5 Ways to Increase Organic Search Traffic
Small and local businesses looking to drum up new customers and more sales, should focus on organically ranking on search engines to increase website traffic. Organic search traffic is a result of ranking naturally without paying for advertising. Though no one knows the search engines’ algorithms, there are sure ways that can help boost your search engine ranking & thus increasing traffic. Take advantage of these 5 optimization tactics to get your website’s ranking moving in the right direction.
#1 Quality Content
Without original and unique content, the search engines won’t have anything to rank. Search engines prefer content that is written for actual people rather than bots. Your potential customers want to read authentic, helpful content so that is what you should provide to them.
If you have a jewelry business you should focus on content centered around all aspects of jewelry such as types of rings, how to clean pearls, jewelry trends, etc. This will allow customers to find you for a wide array of topics based on your core business. It will also make you look like an expert in your field. Be careful to not have duplicate content as it can create confusion within search engines as they won’t know which page is more important and which one, they should rank.
#2 Use Long Tail Keywords
There are two types of keywords, short & long-tail. An example of a short keyword is ‘Mountain Bike’ and an example of a long-tail keyword is ‘Mountain Bike Clipless Pedals’ or ‘Red Full Suspension Mountain Bike’. While more people search for short keywords, they are also very difficult to rank for because the competition is so high. Therefore, if you focus on writing content geared around long-tail keywords you have a higher chance of ranking more quickly.
When writing content your goal should be a keyword density of 1% to 2.5% per page, which is about 6 keywords per every 300 words. If you use your keywords too many times, it is known as keyword stuffing and can actually hurt your rankings.
#3 Increase Backlinks
A backlink is any link on 3rd party websites that are directed at your website. It has been said that backlinks attribute to about 50% of your SEO, which means they are really important. The goal is to have top ranking websites link back to your content as naturally as possible usually in the form of blog posts, comments, or natural mentions. The more sites that have links pointing back to your website the higher your ranking will be.
Occasionally, you will find that spam sites are linking to you which can hurt your rankings. Google offers a tool that allows you to remove and disavow bad backlinks, so that they won’t be counted against you.
#4 Add Meta Data & Title Tags
Meta descriptions, headings, and labels on your pages & posts help pull everything together to present a nice complete package to search engines. These elements are a major factor in helping search engines understand what a webpage is all about and they are what potential customers see on the search engine results page. Take the time to add these elements on all pages & posts and write them in a way that will grab customers attention. Your keywords should be included in these elements as well.
#5 Fix Page Speed Issues
Search engines continue to reiterate the importance of having fast-loading web pages. If your competitors’ sites are loading faster than yours then you may fall behind in ranking. A few ways to increase speeds is by compressing images, use browser caching, minify resources, eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content, and avoid landing page redirects. If these are difficult concepts to understand than it might be worth hiring a website developer or programmer to take care of these speed issues.
Overall, SEO is not a set it and forget it thing. It is an ongoing process that is continually evolving, which is why it is vital to track your website analytics. Moz.com and SEMrush.com are two great resources that offer tools such as discovering new keyword, finding backlink opportunities, tracking rankings, and reports that show ways to improve your SEO. Google also offers their own free website monitoring tools called, Google Search Console.
This guest blog post was submitted by Mike Lies with Gold Compass Real Estate. If you are looking at buying or selling a home in the Denver Metro or Boulder areas give Mike a call at 303-325-5690. He would also love to talk about ways to improve SEO, as he has spent countless hours optimizing his own website at ColoradoHomeBlog.com.