The art of getting traffic to your website by improving its ranking on search engines is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It involves on-site and off-site efforts to optimize your website which results in boosting your Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and website traffic. Here are a few steps that you can incorporate to improve the flow of organic traffic on your site:
Website Performance
To get insight into the performance of your website, you can activate your Google Search Console, verify the ownership of your website, and get the status of your website’s current health. It is a free tool to find technical errors and correct them to improve your website’s health. Running the Google Search Console reveals the warnings, urgent actions, areas to focus on, and recommendations in the form of reports. The tool guides you to fix the errors and run it again to see the progress over time.
Target Market and Budget
Identification of your target audience and competitors is the critical step in optimizing your organic traffic as it helps you to invest your actions in the right direction. Defining your audience and competitors allow you to understand them, so let’s explore how to find out your audience:
- Explore who is visiting on your website
- See if these visitors are converting into buyers
- Understand the audience such as their interests, preferences, location, demographics, etc.
- Create visitor persona for different segments of visitors
You can identify your competitors by finding out the website that ranks highest on the search engine for the keywords you are trying to rank. To improve your position on the search pages you need to dominate these websites. Besides search engines, explore social media networks to get more insight on your competitors.
SEO Strategy
To overpower your competitors, you need to dig deeper into their SEO strategy. When you will try to understand your competitors, you may understand how it has achieved a better ranking than your website. The first thing that you can observe on the competitors’ websites is their performance, visual appeal, and functionality. Check if the competitors’ website authority is better than yours. Evaluate the back links and quality of content on the competitors’ websites. Research the high authority back links and find some good links for your website like health, education, government, etc. Catching up with your competitors will be easy if you get strong back links. One by one, you should compare your insights from the Google Console Search with your competitors’ and pay attention to the key points of improvements.
Content strategy and On-site content
After adjusting the technical SEO of your website, you need to create a competitive content strategy and on-page content to optimize your search engine ranking. Your SEO strategy and goals define your current content infrastructure. Both SEO strategy and content strategy work side-by-side to improve web traffic. You can trace the improvements on each page by resubmitting the sitemap on Google. Identify topics relevant to your business based on the keywords your website should rank for. Utilizing SEO techniques create high-quality and rich content, which will improve the organic website traffic. You can prioritize the content and schedule it for regular posting on the website based on the search keyword volumes for your target audience. Continue to improve your content by getting insights from the tools that educate you about your target audience and what type of content they want to see. It is good to compare your content with better-performing websites and make relevant changes to yours. One useful content strategy is continuing to update the content on the website as per the new insights; this will help Google to keep your website to come in the top pages because of the fresh updates.
Technical SEO
Fast, useable, and easy-to-navigate websites are rewarded with a better ranking than slow, problematic, and confusing to navigate. If users find it easy to use your website and take action where necessary. You can find the areas for improvement using a technical SEO checklist. One of the factors that affect your web performance is the mobile-friendliness of your website. You need to optimize all screens of your website for different mobile devices or sizes. This makes your website more responsive and usable. All images on your website should be reduced to help the pages load faster. Also, check your website for broken links. Fix any 404 error pages, replace 301 redirects, improve your internal linking, remove keyword cannibalization, optimize your metadata, and add schema content markup.
Maintain Ranking
Getting a good ranking on search engines is a constant struggle and you need to continue putting-in efforts to maintain your ranking. Otherwise, the competitors will overpower you and grab the traffic, consequently the sales and revenue. In order to maintain your ranking you should have to keep adding new blogs on your website that brings lots of traffic on your website. Also apply best strategies for off page activities. Besides working on technical and non-technical SEO, you can utilize inorganic channels to bring traffic to your website through social media marketing and PPC.