According to recent statistics from Backlinko, less than 1% of users get to the second page of search results. 

This means that you have very low chances of being found by your potential customers unless your website appears on the first page of search results. When you have high rankings, you get more traffic, more leads, and more sales.

While getting to the top of search results and increasing SEO traffic is usually a long journey with many pitfalls, there are some organic SEO tips that can help you achieve results easily and in a shorter time.

If you are wondering how to increase SEO traffic as promptly as possible, you’re in the right place. In this guide, we’re taking a closer look at how SEO works and sharing 20+ actionable SEO tips to increase traffic in record time.

What Is SEO, And How Does It Work?

Before diving into how to use SEO to increase traffic, it’s worth understanding how SEO works.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a combination of tactics aimed at raising a website’s visibility in search engines like Google and, as a result, getting more organic traffic. The major areas of SEO are aimed at satisfying users’ search needs by offering relevant content and seamless user experience.

Search engines use specialized programs called website crawlers that follow links from known pages to spot new ones. Once a search engine has discovered a new page, it examines its content and, ideally, stores it in a database of pages referred to as an index.

When a user enters a search query in a search engine, the search engine then utilizes complex algorithms to present the user with the most relevant pages from its index, ranking them from most to least relevant.

To make sure your website is crawled, indexed, and ranked highly, start with the ultimate SEO checklist that involves on-page, off-page, and technical site optimization.

Off-page SEO, or link building, helps search engines discover your pages, while on-page and technical SEO ensure they can be easily crawled and indexed. Properly optimized content signals relevance to search engines, boosting your rankings.

Why Is SEO Important?

As you can see, without SEO, your website will have little chance to rank high in organic search results. However, there’s more to SEO than just free traffic. 

Let’s explore some major benefits of search engine optimization.

1. Boosting website visibility and traffic

One of the primary goals of SEO is to improve your website’s visibility, making it easier for your potential customers to find you when they look for products or services like yours. 

Consequently, the higher the position your website hits on search engine results pages (SERP), the better your chances that your prospects will see you and visit your site.

2. Increasing brand awareness

SEO helps make sure that your pages appear at the top of search engine results, which leads to more users discovering your brand when they search for products or services related to your business. 

Even if users don’t click on your website when seeing it for the first time, your name becomes familiar to them at this point, thus bringing them into your sales funnel.

3. Ensuring better user experience

Search engine optimization includes improving a website’s technical condition, such as removing broken links, enhancing website architecture, optimizing load speed, and assuring mobile-friendliness. 

Besides signaling to search engines that your website is worth ranking highly, a technically healthy website goes a long way toward boosting user experience.

4. Generating leads

A tailored keyword strategy allows you to target users who are searching specifically for your products or services. This way, by optimizing your website for search engines, you can attract users who are already interested in your offerings, resulting in more qualified leads.

This advantage of search engine optimization becomes even greater when it comes to local SEO — optimizing your website for keywords with the intent to attract prospects searching for products or services in specific locations.

5. Building trust

A well-optimized website appears high on SERP, just below paid search results. The contrast between paid ads and organic results motivates users to accept the latter as more authoritative sources since these results are based on their search queries rather than paid for by a business.

Combined with relevant content and positive user experience, this instills trust in your brand, making users more likely to make repeat visits to your site and ultimately convert.

5 Actionable Tips On How To Increase SEO Traffic Quickly

In most cases, SEO is a long-term game that requires substantial effort and patience. 

However, there are some tried-and-true SEO traffic solutions that can accelerate the process of improving your rankings and generating more traffic.

1. Leverage quick-win keywords

Unless you work in a very specific and narrow niche, there could be thousands of brands offering products or services similar to yours, making it hard to achieve high rankings with broad terms like “umbrella,” “hairdressers,” “software development services,” or “buy a white T-shirt.”

One of the top SEO traffic tips is using the so-called quick-win keywords, which allow you to quickly raise search engine rankings with less effort than the more competitive keywords would require.

Quick-win keywords are terms (usually long-tail) with moderate to low competition while having sufficient search volume to drive meaningful traffic. And, of course, these should be highly relevant to your offerings, ensuring that the traffic they generate is likely to convert.

To identify the most appropriate quick-win keywords for each of your pages, use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs, looking for long-tail keywords with the best balance between low search difficulty and high search volume.

For example, instead of targeting the keyword term “app development,” you can achieve better results with “custom app development for healthcare.” Likewise, “affordable pet grooming in Los Angeles” is more effective than “pet grooming.”

