42 SEOs Share Their Top Tips for Driving Traffic

There are times when you are stuck for inspiration on how to move the SEO forward for a website. You’ve done all the things you usually do, but growth seems to have stalled. What you could do with are some tried and tested top SEO tips from some seasoned pros to apply to your strategy.

These seasoned pros have in the region of 400 years of SEO experience between them, so you can bet they know what they are on about!

I hope you enjoy the tips - have a read through, test some of these yourself, feel free to contact the guys and gals that contributed their tips, or if you have a cracker of a tip yourself, pop it in the comments below.

Start with Keyword Research

Tip #1: A great source for keyword research is to look for questions related to your niche on question and answer sites (such as Quora). This technique works best if you look for questions that have been asked a few times, as this can be an indicator that there isn’t a good answer to be found on Google. Once you have found your unanswered questions, create great content to answer these. A bonus tip, answer the questions on Quora, but make sure to link back to your blog post for additional targeted traffic!

Joseph Mills, Freelance SEO Consultant

Tip #2: Concentrate on context and not content. Currently, all Google algorithms are focusing on the “user intent.” User intent is the context of the search. Try and answer the question: What does your target audience really want from you? 

Omi Sido, Senior Technical SEO, Canon Europe

Tip #3: Always keep front of mind "what the heck are my users likely to search." Short keywords based on high volume alone are dying - what would someone type (or speak!) in their query that your business can answer. That's where you need to be!

Ruth Attwood, SEO Consultant, 4Ps Marketing (part of NetBooster Group) 

Tip #4: Focus on the user first and give Google's intelligence the credit it deserves. Don't try to fool Search Engines; they know topics are related it's not just individual keywords that provide relevance for search terms.

Chris Ailey, Founder, iThinkMedia

Use PPC for Better SEO

Tip #5: Analyse how important the long-tail is for your business by looking in the search terms report within AdWords. Not only will this give you an estimated opportunity vs your focus terms, but it'll provide you with excellent keyword research to focus your content on.

Daniel Moore, Search & Analytics Manager, BoilerJuice

Tip #6: Understand the value of a keyword by testing it with Adwords first. Effort, CPA and ROI can all be projected with this data.

Martin McAndrew, Founder, Blue Thirst

Tip #7: Don’t lose sight of what’s happening in PPC to guide SEO, both positively and negatively - after all, businesses rarely bid up terms that don’t convert. And if you use PPC as a benchmark, our latest research suggests that search volume data may be being overstated by up to 446%

Stuart Haining, Founder, Seriously Helpful Online Marketing

Make the Most of Google Search Console

Tip #8: Keyword Nudging! Use Search Console to find out what keywords you are getting impressions for, but have not actively written about and optimised your pages for. You’ll find opportunities to improve your existing pages, or in some cases find whole untapped keyword topics to create new pages for. Best thing is, if you are already getting impressions for these keywords, making small changes can sometime be enough to nudge them up to the 1st page of the search results, and substantially increase traffic. I’ve used this ongoing process to increase a page's traffic by 1000s of visits in only a couple of months – it’s a powerful technique!

James Robinson, Freelance Digital Marketing Consultant, Stripe Blue Digital

Tip #9: Backup and analyze your GSC data each month - track impressions, clicks and position changes over time for your primary keywords. Bonus tip - automate with Search Analytics for Google Sheets.

Tony Kelly, Digital Marketer, Tony Kelly Digital

Tip #10: Check the so often overlooked "HTML Improvements" section on Search Console (or Deepcrawl) for duplicate meta titles and descriptions as they might unearth a duplicate content issue. Several pages with duplicate content not only bring the overall quality of your site down but are also a waste of crawl budget.

Marcos Sabino, Head of SEO for Myprotein, The Hut Group

On-page Mark-up

Tip #11: Make sure you do the basics brilliantly, ensuring all hygiene elements are implemented in line with Google’s best practices. 

Kevin Wiles, Freelance SEO

Tip #12: Use the exact match keyword in your URL (no other words), and use tons of LSI keywords within your blog post.

Shakir Hassan, CEO, Bloggingmotive.com

Tip #13: Ensure you are choosing the right technical SEO techniques for the site you are working on. Trying to apply the "silver bullet" you have read about online could be a terrible waste of time and maybe even counter productive. Make sure you are auditing deeply and effectively and choosing the right fixes for the project in hand. Prioritising these intelligently given the resources you have available will then allow you to craft the perfect Technical SEO Strategy.

Charlie Whitworth, SEO Director, Banc

Tip #14: Optimising title & meta tags - HTML titles & meta tags should be different on every page of your website. 

