91 Experts Share the Most Effective SEO Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Website [Expert Roundup]

If you have a website, the idea is for people to visit it. A website’s traffic reflects how well a business is doing online. It is also an indicator of customer behavior, and will help you formulate a marketing strategy that will get you a better ranking in the search engine results.

The basic idea of SEO optimization is getting more traffic to the website. But with 1.24 billion websites in the world, how do you ensure that your website gets good traffic?

Here are my top seven SEO tips that will help drive traffic to your website:

7 SEO Tips to Drive Traffic

Keywords: In most searches, at least 50% of people use four words or more. This means that just keywords are not important. You need long-tail keywords that are specific to the search.

When it comes to broad keywords, there is tough competition out there which means that you need to offer something more to stand out among the crowd. A long-tail keyword is important so that people get specific results for what they are looking for.

Good Quality Content: In this competitive world, there are many people who write on the same topic. What should you do different to get listed at the top of the search listings? The answer is writing good, well-researched content.

The content on your website should also be diverse to avoid any internal competition among web pages for search engine listings. You need to organize your website in way that when people search for something specific, all related information is easily accessible. Also make sure that your content is regularly updated as search engines regularly check for updates to provide the best result to its users. Writing good content can boost up your traffic and ultimately affects your SEO.

Meta Description and Title Tags: Title tags are similar to a book title. This is the clickable link that appears on search engine result pages. If we take Google’s example, an ideal title tag should be less than 60 characters.

A meta description is what appears below the title in search engine results. This is what creates the first impression on a user, and trust me, first impressions matter. If you have a good and concise meta description, there's a better chance of people visiting your web page and also good for SEO.

Optimize Images: Images are what add color to a web page and make it less boring. I can’t even think of a web page with images. For a better search engine listing, make sure that you optimize the images by adding descriptions, alt tags, and titles. Its beneficial for your website SEO efforts.

A search engine can’t identify an image’s content. It is the text with an image that helps them rate how relevant a page is. For this, use original, optimally sized, good-quality images.

Backlinks: For a search engine, backlinks are an endorsement of a website. A guest blog on another site that links back to yours will drive traffic to your website.

Getting a listing in online directories will also drive traffic to your website. The description of your business in a e-directory will have a link to your website. Make sure you continuously update your information in these directories to generate traffic and increase your SEO ranking.

SSL Certificates: For a search engine, an SSL certification is important. What an SSL certificate basically does is it changes your website’s “http://” to “https://” that makes it more trustworthy and protected. If you want a search engine to trust you, a SSL certificate is a must.

Mobile Friendliness: According to Google, there are more mobile searches than on desktops in 10 countries including Japan and the US. In order to capitalize on this growing trend, your website needs to be mobile friendly.

Of course, other than these basic  SEO tips, there are many other ways that SEO can help drive traffic to your website. Below, 91 SEO experts share their best SEO tips for traffic generation.

#1. Barry Schwartz – Search Engine Roundtable

Build something that Google would be embarrassed not to rank well in their search engine.

 

#2. Larry Kim – MobileMonkey, Inc

There’s one other factor you can — and should be — focusing on. It’s something that could double your traffic. Yet so many people are overlooking it.
Your organic click-through rate.
Does your website have cancer? Do you have the symptoms?
Are people bouncing off your pages like rubber balls? Is your click-through rate ridiculously low?
If so, it’s dragging down your overall domain-level engagement metrics.

Follow these ridiculous hacks to raise your CTR (and raise your organic search rankings)

#3. Ann Handley – MarketingProfs

My general SEO advice is: Create user-centric content that answers the questions your prospects have, and that makes them feel like you understand their problems, shoulder their burdens along with them, and feel their pain.

Is that SEO advice or is that Content advice? My answer = Yes.

#4. Anna Lebedeva – SEMrush

SEO is an ever-changing concept. So to talk about search engine optimization, you really have to see what’s going on with Google and its algorithms. If we used to talk about keywords, alt tags, URL structure and link-building – I don’t want to be misleading, these things do still matter, a lot – content is now gaining the utmost importance.

