30+ SEO Hacks Guaranteed to Grow Your Traffic

Do you want to know how to rank higher on search engines and drive more traffic to your website?

We’ve handpicked 30+ amazing SEO hacks to help you get more organic traffic and improve your search rankings on Google in no time.

Since this is a long post with many high-value SEO tips, we’ve organized them into categories for you. You can click the category to skip ahead to the section you’re interested in:

In This Article

Let's start by walking you through some actionable on-page SEO hacks to help you maximize your organic traffic.

On-Page SEO Hacks: Maximize Organic Traffic

On-page SEO includes everything you're doing on your own website to optimize it to rank higher in search results.

Using the right on-page SEO hacks, you can help Google understand your content better and match it with the people who are searching for it.

Here are a few quick hacks to boost your on-page SEO and get more traffic!

1. Use the Right SEO Plugin

One of the first steps to winning at SEO is to use the right SEO plugin. For WordPress users, it doesn’t get better than All In One SEO (AIOSEO).

AIOSEO homepage

AIOSEO is a powerful yet easy-to-use SEO plugin that has been downloaded over 100 million times. Millions of smart bloggers use AIOSEO to help them boost their search engine rankings and drive qualified traffic to their blogs. That’s because the plugin has many powerful features and modules designed to help you properly configure your SEO settings. Examples include:

AIOSEO also has other powerful tools to help you master your on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and even technical SEO. The best part about AIOSEO is that it’s a no-code SEO plugin. This means you can use it to perform most SEO tasks even if you don’t have any technical or coding knowledge.  

For step-by-step instructions on how to install AIOSEO, check out our installation guide.

Check out our article on the best WordPress SEO plugins for more tools.

2. Increase CTR By Adding the Year to Your SEO Title

Did you know that the more people click on your site in search results, the higher you're likely to rank?

Adding the year to your SEO title is an excellent way to increase your click-through rate (CTR). It helps users see that your content is fresh and current, which Google and other search engines favor.

This strategy will work best for content already ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) since boosting your CTR can help move you up in rankings on the 1st page.

Adding the current year to your SEO title is easy when using AIOSEO.

To get started, scroll down in the post or page you’re editing to the AIOSEO Settings and go to the Post Title section.

Adding variables to your SEO title in All in One SEO

Here you can click on the different tags to insert variables into your SEO title. For example, if you click on the + Post Title tag, AIOSEO automatically adds your post’s title as an SEO title.

The Snippet Preview above the Post Title shows an example of how your SEO title will look in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages.

Next, click on the + Post Title tag, and it’ll open a drop-down menu where you can choose to add the Current Year to your SEO title. 

Adding the current year to your SEO title in All in One SEO

Simply click on it, and the Current Year is added!

Now the year will be updated automatically for you – no need to spend time updating it yourself.

If you prefer, you can also type in your SEO title and year directly in the Post Title field.

3. Optimize Your Images with Descriptive Alt Text

Alt text or alternative text is crucial for SEO. It helps Google understand what your images are about. As well as helps visitors to get information about your images if they can’t be displayed on your site.

Alt text is an HTML attribute that’s added to the image tag, which is used to show images on a page. 

It can look like this:

<img src="img_playful-black-kitten.jpg" alt="Playful black kitten" width="500" height="600">

When writing your alt text, you should describe your image as clearly as possible. Don’t just use one or two words to write your alt text. Instead, imagine how you would describe your images to a blind person.

For example, rather than using just ‘cake' use ‘milk chocolate ice cream cake’. This will also help Google to rank your image in image searches.

But don’t stuff your alt text with similar keywords thinking it’ll help you rank higher. In fact, it can result in the opposite, and Google may see your site as spam.

You can easily add your alt text in the WordPress block editor. Simply scroll down in the post or page you’re editing, and click on your image so that it gets marked with the blue frame. Then, go to the Image Settings in the right column of your editor, and type in your alt text in the Alt Text (alternative text) field. 

Adding alt text in WordPress block editor

This is an easy step in boosting your image SEO, but that's often overlooked.

4. Make Your URLs SEO-Friendly

An SEO-friendly URL describes the page using keywords that are easy to read for both search engines and users. It should provide a good user experience and tell search engines what the page is about.

Here’s an example of an SEO-friendly URL: 

http://www.example.com/how-to-make-a-website

This URL is short, organized, and easy to read. Search engines and users can tell what the page is about.

On the other hand, unoptimized URLs are random and hard to read or remember. They usually include numbers, letters, and special characters. 

Like this one:

https://www.example.com/?p=10467

To ensure your WordPress site's URLs are SEO-friendly, head over to Settings » Permalinks and mark the Post name option.

Permalink settings in WordPress

While this URL structure is SEO-friendly, it doesn’t apply to all websites. For example, a news publication site might need a URL with the day and name. Or a large site with hundreds of articles might need a custom structure. 