Once you’ve collected a list of quick-win keywords for your pages, it’s time to incorporate them into the efficient SEO content strategy. For this, integrate the terms naturally into product or service pages, blog posts, titles, headers, and meta descriptions.

2. Strengthen your SEO with technical optimization

You can substantially increase SEO traffic by improving the technical condition of your website. Despite happening behind the scenes, technical SEO is crucial to your website’s ranking and traffic.

As mentioned, it determines the ability of search engines to crawl and index your pages. In addition, according to a recent Semrush study, Google considers page load speed and security when ranking search results.

The first step in enhancing your technical SEO should be conducting a technical SEO audit. Once you identify technical issues that might be hindering your pages from being crawled, indexed, and ranked highly, make changes to your website to address them.

Use this checklist to make sure your website is technically optimized:

• Install an SSL certificate to encrypt data and switch your site to HTTPS.
• Optimize page speed (compress images, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files; trim the code; and use asynchronous loading).
• Create an XML sitemap to help search bots understand and crawl your pages.
• Optimize the website structure.
• Set a clean, logical, and consistent URL structure that reflects your sitemap. For example, using “www.yoursite.com/products/digital-cameras” instead of “www.yoursite.com/page?id=12345”.
• Ensure that robots.txt file is correctly configured.
• Add breadcrumb menus.
• Remove duplicate content.
• Ensure mobile-friendliness.
• Fix HTTP errors.

3. Obtain links from trusted sources

Focusing on your off-page SEO efforts is among the most workable SEO tips to increase traffic. Fair enough, since backlinks directly affect your Domain Authority, which, in turn, has much to do with your site’s rankings. 

Google views backlinks to your site as a signal of its authority and relevance, and, as a result, high-quality backlinks from reputable sites can significantly boost your position in search results.

While it’s possible to earn backlinks organically by posting valuable, sharable content, this can take years. A more efficient way to acquire backlinks is through buying them. However, you should be very careful when choosing your link building partners since your link building success will completely depend on the quality of the sites where you obtain links.

To avoid falling into a link building scheme, make sure the websites you buy links from:

• are relevant to your brand
• share valuable content, not content produced solely for SEO purposes
• aren’t part of private blog networks (PBNs)
• have high Domain Authority/Domain Rating scores and generate 1,000+ visits per month
• don’t contain links to restricted content

4. Optimize your pages

On-page optimization is undoubtedly one of the fastest ways to increase SEO traffic to your pages. It involves fine-tuning page elements to enable search engines to crawl and index your pages more efficiently. Moreover, on-page SEO helps make your pages more attractive to users, improving user experience and helping boost customer loyalty.

For your pages to be perfectly optimized, follow these steps:

• Start with keyword research, identifying target keywords for each page. This will direct your next steps in on-page optimization.
• Use keywords to create SEO-friendly content for your pages.
• Optimize page titles with the target keywords. Make up a unique title tag for each page; make sure your titles are concise (no more than 60 characters) and descriptive.
• Craft SEO-friendly meta descriptions that accurately summarize the content of each page. Write unique descriptions, including target keywords, and keep them around 150-160 characters long.
• Structure your page with header tags. Besides helping search engines understand the content on your pages, headers break pages into logical, scannable sections, improving user experience. Use one <h1> tag per page and several <h2> tags to highlight your page’s main points. You can also use <h3>-<h5> tags to support <h2> headers, but make sure you follow the hierarchy.
• Implement internal linking — place links to other pages on your website where they’re relevant, using appropriate anchor text.
• Include keywords in your URLs.

5. Maximize the potential of SEO-friendly visuals

If your pages don’t include visual content, consider adding images or graphics. Besides enhancing the appeal of your pages and making them more scannable, visuals can drive additional organic traffic from image search results.

And do you know how to increase traffic for free using images? Browse free photo stocks — talented photographers often share high-quality images at no cost, so make sure you grab this opportunity to make your website stand out.

But let’s get back to our SEO traffic tips. Here are some guidelines on how to boost SEO traffic and user experience with the help of images:

• Pick high-quality visuals that are relevant to the topic and your target audience. Also, make sure they look good regardless of the device and screen size.
• Include a target keyword in each image file name. This is necessary to help search engines understand what the file is about and show it in search results.
• Add brief image alt texts that clearly describe images.
• Incorporate image captions to provide search engines and users with extra information. 
• Cut down your image file sizes to optimize page speed.
• Include visuals in the sitemap to help search engines find and index them faster.
• Apply lazy loading to delay the loading of images that are out of the user’s view.

