What Actually Works for Driving SEO Traffic from Search Engines?
Driving traffic to your website organically is difficult, but it’s not impossible. Particularly when you know the right tricks and tips, it should be a cakewalk. Search engine optimization is a long-term project, but the results are often long-lasting and yield regular output.
In this post by SPOPLI Web Development & Services – we look at ways that stood the test of time in terms of driving organic SEO traffic from all the leading search engines. Here they are –
Blogging
Churning out regular content in the form of blogging and guest posting is perhaps one of the most effective ways to improve organic traffic. You can go in-depth than a website typically allows. You can create a huge catalog of optimized, informative, and helpful content of all kinds. But, be sure to avoid writing spammy, cheap, or poor content as it can do the opposite of helping.
Use of Long-tail Keywords
If you aim for general or more popular keywords, it might not get you anywhere. It’s better to pick more specific, longer keywords that better describe your service/product. By optimizing your content for longer keywords, Google will pick up on the fact that those keywords best describe your business and will use it as a destination for sending relevant users against those searches. This is bound to help you with your Google rankings.
Getting Meta Down
Any optimized blog post or web page must contain 3 essential ingredients – URL, description, and the meta title. It may sound too simple to be effective, but it’s mega important. Although all SEO elements are important, getting your metadata and descriptions right is even more important. It tells Google exactly what the page or the post is about.
For more information on how to optimize, you can use Yoast SEO for WordPress, Ahrefs, and SEO tools by HubSpot.
Internal Linking
After you have a decent stock of helpful blogs on your website, it is a good practice to link relevant topics within the website with one another across all the right places.
In this way, you can keep redirecting the person to more helpful blogs and keep them on the website for longer periods. This is a powerful SEO practice that impacts the search rankings positively. It’s called Topic Clustering. However, it is important to be careful and to avoid ‘overdoing’ it; otherwise, Google may look at it as spam.
Working on Inviting Inbound Links
Google prefers websites that other websites like to link to; especially high-ranking and trustworthy sites. If you know suppliers, partners, friends, clients, or other industry partners; it’s good to ask them to link to your website.
Google gives authority to websites that have a naturally high number of incoming links. But, beware – avoid spamming by having low-authority sites link to you as it may damage your SEO health.
Social Media
LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter are all leading social media platforms. It’s imperative that you have a consistent and strong presence across all the relevant social media channels if you want to organically divert traffic towards your website.
Other than helping with traffic, social presence is also a sign of a credible business and its relationship with customers. People like to find out about and connect with their favorite brands. Therefore, do not miss out on having a well-planned social media strategy if you want to enjoy organic search results.
Email Marketing for Better Traffic
This is a highly effective and inexpensive way to reach your audiences directly into their inboxes. Email marketing has a lot of benefits to offer other than generating traffic. You can use a bunch of email marketing tools like MailChimp for organizing and scheduling your emails.
You can stick with a timeline and send out a newsletter with helpful links to products, services, or blogs. You can also have your customers reach your target customers directly.
Enhancing User Experience aka UX
More and more people browse the internet from smartphones and tablets; rather than using laptops or desktops. That means different users are viewing the same website on multiple screen sizes with varying aspect ratios. To ensure smooth, straightforward, uninterrupted, and flexible navigation; it is essential that you optimize your website accordingly.
The truth is, having a mobile-friendly website is no longer an option because it directly impacts search engine rankings.
Another way to ensure good UX is to improve the load speed of the site. Load speed not only controls Google rankings, but they also affect things like bounce rate and CTR. Therefore, always go for a flexible mobile design, smooth navigation, and a fast-loading website.
Voice Search
Google Home and Alexa are all popular voice-activated devices. Because of this, voice search has become the next big thing. In fact, it’s estimated that almost 50% of all searches are voice inquiries.
The thing about voice searches is that they are a bit different from regular searches in terms of the tone of the query, selection of words, and the length of the query.
Text-based searches are short and specific. Voice searches often involve an entire sentence. Your optimization efforts and techniques should take this into account. Although well-written content makes it easy for voice search to recognize the relevant copies, it pays to have a good look at how your content may perform against voice searches.
Bottom Line
SEO is an ongoing effort. That’s why remaining consistent and learning from your mistakes is more important than anything else.