"Clients sign up for SEO and Content Marketing services, but it is web traffic that they are interested in. "Digital Marketing agencies need to keep this goal in mind and adjust their strategies to it. The quote is a mantra we've come up with, based on years of experience, and reminding ourselves of it with every new client call is a mindful practice that helps keep our efforts focused and effective.
It's simply not new blog posts, social media shares, or even keyword rankings (though these might be tempting) that clients are really interested in. Any website, to be successful, is in need of well-targeted web traffic. That's how you get leads, conversions, and well, business growth.Most likely, your own company falls into one of these major categories:
Catching onto developments in the search-engine world, many companies that come to us are concerned that a Google Penalty or Google Algorithmic update might be what's causing their traffic decrease. Although sometimes this is indeed the case, and a clean-up of their link profile is enough to get them back on track, in most cases, link removal is not enough.
While making sure your site isn't doing anything wrong is a good start, it's also really important that you're doing things right and on the offense. That means creating and working with a good online marketing strategy to outperform your organic competitors. How do you get started? It's simple, and we've reviewed the entire process from A to Z with this quick guide on how to work on increasing your web traffic:
There are many aspects of a website and a full website SEO audit will review all of them. The benefits here are two-fold: you both discover errors and issues that need to be fixed and find opportunities to improve your site further so it's running at its full potential.
First, start with an identification of the technical on-site issues. This is like the ground level of a building — if your site is poorly structured and prevents the Google bots from crawling your major pages, all further investment in content would be a waste. Fixing the technical SEO ground of a website may lead to a direct traffic increase (if there were major issues, which are now solved) or stabilize the website and make sure further efforts will lead to visible results. Here's a list of the most common SEO audit issues and how to fix them.
In order to have a well-optimized website, the most important thing is to know which keywords will attract the right audience to your site:
Once you have a good list of keywords, you can check their search volume (how many people are searching for this keyword every month) with Google Keyword Planner and see if it is worth trying to rank for them.
If you find new keywords, which describe your business well, and which you haven't been used much on your site, you may consider adding new web pages to target these new keyword themes and incorporating them into your website structure.
Another option is rewriting and optimizing the pages you already have (including the homepage).
The next step to achieving website success is to find out who you're competing with. Investigating your organic search competitors is a step on the ladder to higher traffic you can't skip out on.
This type of research will reveal opportunities for new content, promotional strategies, and link development opportunities.
See what your competitors are excelling at — can you do it even better and steal attention (in terms of social shares, backlinks, or organic traffic)? If yes, great. If not, no worries — you can focus on opportunities they've missed and blindside them.
If you are putting a TON of effort into maintaining good on-page SEO hygiene and publishing solid SEO-friendly content, yet you still see organic traffic flat or declining, it could be your link profile that's holding you back.What you need is a review of your backlink profile.
Whether you've intentionally created bad backlinks, or are a victim, these can get you de-ranked from Google searches so a link audit should be high on your priority list.We were doing a backlink audit the other day and spotted a major problem that we see countless times.
This particular site had 52,000 links inbound links from about 3,000 referring domains. More than half of those links were coming from blog spot websites and were pure spam.If you see your organic traffic plummeting despite your great technical on-page SEO, and despite active and effective content marketing efforts, then you may have a problem with your links.Go into your link profile, use a tool like Ahrefs and search for spammy domains – you might be surprised what you find. If you want to get rid of those, use Google's Disavowed tool in Google Search Console.
Once you fix on-site issues, come up with keyword ideas, research your competitors and clean up your link profile, you can be sure your website is built on a stable foundation, and you're ready to invest more in attracting organic traffic.
Content sure is king, and more and more companies are investing wildly in it. It's no longer a question of "if" your company will use it, but simply "when" you'll get on board.A great Content Marketing (CM) Strategy should be based on Buyer Persona Research and Topic Modeling. The best piece of content is usually serving two dual goals: (1) get your buyer persona's attention (for example, in social media) and (2) drive organic traffic from the keyword theme you're targeting. This is where SEO & CM work together to boost your traffic both immediately through the outreach of the content and long-term, by helping potential customers find you organically.
Researching Buyer Personas is a very creative and rewarding task. First, try to describe your buyers in your own words. Then, check out your Social Media followers — who are they? Do they fit in any set demographics? Do they have interests in common? Then, go to Amazon to mine reviews and to forums to mine discussions to see how real buyers describe their pain points. It's a good idea to even interview 3–5 of your buyers directly and ask them what they think about your service.
Identifying buyers' pain points is the skeleton of a successful Content Marketing Strategy.
Once you identify your major buyer personas and their pain points, you have to align your content with their buying cycle.
Knowing your buyers isn't enough, though. Having great content which will help you achieve your major goal of acquiring organic traffic also requires that you choose an appropriatekeyword theme to target. This could be something like "best shoes for the winter" or a comparison of the "top brands for high heeled red boots.
"Check keyword search volumes, and check out the competition in SERPs.
If the search volume is high, the competition will most likely be high, as well. But with a little bit (or not so little :)) research and brainstorming, you'll be able to come up with niche keywords that have a decent number of searches and good potential for ranking.You can also use theMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool to see if you have any chance at ranking for a precise keyword, or just use the following checklist.
Sites that appear in search results can be outranked if they:
Based on the findings, you can decide whether to go after a keyword theme or leave it for later and target it with a video, for example.
Once you choose an article topic, you need to start researching what sub-themes to cover. Check out Rand Fishkin's Topic Modeling video, and Cyrus Shepard's post on Semantic Keyword Targeting to get a better idea of the process.
In short, you need to use other people's content, related searches, and Google's instant suggestions to make a list of subtopics to include in your piece, so you exhaust the topic to the fullest.
Google rewards comprehensive quality content, and that's what you're going for here.
And let's not forget the visuals — an image or a graph can make a post go viral, so make sure you create eye-catching and relevant custom images for every post you release.
With a careful house sweep for technical errors, SEO mistakes, and missed opportunities you should see a traffic uplift. With ongoing, strategic content marketing, your website would get more than traffic — you'd start attracting the right audiences and start seeing ROI-positive results.
Take a look at how to get your content marketing in motion — we've shared all our checklists, templates, and tools for content marketing strategy.
I lead the Content team and make sure the content you create is worth the effort. I help you grow and nourish your audience, and make users convert.
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