Experiencing a decrease in website traffic and keyword rankings can take you by surprise. So too can a decline in lead generation.
While many things can cause these, often they occur due to a change in your SEO visibility.
Such a change alerts your organization that it’s time to review and focus on improving your SEO strategy so you can position higher up on search engine results pages (SERPs) and get in front of your customers more.
Know everything about this below.
What is SEO Visibility?
Simply put, SEO Visibility is the overall percentage of the total possible traffic or clicks your website receives for a specific keyword in an organic search.
And that percentage largely hangs on your positioning in SERPs in comparison with your competition.
It’s an important metric and a way of representing how visible your website is in organic search results whenever a relatable query is entered.
Without it, no one will find you, your conversions will diminish, and your revenue will suffer.
How to Increase Search Engine Visibility in 12 Simple Ways
Pay attention to the tips listed and make sure you apply them.
1. Optimize Existing Content
Optimize your existing content with more relevant keywords.
Start by conducting keyword research, determining which are high-ranking keywords, and measure what you find with what’s already included in your existing content.
From there, optimize accordingly.
2. Update Evergreen Content
Keep your evergreen content valuable by updating the publication date or creating new titles.
This signals to the search engine algorithms that you are providing fresh content, and this can expand visibility.
You can also repurpose or revise your evergreen content to increase the click-through rates (CTRs) and boost your ranking on SERPs.
3. Focus on Long-tail Keywords
Identify and target strategic long-tail keywords. Find ones with lower competition and create your content around them, providing more useful information than is currently available.
4. Increase the Amount of High-Quality Content
Build trust and authority by increasing the amount of high-quality content you offer.
Become the go-to source on a specific topic with long-form content and informative pillar pages. Also, always consider search intent for every piece of content, and post fresh content on a frequent basis.
Adding content will get you noticed by search engines, which can then index your web pages.
5. Add More Engaging Multimedia
Revisit your content marketing strategy and find ways to add or integrate more multimedia content on your website to increase consumer engagement.
Different types of engaging content will attract more visitors to your website and increase dwell time, resulting in a lower bounce rate.
You can achieve this by adding:
- Videos, such as explainer videos, product demonstrations, and customer testimonials.
- Infographics that break down the complex and add a visual element to the content.
- Interactive content, like quizzes, polls, calculators, and downloadable eBooks and other products.
- Podcasts.
With engaging content, visitors to your website will stay longer.
In turn, Google will utilize such factors as dwell time and bounce rate in their machine learning algorithms.
The more time website visitors spend on your site, the more it signals Google that your content is relevant, satisfies the searchers’ intent, and indicates value.
6. Compose Better Meta Tags
Meta tags are the descriptive text that gets the attention of search engines.
To increase your visibility, compose better ones and optimize them, including your meta title and meta description.
The meta description appears directly below your title in search results and can persuade viewers to click and navigate to your website for more information and the answer to their query.
Once optimized, these meta tags can improve your overall CTR and increase engagement.
7. Consider Adding More Internal Links
Include internal links, connecting one webpage to another on your site. This action can have a positive impact on your ability to rank higher.
Be cautious, however, about overloading a single page with too many internal links.
8. Build a Backlinking Strategy
Increase the number of backlinks from high-authority, relevant websites. This will alert Google that you are offering authoritative content to readers.
You can accomplish this in a number of ways, including:
- Guest posting to other high-quality websites.
- Building relationships with influencers.
- Increasing social media marketing efforts.
The key to your backlinking strategy is to build relationships with other trusted and authoritative websites.
9. Check for Keyword Cannibalization
Review your keyword strategy to determine if more than one webpage is optimizing for the same keywords. This will create competition among your pages and can have a negative impact on your SERP rankings.
10. Review Page Loading Speeds
Ensure a good visitor experience on your website by reviewing your page loading speeds.
With optimal page loading speeds, you can increase user engagement, improve dwell time, and raise the potential for conversions.
11. Expand for Google’s SERP Features
Find more ways to capture or expand for Google’s SERP features by:
- Optimizing for rich snippets.
- Including site link outline to improve crawlability (e.g., add a linking table of contents).
- Optimize on-page content to address “frequently asked questions” and “people also ask” sections.
12. Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly
With the number of consumers using their phones to search for information today, your website needs to be mobile-friendly.
Not only will this improve the user experience, but it will improve your visibility due to Google’s focus on mobile-first indexing.
How to Fix Search Visibility Loss?
If you’re experiencing a decline in organic traffic to your website and a decrease in rankings on SERPs, it’s time to discover why and take measures to gain traction.
Here are ways to fix search visibility loss.
#1. Check for Search Engine Algorithm Updates
Google proficiently updates its search engine algorithms on a regular basis, potentially up to 500 or 600 times a year.
That’s a lot of updates to keep track of!
While many are minor and have no effect on your SEO visibility, others, such as core updates (1-2 times per year), can make a huge impact.
Stay up-to-date and aware of all search engine algorithm updates to improve or retain your SEO visibility.
#2. Look For and Resolve Any Technical Issues
Technical issues you are unaware of may lead to a decrease in SEO visibility.
These may include a server being offline when a Google bot attempts to crawl your website. If you experience too much server downtime, you may also receive penalties from Google, and this can affect your visibility.
Another issue involves the use of a canonical tag. This tag provides valuable information to Google, alerting as to what page version to index and display in search engine results.
Website software updates can affect various settings on your website or create incompatibilities.
And finally, a site redesign without optimization may cause a change in the URL structure, deletion of pages, alteration of internal linkages, and more.
#3. Determine if Hosting Issues Exist
If you’re experiencing SEO issues difficult to understand or identify, hosting issues may be the cause. Contact your host and ask if anything is going on that could directly affect you.
#4. Find Out What Your Competitors Are Doing
Even if you’ve done everything right for your website, your loss in visibility may be due to the competition increasing their optimization measures to raise their own SEO visibility.
To help you determine how a competitor jumped ahead of you in search visibility, take the following steps:
- Review your top competitors’ websites.
- Read the newest content (this may be newly published content or repurposed/revised existing content), which may have led them to rank higher.
- Determine where any new links occur.
Learn from what you find during the competitive analysis and improve your own content offerings.
#5. Reconsider Featured Snippets
Even if you are currently ranking at the top of search results, a featured snippet can capture the attention of viewers, and you will receive less engagement.
For this reason, concentrate on creating a featured snippet for your content.
#6. Examine Lost Backlinks
Determine whether or not you have lost any backlinks to influencers or high-quality websites.
If so, reach out to those influencers or websites and ask about the backlinks. You can gain valuable insight into why you lost the backlink and if it went to a competitor for a particular reason.
Begin again building those relationships and creating high-quality, relevant content that readers will find value in.
Wrap Up: Improve Your SEO Visibility and Win More Clicks and Conversions
Experiencing a dip in website traffic and a slipping in search engine rankings can create stress and anxiety, not to mention a jolt to your bottom line.
A decrease in your SEO visibility may be the problem. To increase, improve, or reestablish that visibility, you’ll need to analyze the reasons why it occurs and identify the best ways to fix it so you can get back on top.
Your overall SEO strategy will be key to your success in rankings, conversions, and increasing revenue, so constantly reviewing it will be valuable in more ways than one.
To find out where you are currently in your strategy and identify ways to improve it, take our SEO Assessment today.
