Increase Website Traffic: Unleashing SEO as Your Competitive Edge

How can you increase your website traffic if you don't approach it from an SEO perspective? Search engine marketing is the lifeblood of any website as it affects website traffic. This blog is about SEO best practices that can generate more site traffic. It's specifically aimed at showing you actionable ways to improve your web traffic.

The truth is that building a business website is not enough. The kicker is how to increase website traffic. There are various SEO tools and techniques that help to get you significant traffic on your website. SEO is essential as you race to get your website ranked at the top of search engines.

People today are sick of being "sold to." Those who take your money and don't give you much value in return. Unfortunately, SEO isn't an easy topic to master. If you're interested in getting a head-start on maximizing your website traffic, I suggest you stick around!

Before we go over how to use SEO to increase traffic, let's define what SEO is.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the art and science of improving the volume or quality of traffic to your websites or landing pages by using specific "tools" provided by the search engines.

Perform On-Page SEO

Search engine optimization involves a lot of moving parts. Only a few aspects of SEO are more important than on-page SEO. On-page optimization involves optimizing your web content to get it to the top of search engine result pages (SERPs). SERPs include optimizing your website for mobile devices. You want people to find your website easily, navigate your website quickly, and also stay on your website longer.

It's not enough to get people to click on your link. How long they stay on your website directly affects your bounce rate. Like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, your analytics tool can help you determine your current bounce rate. For example, if people visit your website but leave soon after, you'll have a high bounce rate. The bounce rate tells Google that your content may be irrelevant to the audience's pain points. When Google receives this information, your website won't be a suggestion for your search term anymore. To avoid this, you must ensure you have relevant website content based on thorough keyword research. You can use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner to help you whether you're running a blog or an online store.

Before looking for an SEO company, consider if you are already doing on-page SEO. The first step to effective on-page SEO is to perform keyword research for each link you put online. Keyword use ensures that you're using relevant keywords and producing high-quality content. The good news is you can look for tips on improving your on-page SEO from other web admins on forums like SEO-talk or forums devoted to keyword research.

The goal is for your website to appear on the first page of SERPs; the first listing results in keywords associated with your target audience. Here are a few quick ways to get more traffic from search engines. First, optimize your on-page SEO for the right keywords. It's also a good idea to create original content. A great place to start is to look at your current content and see what kind of new information you can get. Search engines love original content. Plus, it's an easy way to be seen as an authority on a topic.

Improving Your Organic Click-through Rate

Your organic click-through rate (CTR) tells you how many people visit your website through search engines. Whenever unique visitors click on one of your web pages, your SEO efforts are directly influenced by how well your website ranks for related terms in SERPs. Good rankings will put you on the fast track to more customers and leads. This ranking will kickstart or increase your return on investment (ROI).

If you ask any random person how they find answers to their most profound question right now, they'll probably tell you they Google it. That answer pretty much says what an organic search is. Undoubtedly, organic traffic is the most direct way to increase your website's exposure on search engine results pages.

How can you improve your organic search traffic? The main aim is to use SEO tactics to boost conversions and revenue. You can start with meta descriptions that encourage people to read additional content. That's as simple as making your website more visible to users. You can use SEO tools like SERP Spy or ClickFunnel to identify relevant popular keywords to what your content is talking about. Then, you can drag and drop these keywords into your website's title tags or descriptions to improve your visibility in the search results.

Plus, you can create a site-wide content calendar and run ads on different social media platforms. Running social media ads is a great way to boost your brand awareness and get the right people to your website.

Optimizing For Rich Snippets

Everyone wants to rank high for search keywords. Rich snippets, or HTML 5 elements, give you extra benefits when you Google search for a URL. Rich snippets make your web pages more visible so potential customers can easily find you.

Dave Naylor, the founder and director of Bronco Digital Agency, once said, "My rule of thumb is to build a site for a user, not a spider." You should optimize for the search engine when it comes to rich snippets. Be sure to start with optimizing your page and content for human readability. Your content marketing strategy should be user-first. Look at it this way. If a visitor can't instantly determine what your site is about, there's a chance that the user won't even bother to click on your link to view your content. Your number one priority should be to create the best user experience possible. Make it easy for people to tell what your site is about.