Bonus: 15+ Quick SEO Traffic Tips To Boost Your Rankings

With today’s high competition for rankings, it’s worth trying out multiple tactics to step up your primary SEO campaign. 

Here are more expert organic SEO tips (including tips on how to increase traffic for free!) to help you achieve your goals:

• Check whether your pages are indexed. Organic SEO tips won’t work unless your pages are indexed — they won’t simply appear in search results. You can check whether your pages are indexed using Google Search Console (GSC). If not, the easiest way to fix this issue is by requesting indexing in GSC.
• Refresh your old content. One of the quickest SEO traffic solutions is focusing on updating your existing content rather than rewriting it. To make this tactic work, you need to find out the keywords that competitors rank for while you don’t. This usually happens when you miss out on including important subtopics in your pieces, so you know what to do, right?
• Don’t forget about the E-E-A-T principle. Besides targeting the right keywords, make sure your content demonstrates Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are important ranking factors. For this, in addition to writing expert pieces, incorporate author bios and link your articles to reputable sources to support your data.
• Use a caching plugin. Website speed is one of the ranking factors, and installing a caching plugin allows your pages to load faster for repeat visitors.
• Target keywords for featured snippets. Featured snippets — short answers to search queries — appear at the top of Google’s search results (“position zero”), providing you with more visibility and traffic. SEO tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs can help you identify keywords that trigger featured snippets you don’t have. To win those snippets, use questions as headers and answer them.
• Leverage local SEO. If you’re a local business, you can improve your search visibility, traffic, and brand awareness by creating a solid local SEO strategy targeting location-specific keywords. For example, “pizza delivery in Sacramento” or “buy a mountain bike in Albany,”
• Ensure your content matches users’ search intent. Analyze the type of content that ranks highly for your target keywords to find out the search intent of your potential visitors and tailor your content accordingly.
• Take a peek at your competitors. Use SEO tools to identify your major competitors in organic search. Look at the keywords they rank for, pay attention to their backlinks, and explore their content. This can provide you with valuable insights on how to increase SEO traffic.
• Add FAQs. Questions can go a long way toward increasing SEO traffic quickly and with minimal effort. Here’s how it works: Do a Google search for your target keyword and go to the “People also ask” section, then select the most relevant ones. Add them to the FAQs section on your page, formatting each as a header, and answer each question.
• Use questions in title tags. Similarly to your FAQs, consider writing titles for your pages in the form of questions where relevant.
• Remove dead pages and broken links. Your website might have indexed pages which, due technical issues or outdated content, don’t bring any traffic while wasting your crawl budget and diluting authority. While you can choose the longer route of fixing errors and refreshing the content, you can also simply remove such pages, including 404 links.
• Make lost links work for you again. If your dead page has backlinks pointing to it, redirect these pages to the most relevant pages in order not to waste those backlinks.
• Incorporate tables of contents. Using tables of contents in your articles can help you trigger site links, driving more organic clicks.
• Keep track of the metrics. Establish a regular routine of checking key metrics such as organic traffic growth, keyword rankings, and conversion rate to measure your success and make adjustments as needed.
• Optimize your pages for voice search. While people tend to be as brief as possible when typing queries into the search box (“fintech app types,” “chinese restaurant orlando,” “dog grooming near me”), they often talk to voice assistants as if they were chatting with a person (“What are the types of fintech apps?”, “What is the best Chinese restaurant in Orlando?”, “Find a good dog grooming place near me”).
• Fix orphan pages. Orphan pages refer to those with no internal links leading to them. They usually underperform, as search engines can only locate pages through backlinks or from the sitemap file. Your task is to spot orphaned pages on your website and link to each of them from other relevant pages.
• Share links to articles on social media. Promoting content on social networks can help you increase reach and drive more traffic to your pages.

Conclusion

Now that you know how to use SEO to increase traffic promptly, you can start planning your quick-win SEO campaign. 

Remember that SEO is a multifaceted process, and you can only achieve success by working on every aspect of search engine optimization. This includes on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.

We hope you find our tips on how to boost SEO traffic helpful and would like to acknowledge that ReVerb provides full-cycle SEO services. From keyword research and technical SEO audit to creating SEO-friendly content and implementing an effective link building strategy, our experts have you covered.