According to the Search Engine Journal, 70% of all website traffic comes from organic clicks. But not every website has cracked the code on getting visitors to your site through unpaid means. If you’re looking to increase organic traffic, and you’ve set up a marketing pipeline but still need a little help to get more leads, you’re in the right place.
We’ve broken down the best SEO strategies that’ll help you retain and boost your organic traffic – from basic to advanced techniques.
1. Create Informative Content
Any search engine’s objective is to get its users the best possible results for any given query. Should Google – or any other search engine – fail on this front, users will likely find alternative ways to find information.
Google is great at picking out relevant content. That’s how you found this article. So as you work on an SEO strategy, make your primary goal to create informative content. What do I mean by that?
Every article on your website should focus on an aspect of your business or a pain point potential customers are facing. Provide actionable tips on how to solve problems and at the same time show-off your expertise. Once you do that, site visitors will spend more time reading your material. Which means your bounce rate decreases and Google starts noticing your pages.
Google reasons that if a user takes more time on a website, it is because they found the site useful and relevant to their query. Since the search engine only wants to give its users the best results possible, it keeps on ranking sites with low bounce rates higher.
It goes without saying (but I must) use some visual graphics, pictures, or GIFs to break monotony.
Image source GIPHY
2. Fix Non-Performing Content
Your website won’t drive traffic and conversions without performing content.
Do a full review of every article on your website. Which posts drive the most traffic? Identify your target keywords in that article and do a Google Trends search to see if the spike in traffic is seasonal. If not, you’ve just found something that’s working. Now go ahead and fix the other content on your website.
Once you identify content that’s not working so well, you can then take up any of these approaches:
- Refresh:Conduct some SEO enhancements like optimizing the meta tag, headers, and image alt texts.
- Redirect traffic from low-conversion pages to relevant pages that have higher conversion capabilities.
- Use canonical redirects/ canonical tags to tell Google which version to prioritize.
- Do an audit every few months to make organic traffic optimal and keep your website from being weighed down by “dead” content.
By getting rid of non-performing content, you will give Google enough budget to crawl through your important pages. Positioning your site better on search results. Which makes you win more organic clicks in the long-term.
3. Be On The Lookout For New Keyword Opportunities
Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay
Even a strong keyword strategy can have gaps in it. User search intent changes all the time. And your content should change with it. Your keywords have to be of a reasonable search volume, relevant, and with a substantial conversion value.
To find new keyword opportunities, follow the following steps:
- Do a keyword research
- Look for keywords that are in line with your target audience’s search intent
- Analyze the level of competition
- Plan the purchase journey of your buyers
- Design the correct content format for your keyword
- Map every keyword to a specific page on your site.
4. Optimize For A Higher CTR
Click through rate (CTR) optimization has double benefits. First, it’ll drive traffic to your site, and second, it’ll send a positive signal to search engines. Google ranks web pages with a high CTR on it’s first pages in search results.
You can improve your website’s click-through rate in a few steps:
- Identify the content on your site that has a low CTR from the results pages. You can use the Google Search Console to download an Excel report. Organize it by CTR, and note pages that need some work in relation to this.
- Make the meta titles for the identified pages more SEO-friendly. This may include adding target keywords and making the title more engaging.
- Optimize the meta descriptions with a clear call to action and the keywords that you’d love the pages to rank for.
- Improve the URL structure to make it more descriptive
- Make use of rich snippets and structured data.
- Where applicable, localize your content description.
5. Improve Your Site’s Architecture
Image by William Iven from Pixabay
A website’s architecture determines how much crawlers will access the site and engage with it. For crawlers to know which posts or pages are important to your site, there shouldn’t be any confusion. Which means no duplicate content, only one version of your site, and relevant informative posts on your website.
If Google bots don’t index your pages correctly. Your web pages won’t show for the intended keywords. That means users who click on your site in search results won’t find what they’re looking for. And what comes next? You guessed it, a higher bounce rate.
Sending negative ranking signals to Google and making your website drop from it’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
To build a good site architecture that positions your site higher in SERPs, you’ll need sitelinks. These will push your competitor listings and add valuable real estate on the results page.
Follow the following principles to improve your site’s architecture:
- Organize your site into relevant categories and subcategories
- Implement a shallow navigation schedule to increase discoverability. Keep all pages close to the domain page.
- Put emphasis on internal linking structures. This will help crawlers hop from your site’s pages easily.
- Add a sitemap: a sitemap directs crawlers to the most important pages of your site. You can easily add a sitemap to your Google Search Console’s account.
SEO keeps evolving. As much as there are specific set metrics to help generate organic traffic, there’s a need for businesses to adapt fast and keep learning.
We hope that the above tips will boost your 2020/2021 ranking efforts, increase organic traffic, and bring you more conversions.
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