Do you know what role SEO plays in improving the traffic to your website? Have you ever wanted to learn how to authentically and naturally improve your SEO techniques?
An understanding of the fundamentals combined with expert help can make a huge impact on the success of your business. We think the best way to look at SEO marketing techniques is to determine what you want to achieve.
As with any approach, especially ones that cost time and money, it needs to have a specific objective and be measurable. In this article, we focus on how to use SEO to increase your website traffic organically. That includes exploring how it will benefit your company, how to go about it, and some resources to measure your progress.
Why Is SEO Important for Traffic?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a combination of understanding how search engines work, catering to that on your website, but also never losing sight of your customers. After all, the website serves them.
The optimization element means fulfilling particular criteria to bring your website higher in the SERPs or search engine results pages. Effective SEO puts your website in front of the people that need it. The higher you are in the Google search engine results, the more likely it is that people will visit.
Achieving a position on the first page, and ideally within the top four or five listings will improve the traffic to your site. Research estimates that 75% of internet users only look at the first results page. It means, if you want increased organic traffic, you need to be in the right place to get the attention of those users.
The people viewing your site listing in search results will be looking for an answer to their problems. They are not quite qualified leads, but they are potential customers. With an increase in the number of quality visitors, you can then expect an increase in sales.
As you can see, mastering the art of SEO has plenty of benefits, and it is worth the effort to learn how to make use of it.
Master Your Keyword Research
One element of SEO is using the right terms on your site to match the search results of your potential customers. Here, the most important factor is to understand how your audience goes looking for your product or service and what language they use.
You can research these terms, known as keywords, in several ways. They need to be relevant, as you want visitors that want your product. You can base the approach on incoming aimed traffic, which means looking at the ways customers already find the site. Plus, looking at how competitors approach it can set you on the right path.
A crucial factor when using SEO keywords is determining user intent. The words need context so that you can be more specific. It allows you to place your site in front of your target audience. If you only used the word bouquet, you would soon realize there is a big difference in the customers who look for prices of wedding bouquets or search for inspiration for a bridal bouquet.
Finding the terms and language that your target audience uses through keyword research is a vital step in improving your SEO score. The more your site aligns with their intentions and covers user searches, the higher chance the user eventually converts on your website. Even if potential customers had a primary informational intent, they may return to your site after reading a useful article rather than to anyone else.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is a task that helps you to answer three critical questions in relation to your product or service:
- What do people search for?
- How many are searching for it?
- What format do they expect or prefer?
With that information, you can tailor your site to suit your customers.
Keyword research usually starts with a few ideas of what relevant terms might be. However, the next step is to widen your list via automated tools with a wide database. Those are Google’s Search Console and the Keyword Suggestion Tool by SE Ranking. For example, SE Ranking uses a base of three billion keywords to analyze selected keywords via difficulty score, search volume, and CPC so that you know how much to invest in a particular search query and decide if competition allows you to enter the niche. Keyword suggestion tools can help you determine how much success you will see from using a particular term. You can estimate monthly organic searches and see competitors’ paid campaigns history, which tells you how likely it is to achieve a top organic and paid ranking in Google’s search results when you target a selected keyword.
Those tools allow you to expand on your initial thoughts and get closer to the way people are using terms associated with your business. They make use of internal databases as well as search engines suggestions when recommending similar, related, and low-search volume keywords.
Fitting Local Intent
The second all-important aspect of SEO keyword research is making sure it also fits your local intent. So, what exactly is local intent?
Local intent is when you target visitors in your immediate local area. Let’s use a pizza store as an example. You want more people to visit your pizza store’s new website, and make use of its new online ordering features.
If your wedding boutique is based in Ireland, then you need to target visitors from this concrete location. There is no need to target visitors on the other side of the country. Although, if you do deliver or want to widen your business coverage, you can check on available options of promotion. A great tool that helps with determining local intent and making the primary research is Google Trends. It has a series of filters, including one based on location, which helps you take a closer look at search trends. You can also adjust the period and review related topics. For example, here are four top locations, Wales, Scotland, England, and Northern Ireland, to start promoting your business.
Time to Create Your Content
Now that you have done your keyword research and know which keywords you would like to start including on your website, it is time to create relevant content. Content creation is a fun process, and it could be one of the activities that truly sets your website apart from millions of others.
If you approach a blog, article, or social media post as merely an opportunity to add some keywords, you could be disappointed with your traffic growth. Relevant content provides useful information to the reader, which increases your authority and builds trust with your audience.
To provide useful information, you need to know what people are looking for. Think of their problems and desires and create something that solves and achieves. All types of content helps, as your keywords should be featured in meta titles, descriptions, and tags. Videos, images, blogs, e-books, and how-to guides play a significant role in growing your traffic organically.
Tools for Creating Quality Content
The ‘People also ask’ section is a great starting point to learn more about your target audience and selecting the right content topics to cover in the first place.