Content is king, we’ve all heard it. Yet, content used to be important because it was the way to place the right keywords, to get backlinks and so on. Yet, now when Google is all about search intent and bringing the most relevant pages in front of the user, content becomes increasingly crucial to gaining traffic.

After all, where does traffic come from? From users finding your content in less time than your competitor’s content. And that’s when you have to optimize for #1 or zero position. And you only get there if your content meets user’s intent. That’s how it works. That’s really the end point of all SEO tips, strategies and tactics.

So, I’d say, instead of using tips and mere tactics to optimize for search engines, try to really get into the user’s head. What does he mean by typing in “fancy restaurant for Valentine’s Day.” And make sure your content addresses his/her needs. People don’t need content for the sake of content, or for keywords, or for backlinks, they need it for answers – any search query is basically a question, even without the question words, so your actual job is to answer that question.

So, the best SEO tip is a basic content optimization to answer the questions your users have, and for that, you really need to understand your audience and anticipate any questions they need answers for. It’s like a good old focus group technique used in traditional marketing – before creating the end product, huge companies invest in buyer perspectives and the needs they need to be covered.

Thus, apart from mere keyword/backlink research and on-site optimization, focus on finding the questions your potential users need answers for. At SEMrush, we tried to embrace this trend by introducing quite a unique feature for the SEO/content market – we developed a tool that actually researches the most popular answers for the particular topic you are writing a piece of content on.

#5. Eric Enge – Stone Temple Consulting

The bad about this question is that people will hate the simple response, which is to add great content to your site. People hate this answer because everyone says it nowadays, but the reality is that it's true.

However, let's dig a little deeper. This is about where Google (and even others like Facebook) are going. They're all in a war to win the hearts and minds of users. Their hold on market share is wholly dependent on their ability to provide a quality user experience. In today's world, even if your Google or Facebook, if you fall off a bit in the value off your use experience, overall market share will suffer.

For Google, user experience means offering the right pages in their search results that offer the best, most direct, most complete answer to the users needs. My belief is that this is largely what Google's machine learning programs are targeted at evaluating.

For you, as the publisher of a website, the practical impact is that improving your site content quality, and depth, offers the following benefits:

1. Increased conversions from users on your site.
2. Increase search traffic as Google starts to see your site as offering more value.

Let me state the tips clearly: improving the quality of your content on your site will likely increase your SEO traffic. To be successful at this, you need to understand how Google defines better content. Usually that means deeper, more comprehensive, content.

(PS: doing this well will increase your ability to get featured snippets too)

This tips of improving your site content quality (and the user experience) on your site needs to be a religion, and a continuous pursuit.

It's the key to your short term, and long term, success.

#6. Andy Crestodina – Orbit Media Studios

Indicate relevance. This is the most important, most effective SEO tactic or tips there is. If you expect to rank for a phrase, you need to use that phrase in the title, the header and the body text. It sounds obvious, but it isn't. Go back to any page that isn't ranking where you hoped and give it the “Control + F Test.” Just using the find feature of your browser will show you if it's optimized or not…

Source: Orbit Media, SEO Advice

Keep in mind that although the phrase may have appeared in links, these don't count when you're indicating relevance for this page. Links indicate the relevance of the page they link to, not the page they're on. So use the phrase in the body text here and in links there!

#7. Stoney deGeyter – Pole Position Marketing

Build a site that meets and exceeds visitor expectations. We tend to think of “pleasing the visitor” as something that happens after we get the traffic, but good SEO puts this at the forefront of their efforts. Search engines want to show only the best and most relevant websites to their searchers. Which means that instead of trying to please the algorithms, we should do what search engines do: try to please the searcher.

You can't get to the top of Google without considering what it is that Google wants. And when it comes down to it, they don't want “optimized” text or “optimized” title tags. Those do provide value, but those are just SEO signals to the bigger picture of optimizing the site for what searchers want and need.

If you focus on the visitor follow this tips, producing both content and a site experience that satisfies searchers' needs, then you're not only going to do a better job at generating new business, but you'll be giving Gooogle exactly what it wants to show their searchers. That translates into better exposure, not because you optimized content, but optimized for the visitor experience.