You can check out WPBeginner's post on SEO-friendly URL structure for WordPress to find the best URL structure for your business.  

Also, don’t put dates or years in your URLs. This makes it more difficult to re-feature old content, and users may think your content is old even after updating it. You’ll also save yourself the extra effort of redirecting your URLs.

It’s crucial to use the right keyword variations to increase your organic traffic and climb in rankings on Google. More importantly, you need to try and understand the intent behind what your users are searching for and optimize your content accordingly. 

The first step is creating easy-to-read, high-quality content that uses related keywords. This also helps Google to understand the meaning or intent behind your content and match it with more searches.

Best of all, the more keyword variations you use in your content, the more searches you can rank for and the more traffic you’ll unlock!

You can easily find more keywords using AIOSEO’s Semrush integration. It will suggest additional keywords and give you the search volume and trends straight from the screen.

Simply scroll down in the post or page you’re editing below your Focus Keyphrase and click the Get Additional Keyphrases button.

Get additional keyphrases in All in One SEO

This will open a new window where you can view suggestions for Additional Keyphrases. 

Additional keyphrases by Semrush in All in One SEO

The new keyphrase will be added to your content with a single click of the Add Keyphrase button.

As you can see, it’s never been easier to rank for more keywords and dominate the search results.

6. Write Descriptive Meta Descriptions to Boost Rankings

The meta description is an HTML tag that summarizes a page’s content. Its purpose is to provide a short description of your page for search engines and users searching for content in the SERPs. Because of this, they are an essential part of SEO.

Here’s an example of AIOSEO’s meta description from the search results on Google:

Example of meta description for All in One SEO

Today, Google mainly focuses on the user experience, so a good meta description should explain what your post or page is about. It should also appeal to users and encourage them to click on your search listing.

That said, a good meta description should:

  • Describe your page’s content
  • Answers users questions 
  • Include a call to action
  • Be unique and interesting
  • Include your main or focus keyword

Of course, it can’t include all of the above at the same time. But depending on your page's topic, you need to write as descriptive and interesting meta descriptions as possible to increase your CTR and boost rankings.

How to Add Meta Descriptions in WordPress Using AI

With AIOSEO, you can automatically add meta descriptions to your articles using the  AI Title/Description Generator. This is a powerful tool powered by ChatGPT. The AI Title/Description Generator takes the labor out of crafting post titles and meta descriptions, all with just the click of a button!

All you have to do to use this game-changing meta description generator is click on the robot icon next to the Meta Description field.

Click the robot icon to generate 5 meta description suggestions using AI.
Select your favorite AI-generated meta description

Select the one you want by clicking the + button and tweak it according to your taste.

For step-by-step instructions on using this powerful meta description generator, check out this guide.

How to Manually Add Meta Descriptions in WordPress

You can also manually craft your meta description directly in the Meta Description field. 

Entering your meta description in All in One SEO

Don’t forget to include the primary or focus keyword that you want to rank for.

You can also use any of the pre-installed tags to insert different variables. For example, the + Post Excerpt automatically adds your post’s excerpt to your meta description.  

Adding your meta description in All in One SEO using variables

And AIOSEO even gives you the max recommended characters for your meta description. If you use more characters, your meta description will be cut off in the search result pages.

Check out this tutorial for detailed instructions on crafting meta descriptions that boost SEO.

7. Create an XML Sitemap to Help Google Find Your New Content

An XML sitemap lists every new and important URL on your website. In other words, it helps Google to find and crawl your new content.

With AlOSEO, you can easily create an XML sitemap and send it to all popular search engines. In fact, once you’ve installed and activated AIOSEO, it automatically generates a sitemap for you.

All you need to do is check if it’s enabled by navigating to All in One SEO menu » Sitemaps and clicking the General Sitemap tab.

General sitemap menu in All in One SEO

This will open the General Sitemap window, where you can see that the Enable Sitemap option is set to on.

Enable XML sitemap in All in One SEO

That’s it!

Also, if you use videos on your website, you can create a video sitemap to make sure Google finds your video content. And if you have a news website, you can create a news sitemap that automatically gets submitted to Google News.

8. Use Schema Markup to Rank for Google Rich Snippets

You’ve probably seen those nice-looking rich search results on Google with star ratings and prices or questions and answers.

Google rich snippets can help you unlock the highest rankings and traffic for your site without you having to be an SEO expert. They allow you to add additional information about your pages.

The best part is that adding schema markup is super easy with AIOSEO's Next-gen Schema Generator. This no-code module adds the schema code for you in the background. All you have to do is choose your schema type in the Schema Catalog.

AIOSEO's Schema Catalog has most of the popular schema types.

Check out this tutorial for detailed instructions on adding schema markup in WordPress.

