8 Advanced SEO Tips to Increase High-Quality Traffic that Converts

If you’re an SEO or marketing manager who understands SEO and can acquire some organic traffic but struggling to get traffic that converts into paying customers or clients, then you’re in the right place.

Because let’s face it, traffic that doesn’t convert is a big let-down and can leave you questioning the effectiveness of SEO as a digital marketing tool, especially when SEO is costly and can take some time to ROI.

In this guide, I will provide practical steps that we use for clients here at Autify Digital to attract high-quality traffic that is more likely to convert and generate revenue for the business.

Below are the 8 advanced SEO tips.

1. Perform technical SEO audits
2. Clean your Google Index
3. Identify and fix cannibalisation
4. Optimise your website architecture and internal linking
5. Focus on targeting transactional intent queries
6. Target informational queries that have commercial value
7. Implement a multi-link building strategy
8. Monitor changes and iterate

1. Perform Technical SEO audits

Technical SEO becomes more important the bigger your site is as the large volume of pages can create many technical issues that waste crawl budget and affect the indexability and ranking of key pages on the site.

Firstly, start by checking the page indexing report of Google Search Console (GSC) to understand how Google is currently perceiving your site from a technical perspective. First check the indexed pages to ensure that there aren’t any low-quality pages present such as filter pages or duplicate pages as they can impact the quality score of your entire website – remove them if possible.

Additionally, if you see significantly more non-indexed pages compared to indexed pages as shown in the screenshot below, then you need to address it.

To understand why these pages aren’t indexed, you must scroll down further on GSC, and you will see the below image.

As you can see there are many reasons why these pages aren’t indexed. Understanding which ones are major issues and dealing with them is a complex process and depends on the URLs you find in each group – so take your time working on them.

If you need assistance with this, be sure to contact us on +44 0115 778 6950 or email us on info@autify.co.uk as we offer technical seo consultancy and services.

Once you have dealt with these problems, you can move on to performing a crawl of your site using third party tools like Screaming Frog and SEMrush. They will provide further insight into the technical health of your website by highlighting issues such as sitemap issues, internal links pointing to pages with a 301-http status code, and much more, which you can address to make your site more crawlable and indexable.

Beyond typical on-page errors, technical audits also involve examining server response times and mobile compatibility to support seamless user experiences, which are increasingly prioritised by Google’s algorithm updates.

Please don’t waste countless hours trying to fix every single issue you find as many of them take way too long for the ranking impact they will have – those hours could be better spent elsewhere.

Overall, a technically optimised site ensures search engines prioritise the crawling and indexing of your transactional pages in the SERPs for target queries and reduces bounce rate ensuring users stay on your site longer increasing the likeliness of converting.

2. Clean your Google Index

When looking at the search performance of large sites in GSC over the last 16 months, you tend to find hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages with zero clicks and low impressions, which are essentially “dead” pages.

The sheer volume of “dead” pages in the index can impede the rankings of high-quality transactional intent pages as Google must crawl through hundreds of underperforming pages to get to only a handful of quality pages – the cost of retrieval is too high.

Below I have provided some reasons why the pages may be under-performing in Google to help you out.

• Page is not targeting queries with search volume
• Page is not targeting queries with a unique SERP
• Page doesn’t align with competitors in SERP for target queries
• Page is low quality
• Page has thin content
• Page has recently been published so needs more time
• Page lacks internal links pointing to it
• Page lacks external links pointing to it
• Page is targeting the wrong query
• Page is competing with another page for a query (cannibalisation)

This process is quite resource intensive and requires a good understanding of SEO, especially if you have a large website. However, this in-depth understanding of your site and cleaning your index will help the rankings of your transactional pages in the SERPs for their target queries attracting more traffic that is more likely to convert.

3. Identify and Fix Cannibalisation

Cannibalisation is when multiple pages compete to rank for the same query (or similar queries), which affects the pages’ rankings in the SERP as search engines cannot determine which page is the most relevant result for the associated query (or queries).

Cannibalisation can generate drops in visibility, traffic, and conversions for primary pages being cannibalised for their main transactional intent search queries.

This makes it important to identify and fix, especially for large ecommerce sites where cannibalisation between product collection and product pages targeting similar queries is prominent.

To identify cannibalisation, use third party tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs then go to GSC to confirm. There is active cannibalisation if the criteria below are met.

