5 effective ways to drive your organic search traffic |
Posted: July 6, 2022 |
Photo byLuke Chesser onUnsplash If you're looking for a cost-effective way to increase traffic to your website, look no further. Organic search traffic, i.e. search engine optimization (SEO), is the strategy you need to know about (and invest in). Organic traffic and SEO are a way to attract visitors without having to pay for Google ads or other PPC campaigns. Saving and earning money are not the only benefits of driving organic search traffic. Think about all those aggressive campaigns that are constantly popping up on all of your socials. Annoying, right? That’s because they’re not building into the journey of your target audience, but interrupting it instead. SEO is all about serving the right content to the right user at the moment they are searching for it. So how do you drive organic search traffic? Let’s take a look at a few effective ways to do it: Choose the right keywords.If you’re looking for a quality leather bag, you’re probably going to enter those words into your search engine and click on the first page that pops up. That’s exactly what your customers will do, too. Naturally, if you want to attract your ideal customer, you’ll have to get to know them. That means you'll have to get to know their:
Creating a buyer persona is a great way to humanize your audience segments and illustrate these information points. It’ll also allow you to better understand both the keywords and the content your target audience is searching for on Google. Keyword research tools can help you validate your keywords by showing you how many searches they have per month. SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs, SEOBook Keyword Suggestion Tool, SpyFu, and Serpstat are just some of the many keyword research tools you can use for this purpose. The great thing about these tools is that they are intuitive and they provide geo-specific search details for each keyword, including how many people are looking for the keyword in your country and how stiff is the competition for it. However, you don’t want to go for just any keywords because they seem popular. You want to make sure that the keywords you’re using are specific to what you’re selling and the pain points your offering solves. This will ensure that you are attracting not just any, but qualified search traffic. With so many competitors out there in the market, ranking for your target keywords is not going to be an easy feat but there are ways even for smaller businesses to get ahead. Sometimes it's better to use longer-tail keywords that generate a lower search than a short-tail and popular keyword used by an already established market leader. Besides tailoring your content to meet the users’ search intent, be sure to optimize your content descriptors – or meta tags - and URLs for your target keywords. When we’re talking about meta tags, we’re talking about meta titles and meta descriptions. Meta titles are the titles that Google displays in the search results and they’re usually about 60 characters long. On another hand, meta descriptors are the text below meta tiles and they’re up to 200 characters long. They should ideally contain your chosen keywords and a call to action. Your URLs should be short and also include keywords relevant to your business. Create content your audience is searching forInserting keywords is not enough to optimize content for search engines. The content itself has to fully answer your audience’s search intent – i.e. the reason why they are googling the keyword. If users land on your content from search engines and bounce off within seconds, these behavior metrics tell Google that your content has not given the user what they are looking for and, as a result, it will get demoted in SERPs. To create a fully optimized piece of content, first, be sure to study the content Google is already ranking for your target keyword and let it inspire your outline. Here are some pro tips: - Check out the People Also Ask section for more subheader ideas - See Related Searches for more keyword ideas Optimize your website’s speedThe average time that a consumer spends on a website is around 45 seconds. If your website is too slow to load, your prospects will be out before they even get to see all the quality content or those amazing product that you’re offering. Not only do slow loading speeds affect your user experience, but they directly impact your rankings in search as Google prioritizes fast-loading websites. Slow-loading websites will have a much harder time reaching those top organic search positions and, therefore, attracting organic search traffic. So, what’s making your website slow? Poor server performance is usually among the top reasons, next to a large volume of images that aren't optimized. Diversifying your content with photos, videos, and a variety of plugins next to the written is a great tactic. Visuals have proven to increase users’ average time on site and engagement rates. However, media files are working against your server response time, so make sure to optimize their sizes before uploading. This is especially important when optimizing your website for mobile. Don’t forget to run technical audits every couple of months, too. So, make sure to emphasize optimization in the website development process since a fast website equals happy visitors! Optimize for featured snippetsThe last time you Googled a keyword, have you noticed a highlighted snippet of text appear at the top of your results page? This usually happens when you are looking for a definition or a list and it is called the Zero Position. For example, if you google “what is organic SEO”, you will see a definition pulled from the top-ranked Google result, typically up to 55 words long. Here’s an example: Alternatively, you might look up “the best SEO tools” and end up with a list of the tools pulled from another top-performing page optimized for the said keyword. Here’s what it could look like; Featured snippets are the definitions or lists taken from one of the top 10 results for a keyword. As such, they’re a great way to increase visibility on Google as well as to attract quite a bit of organic traffic to websites that aren’t already ranked high on the search engine results page. In other words: it gives your website a chance to outperform the top-ranked competitor for the given keyword and, in doing so, increase the click-through rate. At this point, you're probably wondering how to get a featured snippet and we have some practical tips ready for you. There are a couple of simple ways to optimize your content for snippets. Before we get to those methods, first you need to ensure that you fully understand your target keyword’s search intent: - Is your audience looking for a definition? - Is your audience looking for a list? The best way to figure this out is to google your target keyword and assess the content that is ranking for it. - To optimize for definition snippets, make sure you have a header that mirrors the query (ex. What Is Organic SEO? or Organic SEO definition) followed by a definition-like paragraph (ex. Organic SEO is…) - To optimize for a listicle snippet, use a numbered or bullet-pointed list to name your steps, tips, tools, or other listed entities right under your introduction. Alternatively, use H2 or H3 tags when naming and explaining your listed items. But, doesn't that mean that featured snippets will eliminate your target user's need to click on your URL, which will in turn drive fewer visits to your website? Nope! And here’s why: Your content provides additional value beyond the value of your featured snippets. With numbered lists, Google will show you information only up to a certain number. For example, if your content is made up of 10 items explaining certain benefits users might gain from using your services, Google might display only 5 of those. For the remaining 5, users will have to click on “more items”, which will lead them directly to the content on your website. Quality backlink profilePicture this: your target customer is scrolling through an article on someone else's website. They stumble across a link referring them to your website for more information on something they're interested in. That link is a backlink. Backlinks are effective promotional tools that increase your brand’s exposure and make your brand seem authoritative. The more popular the website referring to you is, the better the odds are that consumers – and search engines! – will perceive you as trustworthy. This will directly reflect on your rankings in SERPs. How do you acquire and track valuable backlinks? While you could use tools such as Ahrefs for backlink analysis, we recommend that you hire one of the local SEO agencies that can help you find and gain quality backlinks for your website. Local agencies can be more effective than their peers in helping you identify relevant local websites that can link back to your websites. Why is going local great for your business? Because local link building has proven effective in improving organic search traffic on a local level and in reaching a wider local audience. Finally, what makes a backlink high-quality? Apart from the sheer volume of them and the popularity of the referring website, you want that website to genuinely want to refer to your business. That way, your brand will appear as genuine instead of spammy and its content will seem more valuable to the consumers. You also want to make sure that the words you use for anchor text are relevant to the page, content, and domain they're referring to. SummaryOrganic traffic is the traffic you receive from search engines, so investing in SEO is key to increasing your organic visitor count. Focus on finding the right keywords, creating valuable content for them, optimizing your website’s core vitals such as loading speed, and committing to continuous reporting and optimization. Once you’ve done that, set the measurable metrics for your organic search effectiveness and look for any adjustments you may need to make along the way. Author bioRick Seidl is a digital marketing specialist with a bachelor’s degree in Digital Media and communications, based in Portland, Oregon. He carries a burning passion for digital marketing, social media, small business development, and establishing its presence in a digital world, and is currently quenching his thirst through writing about digital marketing and business strategies for Find Digital Agency.
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