Christian CarereEvery website should have SEO baked into its overall marketing strategy to promote growth. It’s a necessary evil when it comes to generating new clients from search engines. Here are a few SEO tips to increase organic traffic to your small business website.
Establish a topical keyword strategy
Approach your keyword strategy from a topical perspective. Start with the major terms that describe your products, services and important topics related to them. Break each one down into commonly asked questions and commonly faced problems that your clients and potential customers are experiencing.
This type of keyword selection is the initial stage for creating topic clusters. To give your content the most strength and authority, structure your website with pillared content and clustered content.
The pillared content typically targets major keyword themes and the clustered content targets long-tail keywords. The pillar pages will cover the keyword topic in breadth whereas the cluster content will go into detail on specific subtopics related to your major keyword theme.
By breaking down topics into solution-based content you address the pain points of your target audience by providing answers on how to solve their problems. This form of content is commonly searched and builds greater confidence in your brand.
Link internally
If you’ve followed the advice above, you will have multiple pages and posts of related content. Building internal links connect related content to form topic clusters.
Internal links provide more ways for users to find related content they’re interested in. When you have more visitors finding more pages that interest them, you improve the engagement statistics of your website.
Internal links to related content reduce the bounce rate, increase the dwell time and increase the number of pages per session. Improving these metrics are all considered positive ranking signals since they indicate higher user engagement.
Linking related content together forms clustered content. Search engines recognize the relationship between the pages and posts which raises the profile of the main keyword topic within your website.
All clustered content links back to the pillar page, which raises its authority and demonstrates the relevance of the keyword theme to search engines. The pages within your topic cluster will rank for more keyword related terms.
Increase content production
Publish content more frequently to receive more organic traffic to your website. The more content you’re publishing, the more ability you have to rank for keywords. Keep in mind that publishing just to publish is the wrong way to go about it. Stick to the process for SEO content writing and target appropriate keywords.
In a study by Hubspot, they found that small businesses that published 11 or more times a month generated an average of 3 times more leads than websites that published twice a month.
SEO is based on content. Feed the search engines more content on the inner details of your business to give it more reasons to show your website in keyword-related searches? Improving the number of keywords your content ranks for will increase organic traffic to your website.
Establish a content schedule based on your keyword strategy. After you’ve mapped the content you’re going to create to target those keywords, you only need to execute on time. It saves you from wondering what you’re going to publish next and missing deadlines.
Add rich snippets to get rich results
Rich results are visually enhanced search results. You may have noticed them appear in the search results in the form of recipes,
FAQs,
Event listings,
and the list goes on.
Through the use of structured data markup, you can implement certain types of Schema that show up as rich results. The goal is to create more attractive search results that capture more attention from the user thereby increasing the click-through rate your website receives directly from the SERP.
You can choose from a list of options in Google’s search gallery to implement in your content to enhance contextual meaning and improve the organic traffic your site receives.
Here’s an example of a case study where FAQ schema was used to promote a product. By adding an FAQ section to the product page, this publisher was able to improve the click-through rate to the product page he tested.
If you’re using WordPress, you can add an FAQ section with the correct markup using the built-in Yoast faq function.
Click on the plus sign to add a new block. Choose the type of Schema you want to add from the list of options.
You simply need to add the questions and answers in the appropriate areas.
It’s important to note that rich results will only appear on the first page of Google and ONLY if Google decides to display the rich result. There’s no guarantee that Google will show your page as a rich result-even if your structured data markup is correctly implemented.
Update underperforming content
Find content on your site that has lost a percentage of its traffic and update the page to give it a performance boost. Google loves fresh content. Republishing an old piece that used to perform better with a fresh new segment can give your blog a boosted ranking which increases organic traffic.
If you’re page ranks #1 for a keyword, you’re essentially a target. You’re not the only one vying for this position as companies similar to your own would love to steal that traffic.
If you hire an SEO company to rank your pages, the first thing they’ll do is assess the content in the #1 position and reverse-engineer how it achieved the top-ranking position. Content is then published or updated to outperform the top-ranking page.
It’s the nature of the game.
Content eventually becomes dated and another piece will be published that outperforms what’s currently ranking in the top positions.
This being true, it’s best practice to go through your content once a year and update older posts with the potential to drive more organic traffic.
Reassess the target keyword of each article
Are your keywords still relevant to your overall goal? Sometimes there are slight variations of keywords that would be a better match to your content and target audience.
Search intent is not a static concept. People continue to change preferences and ways of thinking which alters how they search for things as well as what they expect to find. Review your keywords to make sure your target audience is a match concerning search intent.
