So there’s one problem with all of the strategies above. They are not going to drive traffic to your site if no one can find them. And with the first gage of Google capturing 70% of search traffic clicks, you need an SEO strategy. Here are the SEO basics.
Target keywords
Keywords are the words and phrases people type into search engines, and as you can imagine, some keywords get searched more than others. Using keyword research tools, your can see, for example, that the keyword “how to increase website engagement” only gets about 10 searches per month while how to increase website traffic gets 500 searches.
Long tail keywords
So the higher the search volume, the higher the traffic potential, right? Not so fast. Many super-high volume keywords are also super-broad and super-hard to rank and will bring on the other hand, are easier to rank for and will bring in the most relevant traffic to your site.
Place your keywords strategically
This is the bread and butter of on-page SEO where you optimize your content so that search engines can understand what it’s about and rank it in relevant searches. Be sure to place your target keyword in the following locations.
- Title Tag
- H1 Heading
- At least two H2 headings
- Naturally in the body
- The first 100 words
- Image file names and alt text
- Mate description
Optimize your SERP appearance
Just include the keyword in your meta description and the meta title isn’t enough. You need to optimize these important pieces of information to improve their appeal on the SERP and encourage more organic clicks.
- Meta Title
Make this 60 characters or less value, with the keyword close to the beginning, and indicate some sort of value or benefit.
- Meta Description
Keep this between 155-165 characters, indicate the value the reader will get out of the post, and make it actionable.
Link Internally
When creating and publishing content, be sure to add at least 1-3 links to other pages on your site to that page. This will help drive traffic to those pages, but also, it keeps visitors on your site longer, gets them to view more pages on your site, and allows them to get more value out of your site all of which improve your ranking and drive more traffic to your website.
Improve your page seed
Ever found yourself waiting thirty seconds for a webpage to load, me neither. If your site takes forever to load, your bounce rate will be sky-high. Speed had always been a ranking factor, but even more so now with the page experience update. Make sure that your pages are as technically optimized as possible, including image file sizes, page structure, and the functionality of third-party plugins. The faster your site loads, the better.
Make your site responsive
Today, more traffic occurs on mobile than desktop, so if you are making visitors pinch and scroll their way around your site, you are basically telling them to go elsewhere. Even if you have a basic website, you still need to ensure that it is accessible and comfortably viewable across a range of devices, including smaller smartphones.
Implement Schema markup
Implementing Schema markup won’t necessarily increase traffic to your website on its own, but it will make it easier for search engine bots to find and index your pages. Another benefit of using schema for SEO is that it can result in better rich site snippets, which can improve click-through rates.
Regularly refresh your content
Even the most evergreen content loses its luster over time, and content freshness is a ranking factor. Even if your post is still ranking on the first page of google, you’d be surprised at what a content refresh can do. A new publish date on the SERP can significantly increase CTR and bump you up a few positions, which can lead to a surge in traffic.
But you can not just change a few words and then update the publish date on your post. Google knows better than that. Here are some strategies, taken from my post.
- Update and add new information and stats
- Replace outdated visuals and or create new ones to illustrate concepts
- Add new links to more recent resources
- Fix broken links and images
- Add new keywords from the query report in the search console
- Tweak your meta title and meta description
Get Backlinks
One of the most influential google ranking factors is the quantity and quality of links to your website. The more links you have from credible sites with high domain authority. The higher your DA, the higher your rank and the higher your traffic.
