14 SEO tips to increase your organic traffic in 2024

In today's oversaturated landscape, organic qualified traffic and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) remain vital assets for any publisher. Focus on these actionable SEO tips to help you get more organic traffic in 2024 :

1. Optimize your internal linking

Internal linking is the most actionable and important task you can do when you are getting started with SEO. Everyone should be doing it. Strategic internal linking is a powerful SEO technique, especially for content marketing. Internal linking among blog articles and other content is something that you can do on an ongoing basis. Once you get good at it, it will probably give you more results than any other SEO action.

You'll surely want to follow the basic guidelines, because having too many internal links on every page can also be harmful. Please be mindful and do not over-optimize your content linking strategy.

Actions :

• Create lots of relevant content.
• Use anchor text.
• Link deep.
• Use links that are natural for the reader.
• Use relevant links.
• Use dofollow links.
• Use a reasonable number of internal links.

2. Improve usability and UX design

Unlike a decade ago when you could rank a site purely based on keywords and backlinks, nowadays, user engagement variables like bounce rate, time on site, and pages visited have all become critical ranking factors.

Google recognizes real human behavior when it comes to determining quality sites worthy of top search rankings. In turn, usability and UX design have become integral components to SEO. Not only does a site require fundamental on-page SEO, but simple UX design considerations can go a long way in supporting engagement, and therefore, rankings.

Actions :

• Simplify your website’s navigation.
• Optimize for your users and their engagement.
• Ensure mobile responsiveness.
• Optimize your website’s load speed.

3. Level up your Entity-Based SEO

An entity is a context-based word or term that can be used to describe your niche contextually. Entity-based SEO focuses on large topics and concepts that allow search engines to provide accurate results straight away.

Today, search engines are advanced with semantic search functionality and can understand the meaning of the users’ queries. To help Google best understand what your page is about, you need to include the words relevant to your niche. It also isn’t bad to have them in the meta title or inside the title tag.

Actions :

• Build your brand entity.
• Use Schema markup.
• Claim your Google Business Profile.
• Research entities for your content.

4. Improve your Topical Authority and E-A-T

This is where internal links and domain authority come in, as you want Google to add you to the high E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) knowledge graphs, because the more expertise you have on the subject, the better it is for your ranking.

Topical authority is one in thousands ranking signals Google utilizes to present searchers with the best results. Google wants to ensure they serve the best article from a closely related website, not from a random website. Suppose you want more search rankings; you will want to cover specific or similar types of content on your website, period. That’s what Google wants; Publish content related to your website’s main topic. Topical relevance and authority are among the best SEO techniques to rank on Google with minimal effort.

Google wants to serve content that wouldn’t disrupt users’ experience; that’s the main goal of the E.A.T. ranking signal.

Actions :

• Write your article yourself and demonstrate your knowledge in a particular area.
• Have an author bio on every piece you make (yours and guest posts).
• Invite or hire experts who have a proven track record of writing in a specified industry.
• Get backlinks from websites with a good reputation relevant to your website.
• Get mentioned online on different websites, forums, and directories positively.
• A positive review is a trust signal; get more reviews for your product or business to influence the algorithm.
• Your website should be encrypted, too; it signifies trust because visitors are confident when browsing your website or purchasing from your store.

5. Update Existing Content

It’s essential to keep the content as updated and fresh as possible. This is because search engines prioritize the most relevant (and recent) content for users.

Actions :

• Update existing blog posts.
• Add original data to your content.
• Update the images.
• Run a page-level content gap analysis.

6. Get on Google Discover

Google Discover is a personalized AI-driven mobile news feed created by Google. It’s a type of query-less search with topics that resonate with users’ interests and previous search behavior.

Discover feed measures visitors’ engagement with the content. Therefore, if they like your content, the chances you’ll appear in their feed again are pretty high. To appear on Google Discover, high-quality, engaging content is a must.

Another tip to get the most traffic from Google Discover is to add Max Image Preview meta tag which essentially tells Google to display your article with a large image.