Now that we understand how rich snippets work for people, let's look at how they work with search engines on the back end.

Simply put, rich snippets are unique extensions of a website's HTML. They allow the search engine to recognize previously hidden content and surface it more easily. With rich snippets, search engines can see these chunks of text and decide how to label them. So you can imagine other websites not optimized this way won't benefit from being featured here.

Social Media Advertising

Social media marketing should be a big part of your content marketing strategy. Facebook alone gets nearly 2 billion visitors per day. That's just an idea of the magnitude of traffic you could miss out on if you're not marketing on social media.

Social media advertising calls on your followers to share content or provide feedback on other sites. The goal is to increase website traffic and page views through social media sites. Overall, website traffic will hopefully build your email list. While you can always post on your social media pages or hire someone, social media marketing is not the same as many years ago.

With the rise of influencer marketing, you broaden your target audience by putting your business in front of your followers and other people's followers. Think about the traffic increase that you could see from this! Plus, you will be looking at more social shares.

Social media marketing through influencer marketing exposes your business to new users. The bonus here is you don't have to worry about how to build trust first. Influencers generally have very dedicated online communities that trust them. Many consumers look to influencers to help them make purchasing decisions. Utilizing influencers is an excellent way to boost your referral traffic. So, on your end, it all boils down to building relationships based on the simple principle of fair value exchange.

Social media advertising can effectively grow a business, primarily combined with an SEO strategy. Recent research shows social media affects 15% of brands' search traffic. That alone can make a big difference in whether your site stands out from the competition.

Repurpose Your Content

As search engines publish more and more content, SEO marketers must ensure their site is well-positioned for those updates. You'd be surprised at how you can use even your old content. Repurposing your content gives you a great start. Think about how you can incorporate new information into your existing site without completely redoing the effort. Bear in mind that you should already be updating your content regularly.

You might want to create new content for your blog and begin a series of blog posts on specific topics. Unfortunately, many people find it challenging to figure out where to start regarding content creation for other topics. While you can use a great tool like Hubspot or AnswerThePublic to give you ideas, you don't have to go that route. Instead, an effective way to get around this hurdle is by thinking about how you can repurpose certain parts of an existing blog post.

Another way to reuse your content is to change the format. The important thing to note is that social media platforms group people based on how they prefer to consume content online. So, you first have to know your audience. Find out where they like to hang out and how they prefer to consume content. Let's say, for example, that you have some long-form content on your blog. You can break that down into smaller pieces and include them in other marketing channels like email marketing. You can also turn that blog content into video content. Then, you can put that video content on your YouTube channel and continue driving traffic to your website or landing page.

So it's not about how much content you can produce. Instead, focus on making that content relevant and easy to consume.

Using Internal And External Links

Internal links are a powerful SEO tool. When you promote an internal link, you promote another piece of content on your website. Internal links are usually easier to spot than external links. While internal and external links are search engine friendly, they have different meanings and benefits.

Internal linking is one of the best ways to increase your organic website visitors by 100%. For example, if someone gets onto your website and reads one of your blogs, it's helpful if they can find a link to similar content on your website within the same blog post.

Internal linking is also a tactic to get more backlinks on your website and boost revenue. Search engines do value external links more. Many search engines penalize websites that have a large number of links pointing to their site. If you can develop good links yourself, it can help you get better rankings. Furthermore, promoting content from other sites with similar topics can generate even more traffic back to your website.

Just another area where building relationships comes into play.

Let's say, for instance, that you're currently not getting much traffic. If you notice a particular website within your niche is raking in traffic, offer to do guest posts and link back to your website. Inviting others to do guest blogging on your blog is also a great thing. That is a simple way to build a linking relationship by reaching out to other content creators. You want to get relevant traffic to your website. So make sure you're linking to relevant content.

Conclusion

A lot of websites suffer from a lack of traffic. That's mainly because business owners aren't correctly optimizing them for search engines. You need high-quality content to keep potential customers on your website in today's world. The good thing is Google can now understand intent. So you don't have to choose between high-quality content and keywords. Searching has definitely changed over the years. People can now do things like voice search and image search.

So, it's up to us as content creators to optimize your sites. Do you need help with getting more organic traffic to your website? Then, talk to one of our growth specialists at gardenpatch today!

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