5 Ways to Boost Online Traffic without Link Building

Creating natural, authentic backlinks is a fantastic way to improve your online search engine rankings, but it’s not the only way to boost your traffic. If you’re new to the SEO way of life, then building links may not be your strong suit, and you might find yourself struggling to find a way to help your website thrive. Writing outreach emails can be terrifying, leading a lot of people to consider the dangerous route of buying links. Although links and other off-page SEO factors can have a heavier impact than on-page tactics, those adopting SEO strategies today have numerous routes to consider when it comes to obtaining increased levels of traffic – without having to build a link. For experienced individuals, these practices might be tried, tested and established, but even the most well-known sites could usually benefit from focusing greater effort into one of the following areas.

1. Appearing in the ‘In-Depth’ articles Feature

   Data released by the Mozart Feature Graph, suggests that approximately 6% of all search engine results lead to in-depth articles. Although 6% may not seem like a particularly high number, articles that qualify for the ‘in-depth’ article feature can see huge boosts in traffic. There have been reports of some websites seeing traffic increases of over 10%. If you want your content to appear higher on the search engine results page, then you’re going to have to add a couple of signals into your HTML. Luckily, these signals aren’t a secret, and Google have actually suggested a few markups:

• Google+ Authorship
• Logo Markup
• org Article Markup
• Canonicalization and Pagination

1. Improving Your Customer Satisfaction

   You can significantly improve your rankings on Google if you improve the experience of your onsite visitors. You may already know that the Google Panda algorithm has begun to punish websites of a lower quality, and Google also measures satisfaction within users according to their bounce rate. If you can reduce the chances of visitors clicking on your site and instantly returning to the SERP (search engine results page), then Google should reward you with an improved results position.

2. Optimizing for Videos

   Pixel by pixel, video snippets are beginning to capture more attention online than any other type of snippet, including authorship photos. In order to utilize video snippets, you’ll need to add a schema.org video markup or video XML sitemap. If you’re looking for a way to simplify the process, you can always go to a third party service. These services are full of experts that can deal with the technical details on your behalf.

3. Speeding up Your Website

   Improving the speed of your website is a fantastic way to improve the satisfaction of your customers. After all, people love websites that don’t take forever to load each and every page. However, a speedy website could also influence your search ranking results too, as Google confirmed that site speed is a significant factor. Interestingly, the speed at which your page loads may not be as important as your website’s TTFB (time to the first byte). This refers to how quickly your website is capable of responding to a request. Although speed is essential for desktop searches, it is even more important for mobile-optimized websites.

4. Using Search Engine Optimization for Smart Phone

   Today, if your website hasn’t been properly configured for access on smartphones, then it’s likely to get far lower results when it comes to consumers making mobile queries. Smartphone errors result in lower rankings, and with more people browsing online from their phones than ever before, you can’t afford to get a bad reputation amongst the smaller devices. Some common smartphone errors include:

• Using fonts or buttons that are too small to read on a mobile device.
• Accidentally redirecting your visitors to the incorrect URL.
• Utilizing pop-ups that your users can’t easily close on their mobile.
• Embedding videos which cannot play on certain phones (such as a flash video on an iPhone).