7 Sneaky SEO Tips and Tricks You Should Know
 

SEO is a key part of your digital marketing strategy and one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site, which is in turn crucial for bringing in sales leads, building your customer base, and growing your business. Site traffic is also one of the best ways to build your mailing list through sign-in funnels and opt-in forms on your site.

You probably already know at least the basics of SEO. However, you may not be aware of these sneaky SEO tips and tricks to drive traffic to your site and help you meet your business goals.

1. Build Back Links

You may already know that having links on your site to reputable websites as references and sources improves your SEO. But how about links to your site from well-known websites?

Building “backlinks” – links to your site from other, authoritative sites – is a great way to improve your site’s SEO. You can also take services from professional SEO experts. You can search locally for them. If you are living in Denver then a professional Denver SEO Agency can help. You can meet them face to face. And it's better for the business.

It demonstrates to Google and other search engines that your site is well respected and therefore improves your ranking on SERPs (search engine results pages).

There are essentially two ways to build backlinks to your site:

1. Create high-quality, useful, and interesting content and publish it on your site. In combination with effective PR and digital marketing techniques, your content will be noticed by authoritative sites that will then link to it.
2. If you wish to expedite the process in #1, implement an outreach strategy that includes contacting relevant sites in your niche and pitching guest posts.

Like many of the other tips mentioned in this article, this is not only good for SEO but has other great advantages for your business such as driving organic to your site and building your brand.

2. Internal linking

Along with links to citations and references and backlinks from reputable sites, internal links are one of the most important link-building strategies. It is also one of the most greatly overlooked, with few people understanding the significance of this strategy.

Internal links are links within your post or site to another URL on that same domain. They not only increase usability, encouraging users to explore more of your site, but they also make it easier for search engine “crawlers” to assess your content, thus helping certain pages rank for keywords.

See this internal linking guide for more on how to effectively use internal links to boost SEO along with making your site more user-friendly and therefore encouraging conversions.

3. Keyword Placement

Using the correct keywords is one of the basics of SEO, however, you may not realize how important it is to put them in the correct place. Google pays attention to whether keywords are located in certain key parts of your posts and your website, in order to determine their relevance to certain searches.

Your post’s or page’s title (also known as H1 header) obviously needs to include your primary keyword, as does the first paragraph, or at least the first 100 words of your post. But what other parts of your posts are particularly important when it comes to keywords and SEO?

Here are some lesser-known elements which should be keyword optimized: 

• Permalink (the link to the posting page)
• SEO title (the title as it appears on SERPs and as shown on the tab on a web browser)
• All subheadings (H2, H3, and H4 headings)
• Alt-tags on images (the alternative text description listed on image files)

You can research which keywords to use with tools such as Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and Answer the Public.

4. Page Load Speed

You may not realize just how much your slow landing page load speed is hurting your business. Firstly, slow page load speed will damage conversions, as customers are put off from browsing and are less likely to make a purchase or take some other action.

Page load speeds are also one of the key aspects which Google and other search engines look for in deciding how to rank pages. In fact, along with keywords, this is one of the top two factors influencing search engine rankings. Google hates slow load speeds because they mean a much higher bounce rate: you can see the direct correlations between page load speed and Google position here.

You can test your site’s speed using free tools such as GTmetrix. If you discover your landing page is loading too slowly there are a number of ways you can address this, ranging from the relatively simple to the technically complex.

5. Site Maps

Believe it or not, the long-standing site map has a role to play when it comes to SEO. Although largely overlooked on slick, modern websites and seen as something as an archaic hangover from the early days of web design, site maps are important because they help search engine bots to “crawl” your site.

Search engines use bots (automatic navigators) to crawl through your site as part of determining which pages to rank for each search. Having a site map somewhere on your site makes it easier for these bots to navigate around, meaning that they examine more of your pages. This in turn means that they are more likely to find information that indicates your pages are relevant to user searches, thus improving your rankings.

6. SEO For Amazon Ecommerce Businesses

If you sell products on Amazon SEO is one of the best things you can do to increase sales. However, in this case, the search engine is not Google, but rather Amazon itself. Amazon uses its own “A9 Algorithm” to determine product listing rankings on search results. The A9 Algorithm works quite differently from Google because as a business Amazon’s primary objective is to make money. Therefore, Amazon will rank the product listings that it feels have the capacity to make the most money for them.

For this reason, sales are the primary consideration of Amazon rankings, although product reviews and relevant keywords also come into play. This means that the more sales you make, the more highly you rank, which of course means you will likely make more sales, and so on.

This can make it difficult for new products and new sellers to rank on Amazon. However, there are some things that sellers can do in order to improve their rankings

• Consider the products they are selling and list more “rank-able” products
• Research and utilize the correct keywords on their listing
• Optimize listings for maximum sales conversions
• Use their network and digital marketing to drive initial sales
• Encourage as many reviews as possible, especially in the first 7 days of a product listing

This is a very basic overview, of course. To really optimize your product listings, rank highly, and grow your e-commerce business, consider working with an Amazon sales consultant.

7. SEO And CRO: A Golden Combination

Focussing on SEO is important, and finding new and better ways to bring traffic to your site can drive sales and business growth. However, let’s not forget the next, crucial step in this process: converting traffic into sales. Bringing visitors to your site is imperative, but you also need to convert them once they arrive.

This is where CRO (conversion rate optimization) comes in. It is critical to make sure that your site offers visitors a great user experience, is easy to navigate, and is optimized in every way to push them toward becoming your next sale. This may be in direct conversions to sales (especially in the case of e-commerce stores) or maybe as part of an indirect transition to sales. In this case, the conversion you are looking for may be simply for your visitor to request a quote, get in touch or sign up for a newsletter.

By successfully combining search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization, you will have a winning strategy to drive sales, increase revenue and grow your business exponentially.

Bio

Tom Buckland is a digital marketing consultant specializing in technical SEO & Amazon Rank Tracking. He’s the founder of SEO Company Cardiff and loves helping businesses profit through smart digital marketing strategies.