Note that Discover content usually generates traffic only within the first 3 days, which means this tip should supplement your main SEO strategy.

7. Recreate Blog Posts as Videos

Video is remarkably the favorite content type among users. So, by converting your blog post into a video, you have a better chance to reach a bigger audience.

Research shows that publishers who utilize video content on their websites see 41% more traffic from search than those who only rely on written content. Moreover, video is also responsible for a 157% increase in organic traffic from SERP.

Your article will get more exposure on SERP, for example, it may appear in rich or featured snippets.

Another tip is to perform YouTube SEO which is opposite to Google SEO. On YouTube, your video needs to get maximum exposure in the first 24h to rank as high as possible, whereas on Google an article can appear in the first position after some time.

8. Optimize Content for Voice Search

By optimizing schema markup (the language in which search engines communicate) for voice search, you’ll help search engines discover your website more quickly and gain more voice search audience.

To do that, try to identify questions your audience asks conversationally. That means people are likely to ask natural-sounding questions which contain long-tail keywords rather than target keywords. Google auto-fill, related searches, and people also ask are great places to start collecting data.

9. Drive Traffic with Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are a great way to get decent traffic with highly competitive topics. They’re less popular and more specific terms, usually containing at least 3 words or more. They aren’t searched as much as your target keywords; therefore, they’re easier to rank for.

At the end of the day, what’s the point of targeting a keyword with a huge traffic volume if there is no reasonable chance you’ll outrank the top pages?

One of the easiest ways to find long-tail keywords is by looking at Google’s autocomplete results and the “People also ask” box. This will give you some insight into the more specific queries.

By targeting long-tail keywords, think about satisfying the search intent. Don’t just throw in some throw keywords if you aren’t actually providing an answer to them.

10. Analyze Search Intent

Search intent is about addressing the things people expect to see when they search for something. This is arguably the most important thing in SEO.

When you generate keyword ideas, consider dividing them into 4 categories based on search intent: Informational, Navigational, Commercial, Transactional.

This will give you a rough idea of what your target audience expects to find in your article and what content type you should produce.

For example, if most keywords fall into the informational category, this indicates that you should probably go for a blog-type article or a guide and include definitions and explanations.

11. Optimize for Technical On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is central to users’ journey from the moment they discover your page in SERP. Therefore, it should be optimized most intuitively and logically. If you don’t follow on-page SEO best practices, all other SEO efforts may be worth nothing.

Actions :

• Run PageSpeed Insights report to detect any technical errors.
• Include your target keyword in your title.
• Use a short and descriptive URL slug.
• Write a good meta description (it can influence your CTR).
• Use internal links.
• Optimize your images (including compressing and writing alt-texts).
• Optimize for readability.

12. Perform Site Audit

Every now and then, you should go over your website and analyze what needs to be improved. For example, getting rid of broken links, broken images, canonical points to redirects, etc.

But what if you have, say, 100+ pages. Where do you start? Ahrefs has a tool called Site Audit that quickly provides insight into key SEO issues, data, and overall website performance.

As soon as you verify your website’s domain, the tool will crawl all pages on your website and present you with a list of problems related to speed, links, HTML tags, content quality, and more, as well as how to fix them.

13. Run a Content Gap Analysis

Content gap analysis is a great SEO hack that helps find common keywords your competitors are ranking for, but you don’t. It also helps to discover new topic ideas for your blog.

To perform an effective content gap analysis, you need to enter the domains or URLs of your main competitors. Your keyword tool (for example, Ahrefs) will scan your competitors’ entire websites and seed out all keywords that have a potential for your website.

It’s a great tool to increase the overall number of keywords you’re ranking for and when you’re out of topic ideas.

14. Monitor effectively your Keywords Ranking

Keyword Rank Trackers are crucial for gaining insights on your SEO strength and developing a long-term content marketing strategy that consistently drives organic search traffic to your site.

Investing in a premium rank tracker like Serpivore gives you a significant advantage over your competitors and helps you discover new keyword ranking opportunities promptly. Get started today!