• The primary and secondary page(s) for the query aren’t on the first page of the SERP
• The primary and secondary page(s) for the query are stealing clicks or impressions from each other
• The primary and secondary page(s) for the query exhibit some broken average position lines at similar times

There are a few ways to address active cannibalisation such as content removal, content revamps (usually deoptimisation), canonical tags, noindex follow tags, updating internal links, and building external links with specific anchor text.

Example of Cannibalisation

For ecommerce sites, one example of active cannibalisation I have seen is when you have two pages (landing page and product collection) targeting the same query “engagement rings”, which is a very high transactional-intent query that both pages wouldn’t rank for due to cannibalization.

In this case, the page that ranks higher and has more organic traffic (check GSC) but also Google is rewarding competitors with that type of page in the SERP is the page that you would keep while the other is the one you would add a noindex follow tag to it.

Don’t use a canonical tag to fix this type of cannibalisation as the two pages aren’t duplicates (one is a list of products while the other is made of mainly content). Also, ensure you replace all internal links pointing to the page you added a noindex follow tag with the one that is still indexable.

This way, the page with the noindex follow tag can still pass on link equity from backlinks to the pages that are internally linked from it but, more importantly, this stops cannibalisation with the other page allowing that page to flourish in the SERPs for the query “engagement rings” and thus attract quality traffic that is more likely to convert.

4. Optimise your Website Architecture and Internal Linking

Internal linking between pages is the best way to establish your website architecture to search engines and users because it allows them to navigate the site and understand the relationship between pages.

Below are some ways to optimise internal linking between ecommerce pages.

• From main product collections to subsequent, related product collections
• From product collections back up to main product collections
• From product collections to subsequent products
• From products back up to product collections
• From blog posts to product collections and products

By following this internal linking pattern, you create a solid topical cluster that effectively distributes PageRank between core transactional intent pages thus helping them rank higher to gain more high-quality traffic that is more likely to convert.

Your website structure and internal links can be visualised using Screaming Frog’s 3D Force-Directed Crawl Diagrams allowing you to find areas of improvement.

Website structure is also established through the internal links from the homepage. Therefore, it’s important to review your menu navigation, content blocks, and optimise them as there may be key pages missing from it (usually orphaned) or it needs to be simplified and less busy.

Competitor analysis is very important here to find additional ways to improve the homepage links as I tend to find many opportunities to create new core pages to target new queries of transactional intent increasing the number of likely conversions once again.

Below is an example of an ecommerce site in the jewellery industry that has good menu navigation as there is good use of keywords and more importantly, both users and search engines have quick access to the main product collection pages in an expected and logical way.

Check out a previous blog post I wrote on ecommerce site structure if you have an ecommerce site and want to find out more information on how to optimise it further for both users and search engines crawlers.

5. Focus on Targeting Transactional-Intent Queries

Blog posts targeting informational intent queries and users who are looking for information is a great way to build brand awareness and trust. With good internal links and call-to-actions (CTA) pointing users down the sales funnel, users may navigate further in your site and potentially convert.

However, it’s important to primarily focus on attracting users to your site that have transactional intent and ready to transact whether it be make a purchase or enquiry.

To do this, first identify the pages on your website that are integral to the business – for an ecommerce site, this is product and product collection pages whilst for a service business, this could be landing pages for the different services you offer.

From here, identify the main query/keyword with transactional intent associated with that page and then use the page to target it. If Google is returning similar type of pages to yours when you perform a Google search for the query, you can rank for it and gain traffic from users with transactional intent rather than informational intent.

Let’s put this into practice for an ecommerce site in the jewellery niche with a product collection page for men’s earrings. Search for the query “mens earrings” in Google and you will see that other product collection pages are ranking (shown in screenshot below) so you can target the query using your own “men’s earrings” product collection page and rank. This way all the traffic from Google you get to this page will be of purchase intent.

Optimise Transactional Pages

Aligning your transactional-intent pages with competitors in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and then finding ways to improve upon them is the best way to optimise your pages, ensuring they rank high and attract high quality traffic.

First start by searching for your transactional-intent query on Google and analyse the competitors’ design layout and content to gain some ideas on how to make your page better.

For an ecommerce product page, you may notice how competitors have the below.

• Descriptive product descriptions with relevant internal links
• Specification table
• Delivery and returns section
• How to care for the product section
• Carousel wheel to showcase similar products
• Review section

These findings can be used to inform your product page, making it more helpful for the end-user, thus helping the page rank high but most importantly helping the user convert and purchase an item.

