You may think you know everything that needs to be known about SEO, but you’d be wrong. Good SEO strategy doesn’t begin and end with using the right keywords. There’s a lot more to the process if you start to scratch the surface.

If you’re willing to put in the time and effort, there’s a lot that you can do to improve your page’s rankings. Try out these seven tips and see how simple it actually is to get people viewing your website.

1. Be strategic about your keywords

While keywords aren’t everything when it comes to SEO, of course you need to think carefully about how you do use them in your SEO strategy. It isn’t as easy as spouting off some marketing buzz phrases and hoping the views will come rolling in.

To illustrate how this should work, let’s use an example. Think of a company that sells organic food, like Terra Organics (terra-organics.com). The keywords ‘organic food’ don’t tell you an awful lot. If someone were to search for the words ‘organic food’ online, where would your pages be in the results? They’d probably be buried under all the other thousands of results online.

Instead, you need to narrow it down. Instead of ‘organic food’, try ‘organic recipes’, ‘organic beef’, ‘organic food vendor Washington’, and so on. The trick is to think like someone tapping the phrase into the search engine. What are they really looking for? What can you deliver? Make your key words more targeted, and you’ll get viewers who want to be on your page and will hopefully be converted into customers.

As well as this, you need to think about using long tail keywords. These are keywords that feature more words and are more targeted. The trick is to keep creating good content on your site, and keep using those long tail keywords. You’ll capture more useful viewers that way, and your conversion rates will go up.

2. Improve your PageRank flow

Do you know what your PageRank is? It’s an algorithm used by search engines to determine how important and useful a website is. It does this by measuring how many links a page has from other sources, as a more often linked page will have more useful information on it than one that is seldom linked.

The next thing you need to know is how to optimise your PageRank flow. You’d be surprised to find out what pages are taking up views in your PageRank. Many find that relatively unimportant pages, such as their contacts pages, are taking up the majority of their views. If potential customers are being brought straight there, they aren’t really going to want to stick around. No one clicks a link and expects to do more work to find the information they need, do they?

To remedy this, use a PageRank tool to find out which of your pages are getting linked the most. You can then add ‘noindex’ code to these pages to stop them being linked to. This acts in a similar fashion to fixing a leaky faucet. You stop the links going to the pages you don’t want, and instead redirect them to the pages they should be going to.

While you’re doing this, be sure to ‘noindex’ any pages that have duplicate information, too. You do have to do this whole operation with care, as doing it incorrectly can dramatically drop your viewing rates. If you’re not too sure about how to it, it’s not hard to find an expert who can help.

3. Build an infographic for link building

Infographics have become and more popular online in recent years, and have been used for a huge variety of different things. They’ve been used recently as a way to improve the link building on web pages, bringing more people to your website.

An infographic has to be interesting, entertaining, and relevant to your target audience. An example of this can be found on the Boom Essays website, with their Pokémon Go Safety Guide. Their target audience is students looking for help with their college essays. That audience has a large cross over with Pokemon Go fans and gamers in general. By creating a Pokemon Go related infographic, they’re tapping into the worldwide phenomenon and using its momentum to drive potential customers to their site. The infographic was featured on Yahoo News, BGR.com, and some other huge online resources.

This examples shows that not any old infographic will do. By their very nature, infographics are informative and are useful to their readers. What should your target audience be interested in? For example, if you run a site selling beauty products, an infographic about skin care or how to achieve a certain look will be of interest to your customers. Write your tips, or have a professional writer do it for you. Then, hire a good artist to make those tips look visually appealing. Before long, you should find you’re getting more hits on your site. If you’re lucky, it’ll even get shared around on social media too. Incidentally, it’s a good idea to incorporate the web page address into the infographic itself, in case it gets shared around without the link attached.