#8. Arnie Kuenn –  Vertical Measures 

I will assume some of the other contributors are covering more technical aspects of SEO. Therefore, I am going to make a rather simple recommendation or tips that can make all the difference for those of you trying to grow the traffic to your website. My recommendation is: create content and TITLES that people are ACTUALLY searching for.

Yes, most of us have our list of targeted keyword phrase that we have optimized pages for, but I am talking about everyday searches related to your industry that people conduct when researching your products or services. Often times this comes in the form of a question.

Pro tips: don't worry too much about search volumes. I would much rather rank in the top 3 positions for 100 lower volume phrases, then rank on page 3 for 100 high volume phrases.

#9. Warren Whitlock – WarrenWhitlock.com

People will respond to your offer for a transaction but what they are really looking for is connection and shared experiences, so make sure that they get that in everything you do. Selling a quality product with great service and a competitive price is just the ground floor of a successful site. Most of the growth for the future will be in real connections with vendors the know, like and trust their clients.

For SEO tips, this means that generic content and links are just the start. You will get a better margin, a lot more sales, and customer sending more referrals when you become known and the industry leader. To do that requires outreach to industry sites, adding value to what they do, sponsorship of blogs, podcasts and influencers to develop valuable connections and participation in the comments, posts and sharing of anything that helps your customers.. not just the sale you are running this week.

This is the most powerful leverage possible in SEO. We've seen ROI over 10x in campaigns like this. Start now. leave a comment on this post, share it where think it will help your audience and reach out to me or anyone contributing when you see something that resonates.

#10. AJ Ghergich – Ghergich & Co.

My favorite tips would be reoptimize your old content to earn Google Featured Snippets. Earning Featured Snippets allows you to occupy position 0 and gain high CTRs against your competitors.

These changes will also set you up nicely for Voice Search Optimization. 80% of Google Home queries return answers from Featured Snippets.

1. Look for content that has top 10-20 rankings but has not earned featured snippets
2. Reformat your content to include ordered and unordered lists
3. Use lots of descriptive sub headers to break up you content
4. Keep you content succinct with paragraphs no longer than 40-50 words
5. Submit your updated content to Google via Search Console

#11. Brent Csutoras – PeakActivity

If you want to drive traffic through SEO efforts, you have to create something worth visiting, linking to, and ultimately sharing.

For years, marketers, consultants, and even search engines like Google, have said they care less about the quantity of content you create, but demand the highest quality content you can produce.

Focus your efforts on identifying topics in your industry that people are making a concerted effort to find. Look at support forums, review keyword tools and check the suggested search phrases in Google, to identify topics people are actively seeking out and then create really amazing content on those topics.

Reach out to experts to get additions or quotes for your topic, allowing you to make the content truly unique, enlist support for your content, and to increase its authority amongst readers.

Review other similar articles to make sure your content is really the best and covers the topic in depth.

Last SEO tip, look at Reddit for getting your amazing content more visible… think about the places on Reddit you could possible write your content to impress.

#12. Eric Siu – Single Grain

There is so much content on SEO out there, and it can feel daunting to begin an optimization overhaul. I focus on tips or techniques that are effective AND make the best use of resources, including the content you already have. Here goes:

Update your existing content – Existing content already has authority and an established readership. So rather than writing something entirely from scratch, find a post already performing well, refresh it with updated information, add visuals, and rely on existing signals to make it rank for terms.

Improve engagement to improve rankings. Take your existing content and make it more readable — break up any big blocks of text, dividing content up with headers, bullet points.

Focus on topics instead of keywords – Google algorithm updates now enable the search engine to determine intent rather than rely solely on the actual keywords. So while keyword research is still very important, focus on what users are searching for rather than different ways to phrase a search query to boost up your SEO.

Build backlinks – Earned backlinks —through high-quality content, outreach and influencer marketing— are still extremely effective. And look for guest posting opportunities on reputable sites. We built our domain authority on guest posts from great sites like Entrepreneur, Hubspot, Forbes, and more. While both backlinks and guest posts will take some manual outreach and tenacity, they're huge for your brand recognition and SEO.

Reporting and analytics tips – The numbers don't lie so measure what's working and what's not and always continue to iterate.

