G enerating organic website traffic is a long term aspect of any digital marketing strategy requiring patience and regular work on building your brand. There are no quick shortcuts to obtain it, though the time and effort will inevitably be worth your while as organic website traffic is generally viewed as the most important form of traffic. In this article we look at some of the fundamental methods used by most successful brands.
On-Page SEO
It’s essential to optimize your website for Google so that when it crawls the internet at regular intervals, your site is picked up and identified accordingly. This includes factors such as page load times, responsiveness to various devices (smart phones, tablets, desktops) and page meta titles so that Google can categorise the page’s content correctly.
Regular, Quality Blog Content
Google favours websites that are constantly publishing fresh content. By increasing the frequency of blog articles your website ranking will naturally increase. It is vital that these articles are not simply irrelevant spammy articles that have no value to your audience. Poor quality content will result in Google penalising such content by ranking it far lower.
All content should be focused and interesting to your readers as well as being relevant to the website’s industry or niche. Publishing high quality content shows that your website is an authority on the subject both to readers and Google.
Keyword Research
Going hand in hand with content creation is ensuring the content focuses on certain keywords and includes these throughout. The process starts with researching which keywords to target based on the amount of competition and monthly traffic for that particular keyword. You will likely need to consider long-tail keywords (longer phrases) rather than single words as there will be less competition to rank highly for longer, more specialised terms.
Following the appropriate research, it’s then imperative to include these keywords through the page’s content – in the title, headers, meta titles, URLs, image alt tags and within the main content. This allows Google to see that this is what your page’s topic is and rank you higher for this search term.
Social Media
Promotion of your content is important. Without it you will be relying solely on search engine traffic. One of the best ways to promote content is via your social media channels. It’s a great way to interact with your customers and get them to visit your website. You can tweet links on Twitter to recent blog articles or post images on Instagram from your blog posts encouraging followers to visit the page to find out more. Additionally you want your followers to share your updates to their followers so you can gain even further exposure and traffic to your site.
Innovative Link Building Strategies
Link building plays a large part in SEO for a web page. External links from other websites to your website shows Google that they trust your content as a valuable resource on the subject. External links from quality, relevant domains can be hard to obtain and every brand will need to think outside of the box for their own methods as well as using well known techniques.
We use all these strategies and more to gain you more organic website traffic. If you’d like to discuss how we can build your traffic and help you rank higher on Google please get in touch.