You’ve been trying to bring more visitors to your website for months, to no avail. Well, you know what? You’re not alone. It used to be easier to increase your website’s organic traffic, back when search engine optimization (SEO) was simply a set of rules you had to follow.

But in recent years, SEO has changed to encompass more than basic rules. Today, like planning and executing a marketing campaign, you need to develop a website and SEO strategy to be successful. Thankfully, if you follow some best practices, you can greatly improve your website’s organic traffic and work towards a higher ranking on Google.

Here are 4 of our top SEO tips to follow to increase your organic traffic:

1. Reoptimize Existing Non-Performing Content

What’s the easiest way to work on increasing organic traffic, you ask? Start with reoptimizing the existing content on your website that isn’t performing. Non-performing content is exactly what you’d expect: it’s content that is not getting the traffic you anticipated it would. It’s content that you and your team have put time and effort into creating, that just isn’t garnering results.

Google Analytics allows you to see the traffic each page on your website is receiving and you can even compare different periods in time. Review the pages on your website and pick out a few of your top content pieces that aren’t getting the traffic they deserve. How can you reoptimize these pieces to ensure that they are up to date and provide the best possible user experience?

Need some ideas to get started? You can:

• Add new sections of content with updated information
• Refresh existing content sections with new keywords
• Make pieces easier to read by including H2 and H3 subheadings
• Add new images
• Update image alt text with new descriptions

2. Perform a Competitor Analysis

In SEO, competitor analyses are great tools. You want to create the best content for your audience, but there isn’t always a clear path on how you can do that. That’s when it’s a good idea to check out the competition and see what they’re doing. What types of content are they creating? What topics do they cover? Can you create a better, more valuable resource?

By taking a look at your competition, you’ll be able to see exactly what you need to do to beat the competition. And you’ll also have a bar you can use to measure the success of your own content.

Your competition can provide valuable insight and be a great tool for research, but it’s also critical to make sure that any content you create after doing this research is completely unique. Search engines like Google can actually find duplicate content—and if they find it on your website, you will be penalized for it.

3. Blog on a Regular Basis

Did you know that blogging can impact your SEO? Believe it or not, blogging isn’t just about creating content for your audience. In fact, Google loves fresh, relevant content—especially when keywords are included. However, your content should meet the needs of your audience first by providing them with helpful and informative content, and include relevant keywords for Google second.

If your website has stayed the same for years, it’s even more important to pay attention to and regularly update your blog. Blogging allows you to establish your business as a thought leader, convert visitors into new leads, and provide new and interesting content for Google to index, which can improve the ranking of your website. For your blog to be truly successful, though, you need to create an SEO content strategy that includes topics relevant to your audience’s questions, needs, and pain points.

This is where topic and keyword research play an important role. To find topics, look to websites like Quora and Reddit to see what questions people in your industry are asking regularly. You can also type queries into Google and look at the “Searches related to” your search and the People Also Ask box. How can you answer them in a blog post?

For keywords, you’ll need to use a keyword research tool like BrightEdge or Ahrefs. A good keyword research tool will give you helpful keyword suggestions, search volumes for each keyword, scores for how difficult a keyword will be to rank for, and how many clicks you can anticipate for each keyword suggestion.

Once you have a list of keywords, it’s time to categorize them according to pain points or your buyer personas and create a content calendar.

4. Start Guest Posting

Guest posting is a great way to increase traffic to your website, build your brand, and win great links back to your own content on your website. But if you don’t quite know how to get started with guest posting, you’re not the only one! The process can be broken down like this:

• Find Blogs: This part is deceptively easy. All you need to do to find blogs you want to write for is do a simple search on keywords you want to rank for or that are relevant to your industry and add “guest blog,” “contributor,” or “write for us” to them. Then, on the SERPs, you’ll see a list of blogs that cover or are in your industry you can write a guest blog post for.
• Craft Your Pitch: Now that you’ve found a few target blogs, it’s time to craft your pitch. The most important thing here is to ensure that the topic of the post you want to pitch is relevant to the target blog’s audience and is something they’ll be interested in.
• Start Writing!: You’ve gotten your first pitch accepted, so now it’s time to start writing! Don’t forget to include links to your own relevant content, as well as external links that are valuable to readers as well. And always be sure to include an author bio, too.

Implement These Tips for SEO Success

These SEO tips are just the start, but they provide a few simple ways you can work towards increasing your organic traffic without having to dive deep into the SEO world to see results. The best place to start is on your website. Reevaluate your existing content, see where you can make changes, and once you have, check out the competition. What are they doing that you believe you could do better?

Figure it out, do it better than your competition, and you’ll be on your way to increased organic traffic and SEO success sooner than you think.