4 seconds. Even those who don’t leave will form a negative opinion (no return visits) if it takes too long to load.

Still, how do you optimize the site for speed?

Well, some of the above-listed mobile-friendly tips work. Using HTML5, optimizing images, and disabling pop-ups are some of the methods you can try.

The truth is that your quest for speed starts even before all of this. You need to start by picking a performance-optimized hosting option. Researching this takes much work, but the payoff is always worth it.

Another way to improve speed, especially for return and regular visitors, is to enable browser caching.

Keeping it simple and using less resource-heavy formats is also a great idea. Even a complex 3D animation is usually smaller (easier to load) than a video. Also, every element is one more HTTP request for your pages to process.

Focus on user experience

Great user experience affects your site’s SEO ranking in many ways. Bounce rate, duration of visit, and the number of return visits are just some of the metrics directly affected by this. Aside from these, the conversion rate and sharing statistics also play a role. All of this is affected (even determined) by user experience.

You need to make a good impression. One of the ways to do so is to include a video on your landing page. Almost half of the users look for videos before visiting a store. If you can provide this from the get-go, you increase the average duration of visits and boost customer experience.

Navigation will make a huge difference. If you make it intuitive and enable simple backtracking, you will already make your site more effective and boost user experience.

Finally, you need to listen to the feedback. Most of the time, they will tell you what you need to know. You just need to listen.

Wrap up

So, to make the long story short, you need to learn how to optimize your landing page, write compelling content, and speed it up. Aside from this, you must understand whom you’re making it for. Put a heavy emphasis on the user experience, and you’ll be rewarded many times over.