Your website can be a powerful traffic and lead generation tool for your small business. Unfortunately, building a pretty website will not get potential buyers to start visiting your site. To generate long-lasting, highly relevant, and free traffic, you have to learn how to improve your website SEO.

The idea of getting free eyes on your site each day seems almost too good to be true, and many small business owners are slow to warm up to the idea of focusing on SEO traffic generation.

“My target customers are too sophisticated to convert on a website.”

“Learning how to increase my SEO is too expensive and time-consuming to bother with.”

I’ve heard several different excuses, but the fact of the matter is – 89% of consumers turn to a search engine before making a purchase, according to a study by Brafton. You don’t necessarily have to close a lead on the web, but it’s a great place to start a conversation.

With this data in mind, let’s explore how to use SEO to increase traffic.

Create the Best Content Possible
Creating exceptionally good content is one of the absolute best ways to increase SEO for your website. If Google’s mission is to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” then having the most accessible and useful content from the start is the simplest way to rise to the top of the organic rankings.

One method for determining how to boost your SEO with quality content is to create in-depth articles.

Write In-depth Articles
Did you know that the average word count of a first page result on Google is 1,890 words? These results are typically long-form blog posts packed with educational content that ranks for keywords that closely align with searcher intent

One of the key pieces of learning how to blog for SEO, is to determine what searchers truly want to know when they search your target keywords. From there, your job is to deliver an exhaustive, skimmable article on the subject.

For example, if a Google users conducts a search for “best lawyer in [location],” you should closely examine the top search results before you craft your own page on the subject. To increase your SEO, your information needs to align with the intended goal behind that specific search.

You might find that the first result is a lawyer listing website that compares several attorneys in that location. The second and third results are attorney homepages from firms in that area. These homepages might have summaries of their practice areas, along with estimated hourly rates.

While crafting your own content, you will need to keep those high-performing competitors in mind. Is there any way you can compare yourself to the competition without sending your users away from your site? Making this comparison would help align your page’s intent with that of the first place result. You would also want to summarize your practice areas, and include ranges for your rates to stay on par with the current second and third place Google results for “best lawyer in [location].”

Aligning your page content with searcher intent will usually lead to a highly valuable, long-form page or blog post. One of the main benefits of having a blog for your business is that you have a logical platform for publishing in-depth articles that will be helpful to searchers and ultimately improve your SEO website traffic.

Capitalize on Low-Hanging Fruit
Another key aspect of learning how to improve website SEO is identifying low-hanging fruit.

Here are some rules of thumb to help you identify low-performing pages that aren’t benefiting your site’s SEO.

Use SEMrush to filter out which keywords your site ranks for that are on the verge of improving to the next page of the SERPs (position #11 or #12 keywords).
Use Screaming Frog to identify any broken or redirecting internal links, and resolve them.
Use Screaming frog to identify any pages that have missing or multiple page titles, H1s, or oversized images.
Once you identify these quick wins, you can resolve any on-page errors, or even improve your struggling content by adding more quality text or rich media like relevant images or videos. Making enhancements to on-page and off-page SEO for these low performers will help improve the SEO traffic generation of your website as a whole.