For many marketers and entrepreneurs, part of running a successful business is having a better understanding of search engine optimization (SEO) and applying the best strategies to increase traffic and visibility to attract more potential customers to your website. Additionally, the right combination of skills, knowledge, and patience can help your website stand out from the local competition and climb to the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs).
A study reported that websites on the first page of the search results have 71.33% organic click-through rates while those in the second and third pages only get 5.59% of the clicks on average. Moreover, the first five results on page 1 account for 67.6% of all the clicks.
However, the SEO landscape is constantly changing. The strategies you used before may not be as effective today. If you find yourself struggling to keep up with these changes, you are not alone. With Google getting smarter in analyzing, understanding web pages, and becoming more effective at answering queries within the SERPs or directing people to ads instead of organic listings, this only made things so much harder for many marketers who depend on organic search traffic. This results in fewer organic clicks, pushing you to invest in paid listings.
However, it does not have to be that way. Working harder, creating better and faster web pages, and focusing on standing out from competitors can still pay off.
In this post, we have gathered the best basic and advanced SEO and internet media strategies that will help you retain and boost your organic traffic and online presence.
Perform a Complete Website Audit
Website audit helps you identify the problem of why your website is not getting enough organic traffic and sales. You can do it yourself but there are also many SEO companies that offer this type of service. The process involves the assessment of your website’s overall performance, the creation of goals based on the information yield, and the implementation of techniques to achieve your goals. Fixing the problem and making the best use of your existing content help increase your sales and profit.
Here is what you need to do when auditing your website:
- Check if your web pages have SEO meta titles and descriptions.
- Optimize the keywords in each webpage but avoid keyword stuffing.
- The URL structure should be optimized for search engines.
- Format each page and blog post properly.
- Images should have keywords in their ALT tags
- Content should have internal and external links.
Know Your Competitor’s Best Performing Pages
Investigating your competitors’ SEO strategies can help your website perform better. Taking some time to determine which strategies are working for them can help you analyze and understand why their approach is working before applying this insight to your approach.
Getting a picture of what factors that drive search traffic to your competitor’s website and analyzing their top pages can lead you in the right direction, such as:
- Content or keyword gap
- Link gap
- How to improve old content
- Keyword cannibalization
You can use the SEMrush Organic Research tool to find your competitors’ best-performing pages.
Internal Linking to Boost Page 2 Rankings
If you have keywords ranking on the second page, you can supercharge them onto page 1 of the SERPs by adding internal links pointing to those pages. Although internal linking passes both the relevancy signal and PageRank, this SEO technique is often underutilized.
You can use the SEMrush Organic Research Tool. Simply type in the domain into the search box and click on the ‘positions’ tab. When you see a row of filters, choose #11 to 20 as this will show you a list of page 2 search queries that could benefit from internal linking.
Use Long-Tail Keywords
If you are struggling to rank high-competition keywords, we’ve got 2 words for you: long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords are phrases composed of 3 or more words, for example, virtual cooking classes in Toronto. Unlike single-word keywords, long-tail keywords are low-competition keywords and target niche audiences to capture relevant website traffic. Do not just use the most popular keywords in your niche. When major search engines see your web content as a destination for that specific subject, it will increase your search engine rankings and online visibility, allowing your target audience to easily find you on the Internet.
For example, using “Why to hire a professional Hamilton wedding videographer” can drive more high-converting traffic and increase revenue for your business than “wedding videographer”.
Make Your Website Mobile-Responsive
Mobile responsive design can help improve your website’s ability to rank higher in search engine results. Research showed that mobile devices comprise more than 50% of internet traffic. Moreover, 80% of potential customers are more likely to purchase from responsive websites. If your website does not have a mobile-responsive design, you could be falling behind the competition, losing significant traffic, leads, and sales, and making it harder to achieve your digital marketing goals. Make sure that you have one of the best digital marketing companies in Toronto to maximize your website traffic and sales goals.
Get Active on Social Media
Sharing content through various social media platforms is not enough to increase your website’s organic traffic. You also need to actively take part and engage in a community. If you have a Facebook or Twitter account, you can participate in group forums with relevant hashtags. Engage with your target audience by asking or answering questions. Avoid using social media as a broadcast channel to promote your products and services. Social media is intended to connect and interact with people.
There are plenty of other effective SEO techniques out there. This post shares only a few of the many strategies that can help you boost your website traffic organically, without the need to invest in paid ads. We hope that these tips are actionable and simple enough, especially for those who are new to SEO.
If you want to share more SEO strategies or tips, do not hesitate to share them with us in the comment section.
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