You have three core objectives when trying to increase your website traffic and drive revenue from it: rank higher in search engine results pages for your existing keywords, find new keyword opportunities, and maximize your click-through rate.
Underpinning all three objectives is an array of SEO tactics you must implement to achieve your desired search results. The challenge lies in choosing the right ones for your strategy. That’s why we’ve curated the 15 essential SEO techniques you need to master to increase search engine traffic and revenue in 2025.
1. Understand Your Competitor’s Strategy
Competition can be a great thing for your search strategy. Researching and understanding your competitors’ strategies helps you to conduct keyword research and develop topic ideas.
We recommend Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool for competitor research. Site Explorer’s “Competitive Analysis” tool provides a full breakdown of your competitors’ targeted keywords and the traffic they receive from them.
It’s also straightforward to use. Enter your URL into the tool, along with the URLs of several of your competitors. Click “Compare” to generate an Ahrefs report showing keywords you have in common with your competitor, along with those for which they rank but you don’t. The latter open doors to new keyword opportunities for you to target with your on-page SEO.
2. Update Older Content
Content “freshness” directly impacts your website’s search engine ranking. However, while search engines prioritize the most up-to-date information, around two-thirds of bloggers don’t update content regularly. Of those who do, 34% claim that updating older content for web and search engines provides strong results.
Consider what this means for each blog post on your website. Perhaps you noticed a decrease in traffic? A traffic dip isn’t always a sign of disinterest – it’s often a sign of staleness.
A quick update to your existing content can reignite your organic traffic.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and the Google Search Console (GSC) are your best tools for this SEO technique. Each provides historical data for your URLs, indicating if their content is attracting less traffic. If you see a decrease for a previously high-performing page, you’ve discovered a candidate for a content update. You can also use these tools to filter through your older web pages, which may be primed for an update.
3. Use Topic Clusters
A topic cluster is a group of pages on your website that cover a single topic in great detail. You’ll typically create a “pillar page” that covers the big-picture aspects of the topic. From that pillar page, you link to subpages that cover specific information from the pillar page in more detail.
Creating these clusters is one of the most important SEO techniques for two reasons.
First, your clusters become great sources of internal links that help with the navigational aspects of SEO.
Second, clusters provide you with more pages optimized for specific keywords, helping you establish strong topical authority in your niche.
To create your clusters, start by defining the categories you wish to target. Within each category, create a list of audience pain points, your solutions, and the high-value topics related to the category. Conduct keyword research using the tools we’ve already mentioned to discover what keywords and queries your audience uses to find information about these topics. From there, create your pillar page and subpages. Documenting how all of these pages link together via an Excel document helps you keep track of this strategy.
4. Prioritize High Quality Backlinks
Link building is like digital word of mouth. Each backlink you receive is a recommendation from the domain providing it.
Links from low-quality URLs, such as directories that only exist to host backlinks, are the equivalent of untrustworthy word of mouth. These poor backlinks do little to improve your SEO performance. Google’s Penguin, now integrated into Google’s core algorithm, operates in real-time constantly analyzing backlinks and devaluating low-quality ones.
Always aim for quality over quantity with your backlinking strategy. Backlinks from authoritative domains, such as professional organizations within your industry, are a priority. Links earned organically via other sites linking to your content also carry value. Not all directories are bad, either. Industry-specific directories provide high-quality links, as do local directories such as Yelp and similar business review directories.
5. Add Internal Links
Internal links are links you create from one page of your website to another. These links form a key part of your site’s navigational structure. They also make search engine indexing easier because they provide more routes for a search engine’s indexing tools to discover your site’s pages. Internal links become invaluable when you have a large website and can’t provide direct links to every page via your navigation bar.
The technique here is simple – create strategic internal links within your content.
Consider the relevance of the linked pages and their relationship as you do. An internal link should be contextual, meaning it makes sense in the context of the page in which it’s placed and leads to another page that’s relevant to the original.
6. A/B Test Title Tags
Optimizing title tags of your web pages is crucial: they signal your target keywords to search engines and are the primary element users see in their search results. Optimizing those tags is key both to an effective SEO strategy and attracting your target audience.
That’s where A/B testing comes into play. An A/B test involves creating two versions of a title tag for the same web page and comparing the click-through rate (CTR) for each tag. The title that achieves the highest CTR – which you can measure using GA4 – is the most effective. Once you have that effective tag, run further A/B tests using variations of the tag to optimize to the point where you have the best title tag possible for each of your pages.
7. Optimize for SERP Features
SERP features are results that are distinct from the organic results a search engine generates. They’re typically found below the ads created via search engine marketing and above (or within) the main organic results. Examples of SERP features include:
- Featured Snippets: Direct answers to queries typically shown at the top of a search engine results page.
- AI Overviews: AI-generated answers to queries that include links to the websites from which the information is derived.
- Popular Products: A carousel of products related to the user’s keyword.
- The Local Pack: A small collection of three business listings that appear for searches containing local intent.
- Rich Snippets: Additional information about a page – such as images and product prices – shown within search results.
- Knowledge Panels: Information boxes that appear to the right of the top result in search and contain more information about a brand.
Each of these SERP features provides more information and takes up a prominent position in search results on Google. Optimize for them by ensuring your domain provides the structured data Google needs to generate rich snippets.
For instance, an e-commerce site should have clear images and prices displayed for each product to increase their chances of appearing in the Popular Products snippet. Content should provide direct answers to questions so it appears in the Feature Snippets or is used as part of an AI Overview.
8. Fix Core Web Vitals Issues
Google’s Core Web Vitals are standard metrics Google provides that help you understand how people view your web page. Those metrics break down into three categories:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): A measure of the time it takes for a web page’s various content blocks, such as images and videos, to load.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): A metric that examines if core website features like buttons and forms shift around as a user navigates your site.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): A metric measuring a website’s responsiveness to user interactions, like clicking a button or tapping a link.
