SEO Techniques to Increase Website Traffic
The process of optimizing your site can be difficult to hack if you’re not exposed to the right tips and tricks. Fortunately, a few effective SEO ideas can bring your website traffic up a significant amount.
We’re going to discuss 6 SEO techniques in this article, giving you some food for thought on how to push your digital marketing campaign a little further. Hopefully, you find the ideas below to be useful as you start to market your business online.
Let’s get started.
- Identify an SEO Target Audience
Making waves online is all about choosing a group, monitoring their behavior, and trying to reach them online. It’s similar to the idea of fishing in the ocean.
There are millions of species of fish in the sea, all of them looking for something a little different in terms of food. The same goes for groups of people using the internet. If you can find what your target group is looking for, you’ll be far more likely to attract them to your site and find out where they’re spending time online.
Market research is your friend in this respect. Find out a general demographic that your brand seeks to address, and you can use various tools offered by Google and SEO companies to reach those groups online. You’ll be able to get insights into people of specific ages, areas, niches, and more.
- Streamline Your Keyword Research
Once you have a group to market to, you can start to see what they’re searching online. Keyword research allows you to see the specific keyword searches that are popular in different niches across the internet.
Typically, there’s one dominant keyword that’s searched extensively in your niche. There are also dozens of similar, yet less popular keywords that exist for any kind of search. For example, “how to make brownies” might be the most popular search in your niche.
The top SEO results in that search will likely be jammed with powerful companies who are almost impossible to compete with. On the other hand, “how to make excellent brownies” or “how to make great fudge brownies” might be popular as well, but have easier competition.
Your goal should be to find keywords that have traffic but low competition. You can identify competition by actually searching the terms in an incognito browser to see what you’re up against. You use incognito because it strips you of various personal preferences that your browser might be using through your cookies or search history.
It’s important to note that most of the steps in this article are carried out perfectly if you use an SEO agency. An agency can make the process extremely easy for you, and you can focus on running your business instead of tweaking things online.
- Place Main Keywords on Your Site
When you identify the dominant keywords that you’ll try to rank for, you can start optimizing various pages of your site for those keywords. The process of keyword placement is a little complicated, but the general idea is to put the keyword in a header, your HTML, meta-description, and throughout the text on that page.
Keep in mind that forced keywords will not serve you well. Google’s algorithm is good at identifying pages that try to “keyword stuff” for SEO purposes. Do your best to place the keyword whenever it comes naturally into the text.
When you’re optimizing your home page, contact page, product pages, and other foundational pieces of your site, be sure to use the keywords that you’re most interested in ranking for. We’ll discuss where to place the other keywords next.
- Create Content Frequently
Your keyword research shouldn’t stop at finding terms to use in your main pages. Different terms will gain popularity, and you should be creating content to optimize for those terms.
If you find that “cookie recipes for vegans” is rising in popularity, you can create a blog post that uses that keyword phrase and addresses the user issue. The same goes for any other keyword phrase that you find through your research. The more that you create optimized content, the more likely you are to be found online.
You can create blogs, videos, or any other kind of content that can be optimized. The key is to create it often, and always make sure that you’re following an optimization checklist when you do so.
- Focus on User Value
It’s easy to get lost in the ins and outs of “good optimization” when you’re trying to get your site to land in Google rankings. One thing to keep in mind is that Google’s objective is to find the highest-quality sites and list them for users.
In other words, Google’s search algorithm is strictly there to find the best content in relation to the user search. They value quality over all else. If Google results were to start coming up with websites that weren’t that useful, users would start to use other search engines that provided better results.
So, always be sure to ask yourself whether or not your content actually provides value. Does the recipe on your blog lead to a great brownie? Is the content easily read and understood?
These things will get you a lot further than rote optimization will.
- Use PPC Marketing
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are what the normal user sees as sponsored posts or advertisements on their feeds. You can place your content on social media sites as well as search engines.
The beautiful thing about these ads is that they’re placed in front of thousands of people without you having to do all of the work of optimization. You create the ad based on a specific keyword, send it out, and the platform you’re using will do the rest.
Additionally, you only pay when the ad is engaged with. You “pay-per-click,” and don’t have to spend any money on all of the people that see your ad and don’t do anything with it. This way, you know that you’re getting exactly what you paid for.
Want to Learn More about Search Engine Optimization?
Working with different SEO techniques can take some time to master, but it’s well worth it in the end. There’s a lot to learn, and we’re here to help you move forward.
Explore our site for more ideas and insights into optimization, digital marketing, and generating traffic to your website.