4. Make sure your content is relevant and useful

It goes without saying that whatever you include on your website needs to be interesting, useful, and relevant to the reader. If they’ve clicked through to your site and it isn’t providing what they want, they’re going to click away just as fast. The trick to keeping them on your site is to give them what they need.

The best content is relevant to your audience’s needs. The formula is very similar to that of infographics discussed above. It needs to address an interest or need that your audience has. For example, people won’t linger on your women’s fashion page if you start talking about men’s fashion. It isn’t what they clicked through for, and they can’t buy it on your site anyway It just isn’t useful to them.

Another key component of good content is length. The longer your content, the more ‘dwell time’ you get from visitors. Of course, that doesn’t mean just pumping out reams and reams of prose. If you’re putting out thousands of words, most of them just aren’t going to be useful, and eventually the reader will get bored and click away. Recent studies have shown that roughly 2,500 words is the optimum length for any piece of content. It’s long enough to keep readers on your site for a decent amount of time, but not long enough to get boring or descend into blathering.

5. Mention your localization in your domain

No matter what your site is for, you’ll find that you’ll have visitors from all around the world. Check your visitor stats and you’ll be astounded at where they came from. Why did someone from Alaska check out your page for surfboards? You’ll never know.

However, you do need to target customers who are local to you and your business. Not all products and services are helpful to everyone in the world, so you need to help narrow down the search for them. This is where you can use the tactic of adding your locality into your domain name.

This is something that Aussie House Sitters (aussiehousesitters.com.au), UK Writings (ukwritings.com) and AU Style (austyle.com.au) do well. Their domain names tell you straight away where they’re located. This is especially important in their field of work. As people look down the results they’ll see where these companies are located instantly, before they even click on the link. If they’re based in the Australia, they’re more likely to click and choose them, as they feel they haven’t wasted their time looking for a suitable writer. If they’re not, they’ll pass the link over, while still feeling good about the brand as they announced who they were straight away.

This small change can help you garner a lot of good will from potential customers, and even those who won’t eventually choose you. You’re making their lives easier when they’re searching by being upfront about where you’re based. This way, you get a lot more useful clicks, rather than wasted ones.

6. Resist the urge to buy links

Your rankings online depend on the quantity and quality of your inbound links. The more you have, the further you’ll move up the search results list. It’s no surprise, then, that a huge industry of selling links has sprung up. However tempting it is, though, resist the urge to buy your links in. It’s just never worth it.

The problem with bought links is that search engines are getting good at spotting suspicious and untrustworthy links. Besides, they’re actually against the Google Webmaster’s Guidelines. Get caught using them, and you can see your rankings drop quite dramatically.

It’s just not worth spending the money on them. Instead, spend the money on creating top quality content. If you’re following the advice in this piece, you’ll be able to earn those links with the quality of the content you’re putting out. Besides, people are more likely to click a link because a trusted friend or source posted it. Most people online can spot a suspicious link straight away.

7. Create pages for marketed keywords

One great way of bringing in viewers is to create pages especially for them. That way, you’re bringing them straight to a page full of the information they were looking for.

A good example to look at this are these pages: ‘buy cheese NYC’ (beechershandmadecheese.com/Locations/NewYork.aspx), ‘nursing essay’ (essayroo.com/nursing-essay) and ‘tutoring Washington dc’ (frogtutoring.com/tutors/Washington_DC_VA_Tutors/page:1). They’ve decided to bring in the viewers by narrowing down what they’re looking for. These pages are marketed solely at what people are looking for.

This method basically gives your potential customer exactly what they want. When they’ve searched for the particular phrase, such as ‘buy bed Chicago’, they’ll come across that page in the results and be more likely to click it. The page domain name tells them that this page holds all the information they’re looking for, so they’re going to click it as it feels more relevant. Collecting the information together for them reduces the work they have to do, too, so they’re much more likely to buy from you.

Now you’ve read these tips, you can start thinking about how you can improve your own SEO. Most of the changes are very minor, but you’ll see results improve in no time.