Olivia Sanders, PR Manager, Web World Promotion

Tip #15: An unusual one: External links on popular/profitable pages to open in a new window; it doesn't detract the viewer entirely away from your site. Please note to do this sparingly, focusing on, popular/profitable pages, as it is a better UX to open in the same window.

Harry Dance, Digital Marketing Senior, Kreston Reeves

Optimising Content

Tip #16: Many people still aren’t capitalizing on long-tail keywords, preferring instead to attempt to manipulate search engines. Write for humans first!

Neil Patel, Co-Founder, Crazy Egg & Hello Bar

Tip #17: Think medium/long-term. Always create content for people who are going to buy or promote your products and services first and then optimise it second for organic traffic.

Ben Dickens, MD/Client Strategy Director, DVO

Tip #18: Keep each page focused on its purpose. Stay on topic and make it obvious what the page is trying to accomplish. Clear messaging and actions will help users to find your site and convert; muddled messaging results in confusion for both users and bots, resulting in a lack of visibility.

Ria Fiscina, SEO Department Manager, Active Web Group

Tip #19: Consistently publish in-depth, highly comprehensive and well-researched unique content around topics and themes that actually get searched for. Dig into all those key terms that people are looking for; and add an FAQ section where possible too. 99% of your competitors will never go to this level of effort, meanwhile you'll be ranking like gangbusters and your content will also pick up valuable editorial links consistently along the way.

Alex Miller, Co-Founder, PosiRank

Tip #20: Optimize to help your future searcher find your amazing content, not for the 500-lb gorilla (Google).

Eric Stein, Vice President, Elevate Creative Group

International SEO

Tip #21: For your Global SEO, instead of translations put forward the use of native speakers. They will give you a cultural advantage (references, trending and colloquial linguo, market knowledge, etc.) for your contents and keywords. This will provide you the audience and engagement that gives you the positive signals to increase your ranking in the targeted country.

Jean-Christophe Verro, SEO QA Lead, Media Skunk Works

Video SEO

Tip #22: People always forget the importance of video in SEO. Video already makes up 64 percent of all internet traffic. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth much more. Uploading your videos on Youtube helps you significantly with ranking in search engines. Video is evidence of quality content and it helps send signals to search engines that your page or site contains rich media relevant to search requests. It is expected that search engines will continue to increase the ranking factor of including video as consumers demand video in search results. So having video on your site will boost page rank.

Chandni Trehan, Head of Marketing & Communications, UpSlide

Tip #23: Create video optimized for search (needs). Use self hosted video (can also be third party) and ensure all links within the video, including embed links point back to your own website, not that of the video host.

Moriam Hassan Balogun, Founder, Orangevine, Online Video Platform for Businesses

Schema and Featured Snippets

Tip #24: Schema Markup; Don’t use JSON-LD, use Microdata. With Microdata, you can't fake it and Google loves it because they don’t have to match it with the content, it’s already there. Combined with semantically related words & phrases, your well crafted content will always be “more valuable”.

Hasan Deniz, Head of SEO, WhatHouse?

Tip #25: To help trigger featured snippets in Google for my sites I always turn to https://answerthepublic.com as this tool gives me a whole raft of questions that people are searching for directly in Google and I can answer them explicitly in my content. That way I know I’m addressing questions that have a big demand in search queries. Also, added bonus, by doing this I’m getting my sites ready for voice search as the bulk of these searches tend to be question based anyway and with all mobile personal assistants you only ever get returned the top result.

Mark Stroud, SEO Consultant, Up Your Rank

Mobile and Page Speed

Tip #26: Site Speed. A faster site for both mobile and desktop will perform better SEO wise compared to a slower version of the same site. It will experience improved rankings, a reduced bounce rate and will be shared more often on social media too.

Aires Loutsaris, SEO Consultant, Freelancer

Tip #27: Think mobile-first - with Google soon moving to a mobile-first index, it is pivotal that your website is mobile friendly and offers an excellent user experience. Don't forget to think about the sizes of buttons and fat finger syndrome.

Ashley Williams, Head of SEO, META

Tip #28: Page Speed - strip out anything that slows down your website that isn't necessary. There are tools, plug-ins and numerous resources out there to help you identify page load problems. Reducing lag can go some way to keeping the search engines, as well as your customers happy!

Bhupinder Singh, Digital Marketing Consultant, Freelance

Tip #29: Make sure that the pages most frequented by mobile users have meta data that is focused on mobile users' needs: use Google Search Console to really target mobile search trends in particular!

Louisa Breakell, Online Marketing Manager, Interdirect

Indexation and Crawling

Tip #30: Server Log Analysis will reveal how search engines crawl your website and where they spend their time, often revealing technical issues such as poor site structure or internal linking issues. International sites can understand if search engines can access all multilingual or regional content easily.