Here’s an example of some of the rich snippets you can generate. The first one below is generated from recipe schema

Example of recipe rich snippet on Google

Looks good, right?!

As you can see, they show additional information like star ratings, cooking time, and ingredients straight from the search results.

Best of all, your listings get more noticeable on SERPs, so you’re likely to drive more organic traffic to your site and increase sales.

Here’s another example of a rich snippet for FAQs:

Example of FAQ rich snippet on Google

The FAQ rich snippets are useful for people searching for information and need quick answers to their questions.

Google rich snippets are created by adding schema markup or structured data to your web pages. You can easily add schema markup to your pages using AIOSEO. For more details, please check out our guide on how to add rich snippets to WordPress.

A broken link is a link on your site to another webpage on your site (or other websites) that is no longer accessible. Broken links result from many issues, including typos in the URL, deleted pages, a page being moved but no redirect implemented, and more.

Broken links negatively impact your SEO because they cause crawl errors and poor rankings. This also leads to a loss in traffic as users can't access the URL.

And that's why you need to scan your site for broken links regularly. If you're a WordPress user, this is easy with AIOSEO's Broken Link Checker.

This powerful plugin scans all the links on your site and lists all broken links. It also provides an easy way to fix all the broken links it finds.

AIOSEO's Broken Link Checker helps you find and fix broken links on your site.

You don’t even need to open any web pages!

Just click Edit URL to replace a broken link – right inside the plugin. You can also edit the anchor text at the same time.

The best part is that the Broken Link Checker plugin automatically scans your site every 3 days. This ensures that you don't miss any broken links.

Check out this article for detailed instructions on using this game-changing tool.

10. Use an SEO Checklist to Optimize Your Website

You won’t know how your SEO is doing and what to improve without analyzing your site. You can target critical issues and warnings before they hurt your rankings.

AIOSEO’s SEO Audit Checklist is a fantastic tool to take your SEO efforts to the next level. Best of all, it’s a great tool for beginners who don’t know much about SEO and how to best optimize their websites.

It lets you analyze your website in seconds and follow an easy-to-understand checklist to optimize your website for search engines. To start analyzing your site, navigate to the SEO Audit Checklist in the SEO Analysis settings.

Analyzing your overall site score in All in One SEO

From here, you can check your SEO site score. The general rule of thumb is to aim for a score of 60 and above. If you end up with a low score, you can scroll down to the Complete SEO Checklist section and look for recommendations on improving your score. 

Analysis of basic SEO in All in One SEO

For example, from the above screenshot, this website is missing some critical areas of basic SEO. Now that you know these problems, you can use this checklist to fix them and raise your SEO score to get higher rankings. 

Check out our SEO Audit Checklist feature page to learn more about this fantastic SEO tool.

11. Spy on Your Competitors and Steal Their Keyword Ideas

A great way to get ahead of your competition is to do an SEO competitor analysis and steal your competitor's keyword ideas.

When analyzing what’s working for your competitors, you'll get insight into the successful strategies others use in your market. And by finding the keywords that give your competitors the highest ROI (Return on Investment), you can use this information to improve your own SEO efforts and gain an edge.

AIOSEO’s Analyze Competitor Site tool lets you spy on your competitors with a single click. Enter your competitor’s website URL in the Enter Competitor URL field, and press the Analyze button.

Analyzing your competitor's SEO in All in One SEO

Your competitor’s SEO analysis will show up in the same window, and you can see what keywords they’re using and get valuable WordPress SEO tips.

You can also compare other important SEO metrics, like page title, description, and page load speed. 

This is valuable if you want to improve your SEO efforts and gain an edge over your competitors.

For more details, you can check out our guide on how to do an SEO competitor analysis.

Site Speed SEO Hacks: Optimize for Speed and User Experience (UX)

Google has confirmed that site speed is a ranking factor on both desktop and mobile, so your website must be fast enough to provide a good user experience.

Let's look at a few things you can do to increase your site speed without being a web developer next.

12. Install a Cache Plugin to Increase Page Loading

To optimize your site for speed, you can use a cache plugin. Browser caching can help speed up your website by storing some of the larger files locally in the user’s web browser.

For example, WP Rocket offers comprehensive tools to help speed up your website, such as page caching and preloading. You can also use other cache plugins, such as WP Optimize or WP Fastest Cache.

For more tools we recommend for improving page load speed, check out this article.

13. Compress Your Images to Reduce File Size

Compressing your images to reduce your site’s overall file size is crucial for SEO since it affects your page loading. A website that’s large in file size gets heavy and will take longer to load.

Fortunately, you can speed up your page loading by compressing your images. You’ll also decrease your bounce rate from users who don’t have the patience to wait for your site to finish loading. 

