16 SEO Techniques to Boost Organic Traffic + Rankings

But as I said, getting caught often results in a site being completely wiped out from search listings. That said, although it might have its lure and can be used on test sites, black hat SEO typically ends in a penalty from search listings. Again, it makes sense, as the search engine needs a way to assess the company’s location. However, one additional element of on-page optimization is a company’s name, address, and phone number on a page. All this information combined helps customers choose which business to engage with. That’s how you waste your reader’s time and inevitably decrease the value of your content rather than add to it.

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For example, some users might search for “charcuterie”, while others might search for “cheese board”. Anticipating these differences in search behavior and writing with your readers in mind could produce positive effects on how your site performs in search results. There are no secrets here that’ll automatically rank your site first in Google (sorry!). Instead, look for candidates who set realistic expectations and focus on performance indicators in addition to organic rankings, such as engagement metrics. SEO is the practice of improving your website’s visibility in search engines. An SEO specialist needs to understand the ins and outs of search engines in order to help businesses achieve their inbound marketing goals.

Conduct a Technical SEO Audit

While you can often start with a keyword and create a piece of content around that term, sometimes your content already exists, and you need to figure out how to match it to keywords. Because search engines like Google consider backlinks as votes of confidence. Meaning, when a high-authority site links to your page, it’s like that site is vouching for the quality and relevance of your content. Don’t force SEO Anomaly keywords into your content where they don’t belong.

Getting cited in generative engines doesn’t follow the same playbook as SEO. In fact, some tactics that work in traditional search won’t help your visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. In our workflow, we’ve created custom channel groups for each platform so we can track traffic sources separately and see where gains are coming from. In one example pulled from ChatGPT, Unilever is cited in a conversation about microplastics. However, the study being referenced hasn’t even been published by Unilever. It’s a third-party research that mentions Unilever in a relevant context.

As you might expect, the keyword “SEO case study” is MUCH less competitive than “white hat SEO”. But thanks to this new algorithm, Google could now understand the topic of your page. Instead, they rely on your video’s text-based title and description to determine what your video is about. Research by Dr. Ellen Langer of Harvard University tested whether people waiting in line to use a copy machine would let a stranger cut in front of them. In other words, pages that link out to awesome resources establish themselves as hubs of helpful content in the eyes of Big G. And pages that link to helpful resources also tend to be higher-quality than pages that only link to their own stuff.

Search engines choose a single URL (the canonical URL) to show users, per piece of content. Google primarily finds pages through links from other pages it already crawled. In many cases, these are other websites that are linking to your pages. Other sites linking to you is something that happens naturally over time, and you can also encourage people to discover your content by promoting your site. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses programs called crawlers to explore the web constantly, looking for pages to add to our index. You usually don’t need to do anything except publish your site on the web.

• Keyword research is the process of identifying the specific words and phrases that people search for to find information, products, or services on the internet.
• While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.
• So while it makes sense to implement these “low-hanging fruit” tactics to improve SEO rankings, they’re no replacement for a long-term SEO strategy.
• That way, your content is super easy to read no matter what device someone is using.
• It shouldn’t be your #1 SEO priority, but it does make sense to start optimizing for voice search.
• This is where you optimize your pages to help search engines understand them.

For this, Google needs to be able to access the same resources as the user’s browser. The Search Essentials outline the most important elements of what makes your website eligible to appear on Google Search. While there’s no guarantee that any particular site will be added to Google’s index, sites that follow the Search Essentials are more likely to show up in Google’s search results. SEO is about taking the next step and working on improving your site’s presence in Search. This guide will walk you through some of the most common and effective improvements you can do on your site.