#13. John Rampton – Calendar

It's critical to get into the minds of your target audience by understanding search intent. By understanding why they searching and how they might search with that intent in mind, it helps raise the results of your keyword research and selection which will ultimately improve your seo ranking. There are informational searches, navigational searches, and purchase searches. Each can have their own keywords in mind while also sharing other keywords. Do this right and you'll get the type of traffic that converts.

#14. Michael B Brenner – Marketing Insider Group

The most effective SEO tips to drive traffic to any website is what I call the 3V approach: Volume, Value and Variety.

Let's start with the non-negotiable: value. You simply cannot create crappy content. But what determines whether something has “quality” or “value?” For me the simple answer is that your content needs to answer a question that your audience asks. If you can create a solid answer to that question, then you can generate traffic to your site. But there are some ground rules I like to follow: Title are important to gain attention. Images help to support your written content. And longer articles have a tendency to rank better.

Second is Volume: the fact is that frequency matters. That's why committing to a high-volume approach works. You cannot sacrifice quality but I recommend every company commit to a frequency of updates on their website. Daily, weekly or even posts published multiple times a day can have a dramatic impact on your website traffic.

Finally, you need to have a good variety of content types and formats. If you do a Google search, you will see options for webpages, images, videos, news, and more. So try and publish research, stats, news, videos, infographics, lists, and more, alongside your written articles.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is! But all good things come from hard work. More importantly, all it takes is commitment. The websites that have volume, value and variety rank for search terms and see higher traffic (and conversions).

#15. Aaron Wall – SeoBook

At the moment I would say whatever you do, do it under the narrative of blockchain. It doesn't need to be real for true believers to value it.

 

#16. Radomir Basta – Four Dots

There are many things you can do out there to achieve this, but I'll single out a couple of foundational steps or seo tips to take, to start driving more serious traffic from search engine queries.

First of all, make your website as technically polished as possible.

People sometimes just optimize their website on the surface, but fail to dig deeper and minify code, optimize the server, relocate javascript to the footer, remove unnecessary tracking scripts nobody is using and so on.

These tweaks, when accumulated, will produce a markedly better user experience in terms of page load speed, and this is a direct signal for improved search engine rankings. After all, your final goal as a website owner is to make users feel comfortable when browsing through your pages, and so is Google's.

In addition to this, I still can't imagine a full SEO campaign without deploying a proper link building strategy combined with PR/branding efforts.

Publish awesome and relevant resources on your websites, promote them both via social media campaigns and manual outreach efforts, and it will work wonders for both the page you are looking to optimize and the website authority in general.

Guest posting is still the best seo solution for increased brand awareness and well-targeted backlinks. Just focus on websites with a relevant audience and you'll be fine.

Finally, creating landing pages for all relevant topics with traffic potential should improve the website's keyword reach, and rank it for new and potentially better converting keyword variations that vary across markets, locations, language and cultural barriers, professional occupancies or topical savviness.

#17. Donna Moritz – Socially Sorted

One of the best things you can do for your blog SEO wise is to do a site-wide audit, especially if you have been blogging for a while. For me this has been so valuable in terms of transitioning my blog over from being found by social to being found by search – which is better for traffic growth in the long-run. Here are 6 steps or SEO tips you can take (and the tools to help you) in order to get started with a site audit.

1. Analyze and Optimize Your Website for SEO – Use SEM Rush to help you find the best performing articles on your site, backlinks from other sites, broken links to fix, images that need Alt-Text, keywords you are ranking for and any keywords that competitors are ranking for… and more.
2. Update Your Images – Add tall pins to your top performing blog posts or switch your old (boring) images with engaging images that stand out. A tool like Easil allows you to create stunning pro-quality images, including tall Pinterest images and infographics.
3. Optimize Your Images – add Alt-Text to images where it is missing. Use the Tasty Pins WordPress Plugin to separate out your Alt-Text and Pinterest descriptions, so they perform better for SEO.
4. Update Old Blog Posts – From the information you gained from SEM Rush, review old blog posts that are doing well with search. Update the content and the links, and add a content upgrade or free download so that you are capturing the traffic.
5. Review the Internal Linking on your Site – I would recommend updating to Yoast SEO Premium Plug-in as it gives you suggestions for cornerstone content, internal links to other relevant articles on your site as well as allowing you to add more than one keyword or keyword phrase to each post.
6. Reach out to influencers and companies you mention in your updated blog posts – Let them know there has been an update, especially if they are mentioned. Outreach Plus is a great tool for this. It has many features that will allow you to get more leads, backlinks and press mentions, but this is a good place to start.