Don’t be afraid to check your target query in different locations and regions for more useful insights and ideas.

Additionally, ensure your copy is original and unique by delving deep into some of the aspects that differentiate your business from competitors. This way you build trust between users yet again helping them to convert. Here is an example of a good product page as it has many of the features I highlighted above like a specification table, a carousel wheel with similar products, and a delivery/returns section, which are beneficial to the user.

6. Target Informational Queries that have Commercial Value

Only once you have optimised and created new content for your website’s core landing pages (i.e. the pages that drive your business), you can focus efforts on creating blog posts to target informational queries with commercial value as users are at the bottom of the sales cycle meaning they simply need a piece of information before making a purchase decision.

If you write an informative and helpful blog post providing relevant call to actions (CTAs), you can increase the chances of converting these users into paying customers.

For ecommerce sites, a blog post about “gold vs silver chain: which to choose” targets an informational query that has commercial value as users are ready to purchase either one depending on the information they find in your blog post.

If the blog post is helpful, then the user will know which one to purchase and if you add call to actions and internal links to relevant products and/or product collections then you increase the chances of the user purchasing from your site.

Additionally, websites that consistently produce high-quality, informative, and relevant content on a specific topic are more likely to be seen as having topical authority in the eyes of Google and helps show that your website is the go-to (i.e. the authority) for the desired topic, which can give your site preferential treatment in the SERPs – this applies to the transactional pages on the site too.

Once you have identified these queries, you should ensure that your blog posts rank high and obtain organic traffic for these queries. Below are some ways to do this.

• Analyse competitors in the SERP to get ideas on design layout and content
• Identify the main content (macro context) and supplementary content (micro content)
• Ensure you include the relevant entitles and entity types
• Ensure you include prominent, unique, rare, and root attributes
• Ensure a good contextual flow
• Ensure a balance between NLP-friendly (clear and direct) and user-friendly sentences
• Provide unique information – information gain

Many of these concepts are from Koray Tugberk and his semantic SEO teachings, which I advise you check out for more information.

Note: These are great ways to try and convert users from blog posts but as we mentioned previously, the best way to convert users is to focus on optimising transactional intent pages.

7. Implement a Multi-Level Link Building Strategy

Source: ElegantThemes

As part of a holistic SEO strategy, it’s important to build links to your website, especially if your authority is low in comparison to your competitors that rank higher than you in the SERPs.

Employing a multi-link building strategy that focuses on earning links to every part of your domain is key to seeing an increase in organic traffic and conversions for your core, transactional intent pages.

Below are the parts of the domain I recommend building external links to, some examples of how to build them, and the reason behind it.

• Build most of your external links to the homepage from high-quality websites with organic traffic – the homepage is at the top of the site architecture so link equity will flow to the rest of the pages (transactional pages too) if you’re internal linking correctly.
• Build external links to blog posts through digital PR campaigns – internal linking from the macro-content of the blog post to the page you want to rank higher (i.e., the transactional page) will distribute more link equity to it, helping it attract more organic traffic.
• Build external links directly to transactional pages through niche edits/link insertions – the link equity passed onto the page will help it rank and gain more organic traffic – just ensure that you align your anchor text ratios with competitors for the target search query to avoid under or over optimisation.

8. Monitor Changes and Iterate

Lastly, it’s important to monitor the performance of your core pages and their associated transactional intent queries following changes you have implemented on your site. This ensures that you clearly see whether your SEO efforts in terms of rankings and organic traffic are paying off or whether you need to adjust accordingly.

You can use GSC to monitor changes in the performance of your core pages and associated queries, however, there are limitations such as you cannot add annotations. SEO stack is the tool we use here at Autify Digital to monitor the performance of pages and their associated queries as it bypasses the many limitations of GSC.

You should also check the conversions and revenue following changes to your site to ensure that your traffic is converting and increasing revenue.

I hope you enjoyed reading this guide and found it very useful as I have provided you with 8 different ways to acquire high-quality traffic that is more likely to convert and generate more revenue for the business. Here at Autify Digital, we have worked with many different businesses and helped them with their organic traffic, conversions, and revenue through our SEO services so be sure to contact us on +44 0115 778 6950 or info@autify.co.uk to find out more about how we can help you.