7 easy SEO growth hacks to scale your business
Originally published on the Lightspeed HQ Blog.

Staying ahead of the competition can be difficult in today’s online world. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) continues to play a pivotal role in making sure that you’re visible to the public. Independent businesses have to double down on SEO if they want to grow their audience.
Growing any sort of business in a market full of high-quality content can seem daunting.
However, with the right strategies and some patience, it isn’t very hard to grow your business and start expanding into new territories. Here are some of the most popular, actionable SEO growth hacking techniques that can help you optimize your content to better suit your audience.
1. Take SEO literally
What is SEO? In its purest form, Search Engine Optimization represents techniques and methods to achieve better “optimization” of online content. If the content is well optimized, it will rank higher on search engines results. If not, the opposite happens.
One of the best ways to hack your growth is to literally do what SEO tells you to do. Let’s take a look at some of the actions you can take to optimize your content for better ranking:
- Choose keywords that are trending in your niche: Keywords play a major role in making sure you are seen by search engines. Pro tip: focus on keywords frequently used in your industry niche.
- Use keywords in your content, titles, subheadings, meta descriptions and URLs: Search engines like Google value content optimized in a CMS like WordPress. Titles and subheadings play a much bigger role than you might think.
- Any multimedia content present on your website should be hosted somewhere else: Link it back to your articles and pages on your website in order to relieve the strain from your server. The golden rule is: the faster your website is, the higher it will rank.
- Add links to your social media on your website for even more exposure: Icons that represent Facebook, Instagram and Twitter can easily boost your following and conversion rates. The same can be said about linking back to your website from each of those social media platforms, like in your bio for example.
- Focus your content on Calls to Action (CTA): Any interaction between yourself and your audience lends a small boost to your visibility. Active comment sections, discussions and community actions play a major role in making sure your SEO is up to SERP standards.
2. Organize your site’s structure
Every good website has a clear structure behind it. For example, take a look at your website and see if you can determine how many clicks it would take someone to find your blog posts. How about your e-commerce storefront or the customer support line?
Streamlining your website’s structure to be as simple and direct as possible is one of the key SEO growth hacking techniques. Bloated websites with countless pages that serve nothing but to be there won’t help you grow an audience. It’ll only slow your site down and negatively affect your ranking on search engines.
3. Rebrand (if you have to)
Your website’s domain, the name of your company, as well as your slogan and visual identity, play a huge role in how people perceive you. Rebranding your website, company or any recognizable part of your brand is both tricky and costly — only rebrand if you have a good reason to do so.
Not only does your SEO suffer if your brand is inconsistent, so does your business. Rebranding doesn’t mean throwing everything out the window and starting fresh — it simply means changing some things that don’t work as well as they should.
Your products, services, target market, and mission statements can still stay the same as they are. The root of the problem is commonly found in the branding itself.
The name you choose for your company, the “catchiness” of your slogan and the appeal of your visual identity is what’s important for attracting customers.
If all of your SEO optimization hacks don’t give you the results you want, consider rebranding and A/B testing to see which options give you the best results.
4. Opt for responsive web design
Most people access the internet from their smartphones and tablets.
What this means is that the majority of your traffic is coming from devices other than computer screens and desktops. Optimizing your website to be enjoyable and accessible from smartphone devices is extremely important for your SEO.
- Focus on creating short-form and to-the-point content that is legible and cohesive.
- Optimize your images so that they don’t take a lot of bandwidth to load.
- Focus on vertical scrolling design — not static pages.
- Use plenty of clearly marked buttons and navigation tools that are suited for touch screens.
- Emphasize the implementation of social media. People are most likely to share your content if you include easy-to-find social media sharing CTAs.
5. Follow your industry’s trends
Your content will always be the lifeline of your website. Businesses that rely on websites for exposure, sales and outreach should pay close attention to their industry’s trends. For example, web design agencies should keep an eye on programming developments, graphic design and UX innovations, VR and AR technologies, etc.
Search engines are wired to promote trending content and push it upward on SERP. The topics your industry deals with on a constant basis should be the main topics of your articles, discussions and content as a whole.
Jessica Fender, a Middle Digital Marketing Specialist at OnlineWritersRating notes: “If you listen to your competitors, investors, and customers, you will be able to grow organically and attract a new audience.”
6. Interlink your content
Internal traffic is a good way to boost your SEO easily. Start by creating a web of interlinked articles, blog posts, and pages around your website.
Add hyperlinks in your content that leads to other related content hosted on your site. The end result is a thread of content that nurtures that reader.
Use outbound links only when you don’t have the resources or information hosted on your site. Your priority should be to create interlinked content that keeps readers on your site. This is one of the fastest and easiest ways to stimulate SEO growth with your website without relying on technical optimization.
7. Reach out
The last piece of advice on SEO optimization tends to be the most overlooked one — talk to your stakeholders. Ask your readers what they think about your products, services, and content.
Enabling customers to provide this type of feedback matters more than just replying to them in your comments section. It makes customers feel like they’re a contributing member of your brand. People love spending time and money on brands that genuinely care to hear what they think and treat them with respect — don’t pass on the opportunity to do so.
About the Author
James Daily is a content marketing specialist and blogger at Flash Essay. He also writes reviews on different translation services for IsAccurate. When he is not involved in career-related tasks, he follows his other many interests, including astronomy, psychology, and cinema.
Originally published on the Lightspeed HQ Blog.