Sam Gipson, Freelance SEO Consultant, samgipson.com

Tip #31: Stay on top of your index. Check regularly to make sure the pages you have indexed in Google are all of high quality and you don't have faulty or thin pages indexed. Then make sure every one of those pages is the best out there. Do that and the rest will take care of itself.

Tom Mcloughlin, Founder, SEO Travel

Tip #32: For large ecommerce sites, I’ve had great success with periodic log file analysis, as it is a great way of ensuring the shape of the crawl is as expected. It can highlight several problem areas that if resolved could substantially improve crawlability.

Brad Roscoe, SEO Strategist, Visualsoft 

Offsite SEO – Social Media, Influencers and Links

Tip #33: Build relationships! Invest time into people and all the doors will open for your brand, website and digital presence. I cannot stress this enough! Use Social Media relentlessly. Help others selflessly. Communicate interactively. By-products of this? Backlinks, shares, PR, content collaboration and ultimately...organic visibility and sales. Off-site SEO becomes automatic!

Sam Hurley, Founder, OPTIM-EYEZ & #1 Ranked Digital Marketing Influencer

Tip #34: Ensure you take full advantage of key high DA social networks, invest more in those aligned with your target audience, underpinning social activity with a customer focused content strategy.

Matt Fay, Digital Marketing Consultant, Native SEO 

Tip #35: Invest in content promotion. Research your audience and the people and brands that influence them. Create content designed to be engaging for your audience and their influencers, as well as influencers within your industry. Promote your best content to reach your audience and influencers with it.

Ben Acheson, Head of Digital Performance, Mahon Digital Marketing

Tip #36: Stop wasting time, money and resources on blog posting to build links, in a hope that it will improve your website's rankings for your desired key terms. It simply doesn't work anymore. Instead, spend the same efforts to diversify your website's traffic sources i.e. through social, video and referrals etc.

Syed Shehzad, Sr. SEO Manager, Bauer Media

Competitor Analysis

Tip #37: Reverse Engineer Rank Brain: instead of trying to guess the user intent of a searcher from a keyword, always start in the SERPs. See why the top 3 are serving the user intent the best, and reverse engineer a master page from that.

Matt Jackson, Ecommerce SEO Specialist, JP Digital

Question Everything and Keep Testing

Tip #38: Do things differently! If you see everybody doing one thing, then what makes you think doing it as well will make you stand out from the crowd? By going against the consensus and changing up your approach you'll reap the full benefit of your work, rather than a small share of everyone else's.

Aaron Watts, Digital Marketing & PR Executive, DuoCall

Tip #39: If it isn't logical, don't do it and be in the mindset of always asking yourself - why? Remember this when performing every single SEO technique and you will soon gain that competitive edge.

Mark Preston, SEO Trainer, Mark Preston SEO

Tip #40: There is no such a thing as one solution fits all in best SEO practises. It's for you and your business best interest to create your own best SEO practises. Keep running experiments on a small scale and let the data show you what works best for you and what doesn't.

Lefto Chatziandreou, Global SEO, trivago GmbH

Local SEO

Tip #41: I recommend periodically checking your Google My Business listings. Don’t assume that once you have added or claimed a GMB listing that everything will stay fixed. It won’t! Google often changes listings as it cross references NAP data with different data sources. It’s your job to make sure it’s correct.

David Whatley, Founder and Managing Director, MiShop.local Ltd

The Power of Branding

Tip #42: Do not underestimate the power of your brand. It is no good being number one for "Pizza" if everyone types in "Dominoes".

Dixon Jones, Marketing Director, Majestic.com

Bonus Tip - SEO Timing!

This tip came in after I closed the original tip submission form, but it makes such a good point that everyone in the SEO industry has experienced at some point, so it just had to be included!!

Bonus Tip: Are you planning to develop (or are currently developing) a new site or are re-developing an existing site? If so then the time to bring in your SEO is before work commences NOT afterwards. If you have already started then prioritise bringing the SEO in as a matter of urgency and get them to review everything done so far before you proceed any further.

Dan Lawrence, Head of SEO & Inbound Marketing, Freelance

When I asked the SEO community if they would like to contribute a tip, I had no idea what a diverse set of tips I would get – from the top level strategic tips, to the granular technical tips, there are some really interesting tips in here. The downside of asking everyone for short tips though is that there are some tips that whet your appetite, and leave you wanting more! I might being doing a few follow ups...

Hi I’m James! I’m a freelance digital marketing consultant with over 11 years experience. I’ve worked in agencies, in-house, and I’m now a freelancer. I am also an Associate at The Hoxby Collective – a community of over 200 freelancers that believes that flexible working is the future of the global workforce. View my profile to find out more about me, or to see my contact details.