Traffic is the lifeblood for any profitable website. Unfortunately most beginners don’t know how to optimize their web pages for search engines. And they give up when they don’t see any traffic growth on their sites.
Organic traffic can grow your efforts into something authoritative, BIGGER and most often profitable. But what SEO tactics should you use? Where do you actually begin?
1. Craft Clickable Headlines
Brian Clark from Copyblogger says, 8 out of 10 people read headlines before clicking on your links.
Search engines, social media sites, blogging forums or wherever you promote your posts, headlines is the first thing most people see. If they’re not compelling, no one is going to click! It’s as simple as that.
You need to spend quality time in crafting powerful headlines. Here are few effective tips that help you write great headlines.
- Find a list of top blogs in your niche. Check out the headlines of their popular posts. Analyze them (are they list posts, how-to guides or a combination of two). Notice the pattern and tweak your headlines according to them.
- Include a number in your headlines (list posts are evergreen, most online people prefer clicking on list posts).
- Use powerful headline adjectives. Check out this post by Jon Morrow on writing powerful words on your posts.
Important Note: Make sure to use SEO plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast, and use your primary keywords in your headlines and meta description to bring more visitors from search engines.
2. Perform SEO Audit
Did you know that by conducting an SEO audit of your websites you can double or even triple your search traffic?
SEO audit is the process of knowing how your website performs in search results. Here are few important factors to perform while conducting a SEO audit for your sites to drive more organic traffic.
- Make sure your site is both mobile and search engine friendly
- Optimize your website's loading times
- Improve your on-page and off-page SEO factors
- Optimize your URL structure
- Make sure you have an XML sitemap for your sites
- Find and fix broken links
- Make sure to no-index your tags and categories from Google search results
Once you know your website is showing up on Google perfectly, your site performs really well and you’ll attract more visitors from search engines.
3. Spy on Your Competition
Finding the keywords your competition use is the simplest way to increase your website search traffic.
Analyze all the keywords your competitors are using. You don’t have to use the exact similar keywords to bring traffic to your sites, but make a list of keyword ideas that are really profitable.
You can use tools like Moz, SpyFu, SEMRush etc to find the most profitable keywords your competitors are using to increase their traffic. You can also use the same tools to figure out how many backlinks they have to rank higher in search results.
Here's a webinar from SEMRush to show you how to use their Competitor Keyword Research for SEO Toolset:
4. Improve Your Page Load Speed
Did you know that 40% of people abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load?
You can use Google’s page insights tool to find out the performance of your website. You can also use Pingdom tool to analyze your website loading times. Here are few effective ways to speed up your WordPress websites.
Use less plugins: Less plugins means less usage of resources. That means your site loads really faster as your site speed mostly depend upon the plugins you use. Avoid using heavy loading plugins.
Use a better hosting service: The web hosting you use affects your site loading time. Avoid using cheap WordPress hosting services if you’re really serious about making money online.
Install a cache plugin: By clearing your cache every time you install/disable a plugin, you will save a lot of space on your hosting service. This improves your overall website loading time and performance. Install cache plugins like to W3 total cache to clear your website’s cache.
Note: Don’t play with CSS files on your websites to tweak your design unless you know about coding. Most beginners affect their site loading time by changing their CSS files randomly.
5. Keyword Research is the KEY
If you’re not optimizing your blog posts or web pages for the search engines, you are not going to get any traffic from search engines.
The key to increase your organic traffic is to write keyword rich contents that are perfectly optimized both for readers and search engines. Don’t stuff keywords though, use your primary keywords in your headlines, meta description, images and links.
Performing keyword research is not a rocket science, here are few simple tips to do it right.
- Use keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Market Samurai or Long Tail Pro to find keyword suggestions.
- Select the keywords that have low competition and more chances of getting high rankings.
- Focus on using long tail keywords like “SEO beginner tips” instead of short tail keywords like “SEO”. Short tail keywords are often competitive, and if you’ve a new website, it’s literally impossible to bring traffic from search engines. So always focus on searching for long tail keywords.
Once you’re done with the keyword research, write long and detailed articles. And use your keywords throughout your pages to get more visibility from search engines.
Also make sure to build links for the pages you want to rank for. You can use methods like guest blogging, blog commenting, outreach etc to build quality links to your sites. Backlinks are the backbone for any successful website that pulls massive traffic from search engines.
In a nutshell: Getting search engine traffic takes time and serious efforts. Avoid focusing on quick results rather spend your time on building natural links that improve your traffic in the long run. If you have a proper SEO strategy, by writing valuable contents, you bring more traffic and quality links from other sites.
Do you have any more SEO tips to increase website search traffic? Please share your thoughts in the comments.