Boosting organic SEO traffic involves more than just creating content embedded with links at the time of publication. SEO strategies can also be applied to older content to optimise and enhance its performance over time. 

Another method to improve published content, targeted at gaining organic traffic, is through experimentation. Nick Swan, founder of seotesting.com, has analysed five key experiments and their impacts, allowing you to assess their suitability for your needs:

Experiment 1: Adding expert commentary

Adding expert commentary can be a great way to increase your article’s authority, leading to vast improvements when Google (and other search engine bots) views it from an E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) perspective.

You might have some articles on your website that lack insights from industry experts. Adding expert commentary to these can significantly enhance your content’s authority, making it more valuable and this approach aligns with Google’s E-E-A-T criteria, helping improve your search engine rankings.

This doesn’t even take into account the non-SEO benefits of adding expert commentary. Featuring an expert in your article automatically increases the chances they’ll share it with their social media followers and therefore driving additional traffic from these platforms.  

Experts might also link to your article on their own websites, providing valuable backlinks that boost your off-page SEO. Moreover, featuring multiple experts enhances the likelihood of organically gaining backlinks, which aligns perfectly with Google’s guidelines for acceptable link-building.  

Experiment 2: Re-writing/improving meta titles and descriptions

Revising and enhancing your meta titles and descriptions is a simple, yet effect content experiment and this approach can notably boost your article’s performance in terms of traffic by increasing the click through rate (CTR). Conducting a proper SEO test allows you precisely measure the impact of these changes on your click through rate within the search engine results page.

Improving the meta titles and descriptions can positively influence your click through rate, existing keyword rankings and the ranking of new keywords. These improvements can lead to a substantial increase in the traffic your articles receive.  

Experiment 3: Re-formatting your content

Reformatting your content is another strategy you can use to boost website traffic, whether from organic search or other sources. Each piece of content you publish will have a ‘target keyword.’ Search this keyword and examine the content ranking ahead of yours. Are these 

pieces formatted differently? Re-formatting your content to align with the format of these top-ranking articles can help better match search intent and increase organic traffic.

For example, if you notice the top-ranking content is formatted as a listicle while your content is a long form blog post with multiple points and a significantly higher word count, consider reformatting it as a listicle as this adjustment could significantly improve your content’s traffic.

 

You can also try the reverse; if you have a listicle-based article that’s ranking well but not reaching the top of the SERPs against other listicles, consider reformatting it into a different style. Offering an alternative format may provide readers with a fresh perspective on the subject and help you climb higher in the rankings.

Experiment 4: Incorporating video embeds

Trying out the inclusion of videos from platforms like YouTube and Vimeo within your content can be an insightful experiment to gauge its impact on your traffic.

While adding video embeds typically doesn’t directly affect your content’s SEO performance, you may notice positive shifts in metrics such as engagement, time spent on page and click through rates to other sections of your website. Considering that Google incorporates click data to some extent in its algorithms, this could potentially bolster your organic traffic.

Experiment 5: Enhancing content URLs

Refining the URLs of your articles is another strategy to boost organic traffic as by optimising the URL, incorporating relevant keywords, removing extraneous parameters, and shortening the link, you may observe an uptick in traffic alongside this adjustment. Performing a content experiment followed by a URL modification test can help validate this.

Beyond its impact on organic traffic, shorter URLs that express the article’s topic tend to be more shareable on social media platforms, potentially further amplifying your traffic from these channels.

It’s crucial to note that whenever you alter a content URL, implementing a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one is essential.