Is your content the best solution to search intent?
Go through the pages that rank in the top positions to see what they have that you don’t. Create a better answer to the true intent of the search by including more topics and subtopics.
Identify what those topics are by analyzing the top ranking pages in the SERP and adding those new segments to your content.
If they have more multimedia, add more images, video, slideshows and interactive media to your page. You. can use a graph maker to publish your own images and add more ways for amplifiers to link to your content
Publishers use visual content in 74% of the total content published. Beating your competition in this department can create more value by providing a more enjoyable user experience.
Does your title and meta description entice visitors?
Increase the click-through rate by improving the catchiness of your headline and meta descriptions. Make your pages more interesting by creating captivating headlines and descriptions that create excitement about your content.
There’s always room for improvement when it comes to updating content. There are quite a few writing apps to catch smaller grammatical improvements and make your page sound more professional.
It’s best practice to audit your content yearly to keep your pages competitive. By continually upgrading your articles you build on the overall quality without sacrificing authority (existing backlinks to the page). The improvement in coverage and quality always translates works to increase organic traffic.
Build external links strategically
Link building is probably one of the most difficult things to do at scale-especially for those without experience. A good approach to link building is to be selective about choosing the websites you link to your own. The overall strategy is to link from credible, relevant websites to increase organic traffic from improved search visibility.
A high-quality link is one that provides your site with an increase in authority and provides streams of referral traffic that are interested in your content. This makes relevance the most important aspect of link building and assessing authority as a secondary priority.
Offer expert opinion
One way to find authority links is to subscribe to a site like H.A.R.O. ( Help A Report Out). Every day you’ll receive an email with a list of publishers that are asking for information to complete an article. When you can contribute your expertise, you can often acquire some pretty good links.
Leverage your personal & professional network
Create a list of people you know that own websites related to your business. There are bound to be a few people that you have a connection to that wouldn’t have a problem linking to your website.
Create a list to include family, friends, clients and vendors. Don’t try to force the connection just to get a link-remember that the most relevant content will make the best backlinks.
Editorial links are among the most powerful as they can be used in context with the overall keyword theme. Look for opportunities in your link prospects blog to find articles that are suited to the link page you want to link to.
Make sure that there’s an identifiable relationship to your business to get the most from your link building.
Feed your GMB profile
Local traffic is among the highest converting sources of traffic for a business. More users are deeper in the stages of the buyer journey and are closer to making a purchase. Maintain a routine of adding content to your Google My Business profile to give search engines more keywords to associate your website within the search results.
Add new images
Add photos regularly. Users gravitate towards images and video over text every time. When a person is looking for a service, they will often want to see the place of business before they decide to go there.
If you were choosing a dentist wouldn’t you want a sneak peek at what the place looked like? For many people, a certain level of cleanliness is expected and important in making their decision. If your images are enough to satisfy their needs, they could be the deciding factor that gets you their business.
People researching products want to see images of the products before they make a purchase. If you have the exact product they’ve been thinking about or something close, it’s going to inspire them to purchase with your company.
Adding images to show the interior, exterior and the products you sell gives your business more content for people to find, which results in more traffic.
Create posts
Google My Business posts live for a week before they are removed from Google search and Maps yet only 17% of businesses post weekly. Google Posts give you another opportunity to create content that can be viewed by people searching.
A post is a way to promote a solution, product or send a message to your audience about a specific aspect of your business. You can send users to internal pages on your site to promote new content you’ve published or pages you want users to visit.
Without using the posts function at all there’s an empty slot in the knowledge panel that counts as wasted space. Weekly posts will keep that section populated to provide another means for visitors to land on your website.
Implement a review strategy
Reviews can be an excellent source of traffic if your company is making a lot of clients happy. It varies by industry, but a lot of people check reviews before making purchase decisions. You can capitalize on this by having a review strategy in place.
Whether it’s training employees to ask after a cheerful interaction with a client or emailing the review link, there has to be a system where your company is consistently receiving positive reviews.
It doesn’t need to be all at once, but consistently positive reviews will attract more clients and are considered to be positive ranking signals.
Respond to every review, whether it’s positive or negative as each review is an opportunity to showcase your brand and demonstrate how well you treat your customers.
Drive more traffic organically to experience growth
Increase the organic traffic to your website to generate more revenue. The opportunity for growth through a strong search presence is growing-and so is the competition.
Commit to implementing the SEO strategies that work best for your website. Strategic development of your content will lead you to massive increases in the volume of organic traffic your site receives which ultimately translates to new clients and increased revenue.