Creating high-quality content is the next step that is extremely challenging. If you do not have enough time to proofread articles, consider hiring expert content writers that will get you better results from the beginning. They combine an understanding of your product with knowledge of how to address a particular audience. Consider subscribing to content tools that can guide and improve your efforts. Grammarly, CopyScape, and the Hemingway App provide feedback on spelling, grammar, tone, and repetition of other websites.
Build Those Backlinks
So, you have done your keyword research. You even crafted the best content based on that keyword research. What comes next?
It is time to build those quality backlinks. Yes, there is an emphasis on quality here.
What is a Backlink, and Why is it Important?
A quality backlink is essential to achieving a high SEO score. When another website links to your content, search engines such as Google get notified. The search engines will rank your website higher because other websites found your content valuable and important enough to link to.
It is a simple way to increase your SEO and we have seen that an increase in SEO will lead to more organic traffic.
Avoid Bad Backlinks with These Tools
Bad or toxic backlinks are those pesky links coming from bad-quality websites. They are quite harmful to your SEO score and can lower it significantly.
If you are worried about having bad backlinks, use the Majestic Backlink Checker Tool to find out if you have any toxic links to be removed. You can start with filtering links rated zero for the Trust Flow and start the disavow procedure.
Make the User Experience Pleasant
Far too many websites provide users with an unpleasant experience. Poorly designed graphics and a horrible layout with no organized structure end up chasing visitors away.
That is why it is crucial to keep an eye on your user experience. Do you know where on your website most of your visitors are spending their time? Are there certain pages that perform better than others?
Understand Your Users
Use tools such as Google Analytics or Clarity to get better insight into your users’ behavior. Being able to see where users spend their time, will help you assess what it is that they like, need, and want. It leaves you equipped to adjust your content and structure to suit them.
Factors to consider are dwell time, usability, and traffic retention. Dwell time lets you know how long users spend. Information pages or ones where browsing is desirable, should have longer dwell times. If not, you need to make changes and evaluate the results.
Usability will tell you whether your website visitor took the actions expected on that page. Did they discover how to expand and see the reviews, could they zoom in on the images? Ultimately, you want to know if a page functioned the way a user expected and served its purpose. Finally, traffic retention tells you if users come back again, which is the ultimate test of whether you met their expectations.
Improve Your On-page Optimization
Part of providing users with a pleasant experience and maintaining steady traffic flow without considerable drops is offering them a site with fantastic on-page optimization. On-page optimization includes the following components:
- Index status
- URL optimization
- Title tags and meta descriptions
- Structured content
- Keyword density
- Image optimization
- Page load speed
- Usability and technical analysis
When you bring all of these aspects together, you can expect a better ranking, which leads to increased click-through rates from the SERPs. The increased rates give you the momentum to keep or improve your position and attract more traffic.
The bots from Google crawl through your site looking to understand what it is about so that it can determine whether you should be included in a search and how relevant your site is. The keywords in the URL, headers, tags and content all inform the bots, who can see the topic and whether the site is well-structured.
To identify areas for improvements you can perform an on-page SEO check online via SE Ranking. You will get an analysis of how well your page answers queries and whether it complies with ranking factors. Plus, you’ll get suggestions for technical error fixes. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a tool focused on page speed, giving you suggestions to improve performance.
Do Not Forget Site Architecture Optimization
Having proper site architecture can also help search engines to discover and crawl all of your website’s pages. Site architecture optimization is simply ensuring that webpages are linked efficiently. You don’t want your visitors to get lost in a maze of irrelevant content. That will only make them leave your website.
Site architecture optimization or technical SEO, which includes:
- Optimizing for a fast-loading site by addressing structure, broken links, and indexing.
- Designing sites that function and look good on any device.
In most cases, proper planning from the start will help ensure a nice-flowing, easy-to-navigate website. Use categories, breadcrumb menus, and SEO-friendly permalinks to make the navigation experience better.
As with other aspects of optimization, you can measure the performance of your site. Tools like Screaming Frog and Siteliner will make the task simpler. Screaming Frog is a lightweight website crawler. It can automatically check every page for redirects or duplicates.
You can use Siteliner to see how your website is structured. It provides you with a free and fast analysis of your entire website. It also sniffs out duplicate content, any broken links, and more. You will no doubt find the XML sitemap creation feature handy.
Are You Ready to Improve Your Traffic with SEO?
The results you get from paying attention to SEO will convince you that it is worth the time. Plus, with the right tools and help, you can rise to the challenge. Take it step-by-step with the following SEO techniques:
- Do your keyword research.
- Create your content.
- Build quality backlinks.
- Understand your users.
- Keep your website optimized.
If you do that, your website will be a success. All of these tips and tricks can be used to increase the overall performance of your website traffic. Yes, SEO marketing can be that simple.