Even if you don't get to do all of these steps, just one or two will make a huge difference to your blog's SEO performance!

#18. Shama Hyder – Zen Media

Creating more site traffic through SEO used to be all about Keywords, but now there are many other SEO steps or tips that can be taken to increase the overall audience.

Perhaps the best and easiest place to start is with site content. A larger volume of content increases the likelihood that the site will be the best answer to a search query as a quality result. The large amount of content provided also leads to more linkable content, which will, in turn, increase the number of backlinks the site receives. This will also help to boost SEO ranking.

Search engines also return featured content at the top of a results list to provide the best answer to a user’s search when they type in an actual question. Increasing the site ranking to be included in this feature content can provide another large boost to site traffic. Begin this process by identifying what the main questions a user of your site would be asking, as in “How do I….” or “Why does…”, and then tailor the content to focus on quickly answering those questions.

While keywords are not the only search tactic in today’s SEO game, they are still very important. Use analytics and Google’s search console to identify underperforming keywords. Not all keywords perform equally, and while they may help your site show up in a search, the content on your page may not be enough to support a high enough ranking in response to that keyword. Identifying the keywords that are receiving a high number of impressions but a low number of clicks can signal where attention should be focused in increasing the content of your site.

Ultimately, the key to getting the most out of search engines is by focusing on delivering top quality content to the user. The search engine has the role of delivering the best results to the user to answer their question, and if your site is focused on providing those answers, you will be able to drive more traffic to your website.

#19. Heidi Cohen – HeidiCohen

To maximize website traffic, links and other measurable optimize content for your 5 key audiences including their audience (prospects, customers, fans, employees and social media followers), social media (including amplification platforms for the short run), search (for core keywords), influencers (including experts, frenemy influencers and micro-influencers), and your business (email addresses, qualified leads and sales).

#20. Jayson DeMers – AudienceBloom

I wrote a huge post called “101 Ways to Improve Your Website's SEO” which has my full thoughts on this topic, but if I had to pick 3 of the most effective tips, I'd say the following:

1. Implement a link building campaign and stick with it. Links are the most impactful component in the ranking algorithm that we have control over, so leverage them!

2. Focus on producing lots of quality content for your website. If you want more organic search traffic, you need a reason for people to visit your site, and that means giving free value (ie, great content). Try to solve problems or answer questions that your audience has. If you're wondering whether your content is “good enough” then ask yourself: Would you proudly recommend it to your best friend as a quality resource if they came to you with a question?

3. Ensure your content contains the keywords you want it to rank for. It's important to have the keywords in the title, first paragraph, body, and last paragraph of your content, as well as the meta description. In addition to containing the exact keyword you want to rank for, be sure to include plenty of LSI keywords (related keywords) throughout the content.

#21. Kevan Lee – Buffer

We get about 80% of our traffic from search, and we rely on just a couple of straightforward tools and strategies to do so. We have the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin, which helps make sure that every post is well optimized for search with headlines, content, descriptions, and more.

And then we also use keywords as part of our blog post idea process, i.e. what high-volume keywords have we not written about that might be a good fit for our Buffer blog content? These two elements have been huge for us. To get really granular, a couple of small tactics we've tried are adding a date to a blog post title (e.g., Best Tools of 2018 vs. Best Tools) and leading with the keyword in the headline (e.g. Facebook Algorithm Tips vs. Tips About the Facebook Algorithm).

#22. Myles Anderson – BrightLocal

I’m going to flip this question a little. We work a lot with SEOs and SMB business owners of physical businesses. These businesses aren’t just interested in web traffic; they want to generate phone calls (e.g. plumbers, accountants) or footfall into their premises (e.g. retail).