To compress your images, you can use free services, such as:

This can reduce your image file size by 70% and more, which will significantly impact your site speed.

14. Use a CDN to Improve Site Speed Even More

And if you want to take your site speed efforts to the next level, you can use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to serve a cached version of your site from the server closest to your geographical location. 

This will help speed up your website because it limits the number of internet hops it takes to display your content from your original server (your web hosting provider).

To learn more about CDN and how to connect your site, you can check out WPBeginner’s guide on installing and setting up WordPress CDN.

15. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly Using a Responsive Theme

Authority Pro responsive WordPress theme

The rise of mobile devices has made failure to look after mobile SEO a death sentence.

Don't stop breathing now…

…it's not as bad as it seems.

If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, Google will still show it. But it'll rank mobile-friendly sites higher because of its mobile-first index. With mobile-first-index means that Google mainly uses the mobile version of your content to index and rank your site. 

That being the case, the easiest way to make your site mobile-friendly is to use a responsive WordPress theme that adapts to different screen sizes and devices. To find a responsive theme, please visit WPForm’s post on the 60+ best responsive WordPress themes.

Content SEO Hacks: Get Traffic From Existing Content

Did you know that you can increase your organic traffic just by updating your existing or old content?

With the right content SEO strategy, you can rank higher in search results for your existing content, increase CTR, and drive more organic traffic to your website.

Here are a few easy content SEO tips that can have major effects on your rankings!

16. Use Long-Tail Keywords to Get More Organic Traffic

Search demand curve infographic

Did you know that long-tail keywords make up for 70% of search traffic? So if you want to get more organic traffic, you should definitely use long-tail keywords in your content.

But what are long-tail keywords really?

Long-tail keywords are phrases people enter into search engines when they’re looking for something specific. Often, they're 3 or more words. And they can help increase your organic traffic, dominate search rankings, and boost your conversions.

Let’s say a user wants to purchase running shoes. An example of a long-tail keyword would be: buy running shoes for flat feet. On the other hand, a short-tail keyword would be: buy shoes.

Optimizing Your Content for Long-Tail Keywords

With AIOSEO, you can add long-tail keywords and even get an SEO analysis of how well you’ve optimized them in your content. All you need to do is enter your long-tail keyword in the Focus Keyphrase field and press Enter.

Focus keyphrase analysis in All in One SEO

AIOSEO then checks how well you’ve used it in your content and gives recommendations on improvements. This is so that you can maximize your rankings in search engines.

17. Improve Readability and Keep Visitors on Your Site

Did you know that users spend less than a second deciding whether they want to stay on a page or not? That’s why your content has to be interesting, engaging, and easy to read so that the readers want to stay glued to your site. 

Readability is also an important factor for search engines. As mentioned earlier, content that’s easier to read often ranks higher than content that’s difficult to read. It also lowers your bounce rate, and Google sees your site as more relevant. 

That’s why you should always break up your content with shorter sentences, subheadings, images, quotes, and bullet lists—anything that will keep the reader glued to your content and stay on your site.

Improve Readability Using AIOSEO

AIOSEO automatically analyzes readability issues and makes suggestions on how you can improve your content in the Page Analysis section. Simply click on the Readability tab and it will show a list of what you've done well and what needs to be improved.

Readability analysis in All in One SEO

Here you can see that this blog post has 4 readability errors that need to be fixed and recommendations on how to improve your content. 

Use AIOSEO's readability analysis tool to improve your content, and you’ll keep visitors glued to your site in no time.

18. Help Google Discover Your New Content With Internal Linking

Internal linking strategy infographic by MP Digital Marketing

It’s important to have a good internal link structure for SEO. This helps visitors navigate your site, and it also helps Google to discover your new content.

There are two main methods for building a good internal link profile:

  1. Always include relevant internal links to your own content whenever publishing a new piece of content.
  2. And on a regular basis (weekly or monthly), update your older content to add links to newer content.

This will help your readers and Google discover how all your content is related. And to make sure Google knows about all your links and ranks your content, you need to write descriptive anchor texts.  

Internal Linking Made Easy with AIOSEO

AIOSEO's awesome Link Assistant feature will help you automatically find new internal linking opportunities.

It will crawl all of the pages on your site and generate a Links Report with insights like:

  • Linking Opportunities — Recommendations of relevant posts and pages you can link to internally, as well as anchor text you can use.
  • Orphan Pages — Discover all of your orphan pages (pages that have no internal links) and suggestions of articles you can link to.
aioseo links report

You don't even need to edit individual posts and manually add the links yourself. Simply select the link suggestions you want to apply to your content and click the Add Link button.

The tool gives you link suggestions and enables you to add internal links automatically.

It's that easy! The Link Assistant will save a ton of time on internal link building.