Ideally, your site should achieve an INP of 200 milliseconds or less. Unexpected layout shifts should be avoided as the user navigates, and content blocks should load quickly.
Improving core web vitals involves optimizing images (often by reducing file sizes) and testing your site to ensure it displays consistently across all devices and browsers. Caching and code minification are other ways to help improve core web vitals.
9. Create Thought Leadership and Organically Generate Backlinks
Organically generated backlinks are some of the most high-valued links your site can obtain. These are links you gain when another site owner feels your content is useful enough for them to link to from their website.
How do you encourage these types of links?
By becoming a thought leader in your industry. The topic clusters we discussed earlier help here. Having multiple pages on your site dedicated to the same topic demonstrates expertise and provides more opportunities for others to link to you.
Developing original research shared via your site and offering a unique point of view on your industry also establishes thought leadership. Your content must demonstrate that you’re sharing information that can’t be found anywhere else.
10. Add Expert Quotes
Expanding on the thought leadership approach, even the most unique points of view benefit from having expert quotes and data to back them. In fact, 55% of C-Suite executives say that good thought leadership references strong research and data.
Have you noticed what we just did?
We used a statistic to add credibility to our point, which is what you do when you use stats and expert quotes in your content.
This is one of the SEO techniques closely connected to Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) requirements for content. You draw upon somebody else’s expertise and experience to make your content more authoritative, signaling to your audience that your content is valuable and trustworthy. Google ranks your web pages higher if its algorithm determines that the pages meet its E-E-A-T guidelines. Adding expert quotes to your content is one way to demonstrate that you’ve put the work into ensuring your content is as useful to your audience as possible.
11. Optimize Meta Tags
Meta tags are HTML snippets embedded into the code behind your web pages that provide information to search engines. Title tags and meta descriptions fall into this category. You can also use robot meta tags to inform a search engine about how to behave on your page.
Optimization across the board with these tags is one of the most important SEO techniques.
We’ve already mentioned using A/B testing to optimize title tags. For robot-related tags, ensure you’re not using “nosnippet,” “noindex,” or “nofollow” tags. Respectively, these tell search engines you don’t want them to create rich snippets, index your page, or follow the links on your web page. These tags can harm your Google rankings because they essentially tell the search engine that you don’t want it to showcase your page.
Meta description optimization can benefit from the same A/B testing for improving title tags. Keep these descriptions below 160 characters because anything above that limit won’t display in your web page’s search listing. A good meta description is concise, includes a keyword relevant to the web page, and contains a call to action (CTA). “Doing” words, such as “discover” and “buy”, are often the best options for creating meta description CTAs.
12. Add Images or Videos
Add Images or Videos
The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, with 90% of the information our brains receive being visual. These statistics demonstrate that images and videos capture attention instantly and far more effectively than text alone. Our eyes are drawn to visuals first, making images key to ensuring engagement once somebody arrives at your site via organic search.
While this alone highlights the value of visuals to internet users, it doesn’t explain why adding images and videos is one of the most important SEO techniques.
Images on your site increase your chances of showing up in the Popular Products and Rich Snippets SERP features mentioned earlier. You can also add alt text containing a keyword to images and videos, which helps Google determine what the image displays and improves your site’s accessibility.
13. Add Authoritative External Links
Adding authoritative external links within your content may seem counterintuitive. Those links lead visitors away from your website when your goal is to keep them in your site’s ecosystem for as long as possible. However, it’s a valuable SEO practice.
Consider these types of links from the authority-building perspective. You reinforce the information you provide, such as when linking to a study, and provide your site’s visitors with access to valuable information.
Take advantage of “rel” attributes to define how search engines view these external links. For instance, use the rel=”nofollow” tag to prevent your site’s link equity from passing to another website. For links that are advertisements or paid placements, you should use rel=sponsored” while “rel=ugc” should be used for user-generated content.
14. Fix Broken Links
Search engine crawlers use links to navigate your website and understand its structure and content. When you have broken links, those crawlers hit dead ends. That means they can’t index your site properly, which impacts your rankings. Additionally, broken links also hurt the user experience, and keep users from navigating the site correctly.
Avoid these issues by conducting regular checks to ensure all of your links still work. Never assume they do.
In 2024, Ahrefs sampled links pointing to over two million websites placed since January 2013. It found that 66.5% of the links had “rotted,” meaning the links go nowhere, with a further 6.45% returning temporary errors.
A link that works today may not work tomorrow, so check often to avoid this problem.
15. Edit Anchor Text for Links
A link’s anchor text is the collection of visible words displayed on the page your user sees. For instance, “SaaS SEO” could be the anchor text for a link we use to send you to our dedicated SaaS SEO page. You can click on “SaaS SEO” in the previous sentence to see that the anchor text takes you to a relevant page.
Take advantage of anchor text when building links into your content. Use keywords relevant to the linked page to make clear to search engines and users where they’ll arrive if they click. Anchor text is one of many signals search engines use to understand the linked page’s content, which helps in site indexing.
Master Search Engine Optimization with Linkflow
Implementing the 15 SEO techniques we’ve discussed significantly increases your chances of appearing in prominent positions in search engine rankings for your audience’s search queries. These techniques include often-overlooked technical SEO elements, such as tweaking anchor text and metadata, as well as strategies to ensure your content is as fresh as possible and meets Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines.
Work with Linkflow to create a customized SEO strategy that incorporates all of these techniques, along with any that are relevant to your site and your specific goals, such as generating leads or improving brand awareness. Schedule your intro call today – our team is always happy to help.