So their online visibility drives offline conversions that have immense value to them.

Google is moving to a model where they want to provide searches with all the answers in Google and not push them out to 3rd party websites. Here are a few examples –

1. Answer boxes – get a snappy answer to any question right in the Google SERP
2. Knowledge panel – see business contact details, reviews & driving directions in Google SERP
3. Local Service Ads – get quotes from verified local plumbers etc… that Google has vetted and approved
4. Google Posts – businesses publish updates, news & deals into GoogleMyBusiness that searchers can read in Google

And Google isn’t going to stop here.

So my tips to businesses that provide a physical service to their customers is to think about how you can make use of all these new opportunities that Google is giving you to get in front of customers and impress them. Most of there are Free so why not?!

1. Ensure that your GoogleMyBusiness profile is well optimised and that you’re linking to the best page on your site that reinforces what you offer & where you’re located.
2. Write Google Posts (just 300 words) to provide users more info about your services & any deals you have
3. Generate more reviews on your Google My Business profile (boosts ranking & conversion). And reply to all your reviews too!
4. Monitor Google Q&A and answer any questions that are posted there.
5. Get yourself registered with Local Service Ads if you’re in an industry & location where Google has rolled this out to.
6. Find out what questions people are asking about your type of service. Then create detailed and unique content to answer these questions. This is helpful to any visitors to your site and it gives you a chance to start appearing Google Answer Boxes and ultimately boost your seo efforts.

#23. Cynthia Johnson – CynthiaLive.com

Use multimedia effectively. Video, images, and interactive content will improve the user experience on your website and drive more traffic.

 

#24. Dave Schneider – Ninja Outreach

Links are still among the top ranking signals for Google, so, even though we employ more than just one SEO technique to help us get more traffic, link building is still our number one.

We have more than a few link building tactics or tips upon our sleeve, some of which we’ve written about already.

Our favorites tips are:

Competitor link building – we prospect bloggers who’ve linked to any of our competitors in their posts and we offer them our own content and a request to include us in this post as an alternative or comparison.

Dead URL link building – we prospect bloggers who’ve included any dead URLs in their posts. If whatever they’re linking to is relevant to our business, or if we’ve written something similar, we send the bloggers a heads up about said dead URL and offer our content as an alternative.

Expert roundups – we build relationships with bloggers by participating in roundups (such as this one) and asking them to participate in our own roundups in return.

Podcast/interview link building – much like expert roundups, participating in podcasts or interviews earns us backlinks, so we accept invitations or prospect for bloggers (in relevant niches, of course) looking for interviewees to feature on their channels.

Resource page link building – We prospect for bloggers who’ve created any relevant, massive resource pages and ask to be included.

Guest posting – we prospect for DA 30+ blogs in a niche or “shoulder niche” relevant to ours. We reach out and, if the blog owner responds, we offer our content (following their guidelines) and, if everything goes well, we earn a backlink and exposure.

#25. Phil Rozek – Local Visibility System, LLC

The “create great content” and “earn great links” advice has been covered enough for now, including by me. So my best piece of less-obvious SEO advice is: either specialize in a narrow niche, or start offering a really obscure service (or product or widget). The weirder and more “niche,” the better.

If you’re the only provider, or only local one, or the first one, you can pick up some easy rankings, traffic that consists of people with a specific and immediate need, and sometimes even a few easy links. Also, some people will come for the weird little service and stay for the more-mainstream service(s) you offer – for which your rankings and visibility maybe aren’t so good. Go a little off the beaten path.

#26. Maria Johnsen – maria-johnsen.com

Write compelling and useful content in your niche, then spread it on the most trafficked social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and even Instagram. Make sure to install Google Analytics on your web pages in order to monitor flow of SEO traffic and keyword ranking of your page.

Create a community in your niche and promote materials that are useful and actually solve a problem. Be honest, open and caring so that people start following you and care about what you have to say. Don’t comment spam on people’s posts, this has never been a solution. Promote other people’s posts this way they will share your content. There are paid solutions to getting traffic to your websites such as; Facebook ads, Google Adwords PPC, Bing PPC and Twitter ads.

