As a business owner, the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of SEO is “more customers and more revenue!”
However, with no background or technical knowledge, it can be overwhelming to execute this vision. At the same time, the internet is brimming with tips, tricks, and hacks that promise stellar results but fail to deliver for several reasons. SEO can be a hit or miss, and if you were to go by the trial and error route, you would be stuck in a loop forever!
Fortunately for you, we have shortlisted some of the fail-proof, tried and tested strategies to boost your website traffic!
Conduct an SEO Audit on Your Website
Before strategizing or implementing any plan, it is always best to take stock of your existing resources. Hence, conduct an SEO audit on your website to identify the critical failure that may be coming in the way of your traffic.
Follow a systematic approach by outlining the desired results, recording the action taken so far, the proposed plan of action, and any future changes that will be required. It would help to have an SEO Audit checklist at hand.
Here is a standard checklist:
- Is the website mobile-friendly?
- How does it perform in terms of speed and responsiveness?
- What is the organic traffic on your website?
- Are there any “zombie pages” remaining on your site?
- Do all pages have meta titles and descriptions?
- Have you optimized the keywords?
- Have you created backlinks?
If it may seem like a lot, you can always make use of a Website Audit Tool that can report on all these considerations. Alternatively, you can benefit from the services of a reliable and professional SEO services company that will carry out an end-to-end audit along with listing out the actionable solutions.
Identify Topics With Search Traffic Potential
SEO is one of the most reliable ways to attract organic, long-term audiences to your website. However, for SEO to be effective in the first place, you need to give your audience what they want. Essentially, it means that you must identify the topics that your intended audience is looking for!
Enter topics with search traffic potential.
These topics form the basis of your content marketing strategy, which will help realize your goal of increasing website traffic. There are two ways to approach how you can locate these topics:
- Through high-volume, low-competition keywords, or
- Through trend analysis
Keywords lay the foundation for successful SEO. Hence, if you go for option #1, you would need a reliable keyword generator that can help you weed in keywords depending on the search volume and keyword difficulty. These filters will identify the high-volume, low-competition topics that you can map against the business value to generate content that will attract passive organic traffic in the long run.
On the other hand, you could capitalize on low-hanging content triggers by observing the search trends for your concerned business area. Analyze these topics further to find out relevant pages with high organic traffic and low backlinks to create content that will rank. This growth hack can fetch you backlinks, referral traffic, and short-term traffic that can complement the above strategy.
Finally, gather feedback from your readers and ideal customers to see the effectiveness of the strategy.
Post on Several Channels and Platforms
You simply cannot write excellent content on your main website and wait for readers to stumble upon it by chance! You need to adopt a proactive stance while spreading the word on all your posts, products, and services.
Collaborate with other brands, co-create content, or feature as guests in podcasts – whichever mode that you choose, the point is to get seen!
Sharing and promoting content over social media is one of the best ways to grant visibility to your website. Depending on your target customers and their preferences, you can pick anything from Reddit and Quora to Facebook and Instagram to engage with the right audience. However, invest time into becoming an active member of these online communities rather than spamming them. It also opens up opportunities to emerge as a domain expert.
Another excellent strategy for creating brand awareness and gaining recognition as a subject-matter expert is to post guest blogs in high authority, high traffic websites. You may even score a highly valuable backlink through guest blogging!
Optimize Your Website to be Mobile-Friendly
One of the first considerations in the SEO audit checklist states, “Is the website mobile-friendly?”
Clearly, multi-device compatibility has emerged as one of the key determining factors for SEO, which needs special mention. Considering that mobile devices are the leading source of search traffic, websites have to be mobile-friendly. In fact, Google is pushing websites to adopt a mobile-first approach for developing responsive web designs (RWD). In case you have missed out, it is time to redesign your website and streamline it for optimum performance.
In just a couple of tweaks, your website design can become usable over mobile!
Refurbish Dated Content with Organic Traffic Potential
It may not always be possible for you to publish fresh, high-quality content periodically. However, it is also crucial for you to maintain the minimum level of activity to keep the visitors engaged.
In this regard, it would be a wise move to update your existing content that has been ranking consistently. You can upgrade, update, and republish the evergreen content as it possesses vast potential in granting you visibility. In doing so, you share the latest information, while also ensuring that your content continues to rank for the said keyword. Based on this activity, Google may even reward you by ranking your website above your competitors’!
Additionally, you can give your existing content a makeover by publishing it in a different format. Given the popularity of visual content, you can revamp the content in the form of videos or infographics to increase traffic.
Final Thoughts
The five SEO tricks, as shared above, will boost the organic traffic to your website. However, do bear in mind that SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it activity. You need to be highly active and personally invested in measuring and adapting to any changes in the strategies. Given that it is a long-term commitment, it would be best to hand over this task to SEO professionals, who can always keep you a step ahead!
About the Author
Sheryl is the Sr. Marketing Specialist at Uplers who has a great experience in designing well-defined user journeys across the digital marketing domain. She leverages her digital marketing expertise to help businesses draw significant ROIs.