19. Repurpose Your Existing Content Into a Podcast

Another simple way of repurposing your content is to turn it into podcasts. Through podcasts, you can use your content to build a community and then direct them to your website for more information. This will help boost your rankings and drive more traffic to your site. 

To create a podcast, you don’t have to do anything fancy. In fact, you can simply read out your blog posts, record the audio, and then upload it to your website using a WordPress podcast plugin

Then you can submit your podcast to platforms like iTunes and Google Play to attract an audience and ask them to visit your website. For more details, you can check out WPBeginner’s step-by-step guide on how to start a podcast.

Google voice search

Voice search is quickly becoming one of the most popular ways consumers search for products and services online. It’s now more convenient for people to talk on their phones or smart speakers instead of opening Google whenever they have questions. 

For instance, did you know that 45 million people use voice assistants daily, and Google Assistant usage has increased by 400% in the last year?

With this in mind, we bet you're now wondering how to optimize your site for voice search.

To optimize your site for voice search, you need to start with the following two steps:

  1. Try and figure out what a consumer will likely say instead of type. Strangely enough, these two things are often different, so choosing the right keywords for voice optimization is important.
  2. Focus on publishing conversational content on your site and write as you believe users will speak.

These tips will help boost your rankings, increase traffic, and encourage more engagement with your content. 

21. Increase Conversions by Linking Your RSS Feed

Did you know you can increase conversions by linking to the highest-converting pages in your RSS feed?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is a web feed that allows users and applications to receive regular updates from a website or blog they've subscribed to. 

It’s a simple XML text file that includes a site’s updated information, which gets plugged into a feed reader that users can subscribe to.  

WordPress comes with built-in default RSS feeds. But you can tweak and control the default feeds to increase conversions using AIOSEO.

In the RSS Content Settings, you can add text and links before or after your content.

Editing the RSS feed in All in One SEO

You can click on the tag you want to add, and the link will be included in your feed. Or you can type in text straight into the field.

This is a great way to direct your readers to your most converting pages and grow your business.

Google video search

87% of video marketers say video has increased traffic to their website, and 80% say it directly helped to increase sales. Like you probably understand, videos are a great way to grow your website traffic and business.

Adding videos to your website can also help with:

  • Increasing Your CTR (Click-Through-Rate) — including video on your site drives a 157% increase in organic traffic.
  • Lowering Your Bounce Rate — people spend over twice as long on a page with video than without.
  • Help You Get More Quality Backlinks — the higher the quality of your content, the more likely you are to get quality backlinks.

That being the case, you must optimize your video content to help Google find your videos and rank them in video searches. And a first step is to create a video sitemap.

This is super easy with the help of AIOSEO!

If you have AIOSEO’s Pro version, the video sitemap is enabled by default. To learn how to configure your video sitemap, please visit our guide on how to create a video sitemap in WordPress the easy way

23. Monitor Content and Keyword Performance

Once your content is live, you should track its performance on SERPs. This is important as it:

  • Helps you see if your SEO strategy is working
  • Spot and combat content decay
  • Gives you insight into content that needs better optimization

All this can be done right from your WordPress dashboard using AIOSEO's Search Statistics module. This is AIOSEO's Google Search Console (GSC) integration and gives users valuable SEO data to help monitor campaign performance.

Search Statistics dashboard.

Some reports you get from this powerful module include:

  • SEO Statistics
  • Keyword Rankings
  • Content Rankings

These give you a lot of metrics you can use to gauge your performance, identify issues like content decay, and give you insights into how to improve your campaigns. All these will help you boost your SEO, traffic, and engagement.

For more information on how to use Search Statistics to boost your SEO, check out this guide.

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Social Networks SEO Hacks: Get More Referral Traffic

Social networks SEO includes the things you're doing to optimize your social media networks to get more referral traffic to your website.

It also helps you get more visibility online and can strengthen your brand. Let's look at some quick and easy hacks to boost your social media SEO.

24. Let Google Know About Your Social Media Profiles

Optimizing your social media is important because it can strengthen your brand. You’ll gain more visibility and can generate more leads for your business. Also, the more your content is shared on social media, the more people will see and link to it. 

More importantly, it’ll also help you get more visibility in search. After all, your social media profiles are often ranked on the first page of the search results.

AIOSEO lets you connect up to 11 Social Profiles to let Google know which social media profiles are associated with your website:

Social networks settings in All in One SEO

Simply paste the URLs to your social media profiles, and AIOSEO will let search engines know about them.

25. Add Twitter Cards and Facebook Thumbnails

Adding Twitter Cards and Facebook thumbnails on your website lets you control how your content looks when shared on social media. 

It lets you choose the image and text displayed, which means that more people will likely notice your content and click on it.

For example, this is a Twitter Card when sharing WPBeginner’s post on how to start your own podcast on Twitter:

Example of summary with large image twitter card in All in One SEO

As you can see, it looks appealing, and you can include more information about your content. 