#27. Craig Campbell – Craig Campbell SEO

SEO tips would be to look at the technical side of SEO, ensure your website is responsive, fast loading, and technically sound. Moving onto having a good internal linking structure and adding Schema markup are all processes that has resulted in some nice traffic increases for clients websites for me.

The obvious thing to say is quality relevant link building too, which will help your website further move up through the gears and help you get more traffic to your website. But the key is doing small changes, seeing things moving in the right direction.

Technical SEO is something that is generally poor on a lot of websites, so keep doing audits and improving website performance.

#28. Kevin Gibbons – BlueGlass

In terms of staying ahead of the game in 2018, I would suggest focusing on these 3 key areas:

1. Integrated content marketing approach – In 2018, I would expect to see brands continue to evolve and centralize content with other marketing channels. By making content a key part of the customer journey at each buyer phase, it will be much easier to prove the full value of content across all channels to measure and prove the real business value.

2. Mobile first – when planning any annual SEO roadmap, you have to look where Google is going, and for the last few years you simply can’t ignore mobile. Mobile-first is the latest iteration, which means that responsive websites are now the minimum barrier to entry. Brands need to think about how consumers interact with mobile devices differently and adapt to behaviors, not just via websites, but also apps – to ensure they capture the full mobile experience.

3. Voice search – 2017 has been a big learning curve for voice search, and seen a land-grab for the devices, of which Amazon’s Alexa is significantly winning to-date. In 2018, a continued growth in popularity of voice searches is likely, and brands need to be thinking about how people could be using voice queries within their niche, and how they can offer value to become the best result.

My advice: Think about your users first and foremost. Who are you targeting? What do you want them to achieve? To win at SEO in 2018, you need to be the best result. This means providing great content for your users, across all devices – rather than simply having well optimised content for search engines. Most importantly, you’ll be engaging in the best way possible with your visitors. And as a by-product of this, you’ll likely be rewarded by Google for providing the best experience.

#29. Razvan Gavrilas – CognitiveSEO

SEO is getting more and more complicated when we talk about its technicalities.

There are a lot of things that you need to align to get the highest rankings.

The two significant signals are LINKS and CONTENT.

I will share a tip that we use on any page or blog post that we publish here at cognitiveSEO.

We improve the content on the page (from an SEO perspective) by measuring the Content Performance Metric provided by the cognitiveSEO Content Assistant tool.  This metric allows us to measure how well a page would do for a specific keyword or set of keywords.

The tool behind it analyzes the top performing content in Google and by using a proprietary semantic analysis algorithm can provide specific keyword recommendations that allow us to improve the chances of getting a higher rank.

It worked almost every time. We even improved old content by making content improvements based on the Content Performance Metric.

Keep in mind content is not the only signals. So if you try to improve a page/site that has no link authority than you probably won't see any improvements.

#30. Ryan Stewart – Webris

Hate to break it to you, but there are no hacks or tips – organic traffic is the result of good marketing.

I break SEO into 4 general buckets that need to be executed well:

1. Technical SEO – Make sure your website is built properly according to Google's Webmaster Guidelines, runs fast and accommodates mobile visitors.

2. Keywords / On Page + UX – Make sure your website is targeting the RIGHT keywords for your business. It sounds basic, but it's a cornerstone of SEO. Optimize your pages are the unique value your business provides (within the scope of those keywords). Make sure your pages provide all of the information a searcher needs to find your page, engage with it and take action. That means you should focus on good front end design as well.

3. Content – Make sure your website has supporting content that can be shared on social media, rank in search engines and provide more context for what you do. You don't need a TON of content, but your website should meet industry standards (find out what the top dogs are doing).

4. Promotion – Go out and push your website across all corners of the web. Find and pitch bloggers to include links to your content within theirs. Get writing gigs as a guest author on industry blogs, mention your website within those articles. Get active on Reddit, Quora and industry forums. Tell the world about your website.

#31. Chris Makara – Bulkly

One of the most effective SEO tips I find for driving traffic to a website is through outreach. It's a tedious task, but the results are worth it.

While there are many ways to go about outreach, one of the most effective ways is to find existing sites already linking to similar content. The premise is that you have a much better piece of content that should be linked to instead of the one they are using.