Here’s another example of what one of our posts looks like after choosing which thumbnail that’s used when it’s shared on Facebook:

Example of facebook thumbnail in All in One SEO

These nice-looking thumbnails capture people’s interest, which makes them more likely to click on and share your content. 

With Twitter Cards and Facebook thumbnails, you’ll also ensure that the right featured image is shown when your content is shared on social media. Best of all, it'll increase referral traffic to your site. 

AIOSEO makes this super easy and enables Twitter Cards and Facebook thumbnails by default upon activation. But if you want to customize them and add extra information, you can check out our guides on how to add Twitter Cards in WordPress and how to fix the wrong Facebook thumbnail

26. Add Social Feeds to Your Site and Improve Organic Reach 

As mentioned, you can use the power of social media to boost your website’s search engine rankings.

With over half of the world’s population using social media, it makes sense to optimize your social media marketing to improve your website’s organic reach on Google. 

And since social media profiles rank high in the search results, they can help your site rank higher when you add social media feeds to your website.

For example, instead of adding a plain social media button, you can embed your social media feed on your WordPress site using a social media feed plugin like Smash Balloon.

Example of facebook feed in Smash Balloon

It lets you create completely customizable social media feeds tailored to your website.

Best of all, unlike regular social media plugins, Smash Balloon adds dynamic, indexed, and search engine crawlable content to your site. This will help boost your SEO even further.

Smash Balloon also lets you showcase your user-generated content, which we'll look at next.

27. Encourage User-Generated Content and Get Free Marketing

Example of user generated content in form of product reviews

UGC or user-generated content is any content that’s been created by users, contributors, or your raving fans. If used correctly, it’s free marketing for your business.

In addition, people tend to trust user-generated content more since it’s coming directly from users and not the brand itself. That said, you should take advantage of the power of user-generated content to get free marketing and increase profits for your business. 

How to do this, you may ask?

For example, you can encourage users to engage and post about your brand by creating a contest that encourages them to post pictures about your products and share their thoughts. And then you re-publish it on your website. 

More importantly, reviews or testimonials are one of the best forms of user-generated content to help grow your business. This is evident because 91% of millennials trust reviews as much as recommendations from friends and family. 

So a good way of showcasing your Facebook reviews is by using a social media review widget in your sidebar on your website:

Example of Smash Balloon's facebook reviews sidebar widget

This will help you build credibility and boost conversions. 

You can also encourage people to comment on your blog posts to boost your SEO. Google will see your site as relevant and bump it in the search results, which we'll look at next.

28. Reply to Comments and Get More Returning Visitors 

Did you know that 77 million new blog comments are generated by readers each month?

Comments left by users show their interest in your content, whether positive or negative. That being the case, your blog should be a two-way communication, and encouraging readers to engage can benefit your business.

Not only does responding to comments deepen your relationship with your users, but it’s also a form of social proof. 

Better yet, comments are user-generated content filled with long-tail keywords, which are more specific and easier to rank for. As you already know, long-tail keywords make up 70% of all search traffic. 

Also, if you provide helpful answers to comments, it’s a great way of getting returning visitors to your site since users often want to come back and look for your answer: 

30 SEO hacks guaranteed to grow your traffic - respond to comments

And if you include links to your content when you reply, you’ll also boost your internal linking. 

Best of all, studies have shown that users leaving comments are more likely to share your content on social media, subscribe to your channels, and buy from you. 

In other words, allowing comments on your website and carefully responding to them can help increase your organic traffic and improve rankings.

Local SEO Hacks: Boost Rankings on Google Maps

Local SEO is what you do to improve your rankings on Google Maps and get featured in Google's Knowledge Panel.

It's a must for businesses that serve customers in a specific location or have several locations and want to improve rankings in local search. This will help local customers find your brick-and-mortar stores or local services.

Here are a few powerful hacks that will boost your local SEO and rankings in local search!

If you’re running a brick-and-mortar store or offering your services in a specific location, you should create a Business Profile in Google My Business

Business Profiles are specific to businesses that serve customers at a particular location or within a designated service area.

Why is this important for SEO, you may ask?

A Google My Business profile is important for SEO because it lets you be more visible in local search and Google Maps, where potential customers can easily find your business.

You’ll have your own profile, where you can add your business’s information, photos, and showcase reviews straight from the search results.

For example, when people search for a business (for example, Walmart Pharmacy), Google may show a Knowledge Graph card with the nearby locations for Walmart’s Pharmacy:  

Example of Google Knowledge Graph card

This makes it easy for people to find your brick-and-mortar locations and puts your company at the top of the results. Best of all, this will increase the clickthrough rate of your site and likely lead to more sales for your business.