The key is to be personal with the email and not a generic/templated approach. While you can use a template to build the framework of the email, it's best to add some sort of personalization about the page you are referring to on their website (something you liked about their post, a quote, etc).

Basically, show them that you actually read it.

This will go a long way in getting them to swap out someone else's link for yours.

#32. Mandy McEwen – Mod Girl Marketing

One of the best tips to increase your ranking is to create a solid piece of SEO-friendly content and leverage influencers to help you get that content in front of more eyes. Here's what this looks like:

Create awesome content that’s valuable to your audience and get other influencers involved. Quote them, link to their resources, use their knowledge in your posts and then reach out to them. Let them know how helpful their info and resources are, that you utilized them for your latest blog post, etc and ask if they would be willing to share.

Social shares DO in fact impact rankings and by leveraging influencers who have larger social audiences, you will not only be attracting more people to your blog, but you will be increasing your chances of ranking for your keyword. In addition, sometimes you can get the influencer to include a link back to your website, from their site.

To increase your chances of this happening make sure the content is exceptional and speaks highly of the influencer. Of course, adding things like social bookmarks and contextual links from other relevant websites will help as well.

#33. Jerry Low – Web Hosting Secret Revealed

Google and the entire search landscape have changed a lot over the years. A lot of SEO tactics or tips that used to work wonders are no longer effective today.

The only thing that has not changed, so far, is the impact of link to search rankings. If you want good rankings at Google, you need to build good natural links consistently. This means building valuable content that people want to link to; and regularly reach out to others in your industry for linking opportunities – be it guest posting, or interview opportunities, or roundup post like this one.

#34. Marcus Miller – Bowler Hat

These questions are always tough to answer in a generic way. The most effective SEO tips are always the ones that consider your SEO strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It's a cop out answer but it's the right answer – and why when asked in person my answer is typically… it depends.

Here are a few examples:

If we have an authorative site with technical SEO issues then the best strategy for this site will likely be to resolve these technical issues.

If we have a site that is technically well put together and well optimised but has no authority then the solution is likely an authority building strategy.

For small, local businesses then local SEO is often the best approach, coupled with some local focused link and authority building efforts.

For many businesses who are doing okay on the authority and technical SEO front then content generation and promotion is often the best strategy.

And in many cases it is simply all the above. Get your technical SEO dialled in, expand scope with content and promote your content to build authority.

All of which still feels like a bit of a cop out so lets look at some actionable SEO tips. In this case I will typically want to know where the site is in terms of their SEO.

For absolute beginners then get the basics dialed in and we recently published an article covering 5 basic  SEO tips:

Our suggestions here were:

1. Research & use relevant keywords
2. Optimise page titles & meta descriptions
3. Optimise page content
4. Optimise your business around the web
5. Build relevant links

We also have a more advanced set of SEO tips that covers the whole SEO process. This is targeted at small to medium businesses but is applicable to any business that has got the basics dialled in and wants to take things to the next level:

In this guide we layout 30 tips (well, 31, there is one bonus tip) where walk users through the SEO process. There are too many tips to list here independently but the main areas are:

Planning
Research
Keyword
On Page SEO
Local SEO
Performance optimisation
Link & Authority building
Analytics & conversion tracking

To summarise, my main tips would always be to get an understanding of the kind of SEO you need. Perform an SEO SWOT analysis. Set SMART goals for your SEO. And then approach SEO with a strategic mindset where your efforts and budget are focused where they can make the most possible difference.

#35. Chad Pollitt – ChadPollitt.com

I've been giving this tips for nearly eight years. In that time SEO has changed a lot, but this tips still helps significantly — bylines (guest posting). Write great content on as many websites as possible and cite information and data on your own blog or website where prudent. This isn't link building, it's actually real PR and has massive benefits outside of search, too.

#36. Julie Joyce – Link Fish Media

Getting your content in front of audiences in various places…not just on social, not just ranking well in Google, but everywhere. PPC ads, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Google, Bing, articles placed on other sites, etc. Covering all those means that you'll have a much greater chance of driving traffic than if you simply relied on Google, as many people do.

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