To increase your chances of getting featured in Google’s Knowledge Panel, add Google’s local business structured data or schema markup to your website. 

With AIOSEO’s Local Business Schema addon, you can easily set this up and increase your rankings in the local search results, Google Maps, and the Knowledge panel in no time. For more details, please visit our local business SEO documentation.

30. Build and Optimize Your Citations

Citations are important because they help Google to trust your business and show it in search results. 

If Google sees consistent citations of your business name, address, and phone number, it counts this as trustworthy information. Conflicting info about your business can negatively impact your rankings. 

The first thing you need to do is make sure your business information is displayed on your website where it’s easy to find. For instance, it can be on your homepage, footer, or contact us page. 

To avoid inconsistency when adding citations to other sites, it can be good to use a Listing Management solution like Semrush offers:

Semrush's listing management tool

All you need to do is enter your business information, and Semrush will make sure your business info appears consistently on every major citation site on the internet (including Facebook, Google My Business, Yellow Pages, and more).

But don’t forget to remove duplicate citations since they can push your rankings down due to inconsistencies in data.

Check out this detailed guide for more information on building local SEO citations.

31. Submit Your Site to High-Quality Local Directories

To increase visibility online and boost your rankings, you should also submit your site to local directories, such as Yelp and Bing. 

However, you should ensure they’re quality directories, or it can hurt your rankings. 

Yelp is one of the most popular sites for business discovery and reviews. And getting listed on Bing can help you earn more leads for your business.

Also, checking HubSpot’s local business directory list will help you find quality directories.

Overall, the best thing is to try and identify the local directories where your customers are and add your business to them.

Don’t forget to keep your business information consistent on all directories to be trusted and favored by Google.

Learn more local SEO hacks in our ultimate local SEO checklist.

Off-Page SEO Hacks: Winning Backlink Strategies 

Off-page SEO includes what you're doing outside of your own website to impact your rankings in search results.

Using the right off-page SEO hacks, you can get more referral traffic to your website, strengthen your authority online, and improve your search rankings.

Let's take a look at two winning off-page SEO strategies next.

Guest blogging is one of the most effective types of link building and getting more quality backlinks. Guest blogging works because you offer value to site owners in exchange for a link to your site.

If you choose your guest blogging targets carefully, you can soon build up a diverse and authoritative inbound link profile.

To guest blog effectively, you need to:

  • Identify sites that accept guest posts
  • Pitch and create stellar content
  • Create a bio that helps both with link building and lead generation

Learn more in OptinMonster’s ultimate guide to guest blogging.

33. Create and Add Infographics to Your Site 

Creating and promoting infographics is another powerful strategy to increase website traffic, improve your domain authority, and boost your SEO.

For instance, creating an infographic that focuses on a trending topic and includes helpful stats and data visualizations can get people interested in sharing your infographic with others.

Here’s an example of WPBeginner’s infographic of 25 things you don’t know about WordPress:

You should create your infographic and publish it on your website so that users can link back to it. You can find tools to help you create infographics in OptinMonster’s post on 51 visual content creation tools to make marketing easy.

However, you shouldn’t share the infographic by itself. As mentioned earlier, Google can see it as thin content if it doesn’t include text as well.

So a good strategy is to publish a new post with your infographic and add some text explaining your process and your findings within the infographic. Don’t forget to add an embed code to make it easy for others to share your infographic.

Use these 30+ SEO Hacks and Tips to Boost Your Rankings and Revenue

We hope this post helped you discover some SEO hacks and tips to help boost your search rankings and revenue. You may also want to check out other articles on our blog, like our DIY SEO tips and our guide to using AI SEO software to boost your rankings.

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author avatar
Kato Nkhoma Content Writer
Kato is one of those rare unicorns born with a pen in his hand—so the legend says. He’s authored 2 books and produced content for hundreds of brands. When he’s not creating content for AIOSEO, you’ll find him either watching tech videos on YouTube or playing with his kids. And if you can’t find him, he’s probably gone camping.

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78 comments on “30+ SEO Hacks Guaranteed to Grow Your Traffic

  1. Awesome article! Some I have used already & others have been explained here & I will attempt to use in my travel blog. Thank you!

  2. I Love using AIOSEO for my website it has boost my site’s rankings. I prefer to my friends and family to use it. Thanks

  3. Thanks for being a plugin that actually makes life easy as a webiste/blog owner. Love that I can concentrate on content and then leverage the absurd amount of tools in your plugin to optimize wording, placements and utilize aspects of SEO I never knew existed or didn’t want to dedicate time to learn how to manually accomplish.

  4. This is an extremely helpful article for anyone looking to boost their websites on search engines. I discovered a variety of ideas that I did not think of.

  5. Wow, lot’s of great stuff here! I’ll see working for a while implementing everything. Thanks for the information!

  6. Very good article. Top 30 Hacks I’ve Read To Increase Traffic Great Job And Probably One Of The Best SEO Apps

  7. I already apply many of these and know how well they help, so I am excited to add the new ones to my site!

  8. I tried using the competitor site analysis tool, but didn’t get a list of the keywords my competitor was using. Does that mean they don’t have them listed anywhere?

    Good artlcle with a lot of relevant tips. Unfortunately a lot of the features are completely paywalled off so I can’t tell if they’d be that useful for me (a very small business). Would appreciate some limited access to features like the SERP stuff so I can start to see how useful this could be for me before I pay for the pro version. Otherwise, I’m happy with what I’m getting out of the free version already!

  9. Your tips, help and advice have increased the traffic to my site! Thank you for what you do!

  10. There is so much here to digest. Thank you for creating it. I’m really interested in #8. Use Schema Markup to Rank for Google Rich Snippets. I’ll be going down that rabbit hole next.

  11. Awesome SEO hacks! These tips are gold for increasing website traffic. Quality content and optimized meta tags are key. Patience is vital for long-term success. Thanks for sharing!

  12. What a golden guide! I will save this for later and try to optimise my project with it, thank you SO much

  13. We used to only use Yoast as our SEO for WordPress, but last year we changed to AIOSEO and have never looked back. Not only do they do everything we need, but they do it cheaper. We’re now fans and here to stay.

  14. Thank you for this presentation. I cannot wait until I am able to change SEO companies (saving to pay for a year rather than the monthly fee I pay Yoast).

  15. It is a great addition that achieved a great level for my website and helped me to top the results in searching and organizing site articles

  16. 3 Million Online Professionals could not be wrong, AIOSEO certainly my favorite SEO tool and go to resource for up to date SEO guidance like demonstrated one’s again in this comprehensive article. These 30+ SEO Hacks Guaranteed to Grow Your Traffic is very helpful indeed, thank you!

  17. This article is a goldmine of practical SEO strategies that can catapult your website’s traffic to new heights. Implementing these hacks will surely give your online presence the boost it needs to thrive in the competitive digital landscape.

  18. I’ve been using Aioseo for 6 months now and I see a big difference, my position has definitely improved. good job

  19. Wow, what an enlightening article! The comprehensive explanation of each SEO hack, coupled with the practical tips on how to implement them, makes this a valuable resource for anyone looking to boost their website’s visibility and rankings. Thanks for the great read!

  20. This article is superb! It’s packed with actionable SEO tips that can help anyone grow their website traffic. The author does a great job of explaining the different SEO concepts in a clear and concise way. I especially appreciate the section on long-tail keywords, which is a topic that is often overlooked by beginners.

    I’m definitely going to put some of these tips into practice on my own website. I’m confident that they will help me to improve my rankings in Google and attract more visitors.

    Overall, this is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to learn more about SEO. I highly recommend it!

  21. 3 Million Online Professionals could not be wrong, AIOSEO certainly my favorite SEO tool and go to resource for up to date SEO guidance like demonstrated one’s again in this comprehensive article. These 30+ SEO Hacks Guaranteed to Grow Your Traffic is very helpful indeed, thank you!

  22. I’ve been an AIOSEO user since its inception. It’s been a consistently excellent product. Somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten about the broken link checker! I’m off to look that up now. Thanks for the reminder and for this informative and thorough article

  23. Enjoying that another company has taken the challenge of offering another solution for the “ever-changing” algorithms on numerous search engines. The article above is a classic example of how AIOSEO is staying connected to the changes they make (almost daily). Thanks for the article.

  24. Daaaang! I didn’t know this resource existed. Thank you for making such a comprehensive list for us. I feel like I need to print this out and keep it as a manual beside my computer. 🙂

  25. Thank you for sharing these valuable tips on SEO. I found the information on using the right SEO plugin and adding alt text to images particularly helpful. I’ll be sure to implement these strategies on my own website. Keep up the great work!

  26. I wish to thank you for the link to this content. Contest Prizes aside, I saved this to read so much more, in applicable bite sizes.

    For now, I am really pleased to see more ways to optimize my social media links and feeds where testimonials and customer or reader interaction adds value to what can be found on my blog.

    I have had AIOSEO for awhile and had not gone down the rabbit hole of learning (all tech is quite daunting to me).

    THIS!! Article has been incredibly helpful to realize and welcome the beginning of a kinder friendship going forward.

  27. Thanks a lot for the great article.
    its very very helpful, now I can easily configure my SEO to very best level

  28. Great tips! Alt text is not only useful for SEO but also for visitors who use screen-reading tools, increasing accessibility and allowing you to reach a wider audience.

  29. I am loving these hacks! I truly enjoy using AIOSEO and I recommend it anytime someone mentions SEO.