Visit the Four SEO Best Practices for Driving Your Organic Traffic!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a powerful marketing tool that many companies visit and overlook when first building their website and content. An ideal scenario for many companies would be an automated lead generation system. Well, one of the most important lead generation methods is organic website traffic through SEO. Getting a potential look at your website, interacting with your white pages, or even contacting additional information directly are excellent talking points for the progress of the sale. When a user clicks on your website from a Google search, it shows genuine interest and a belief that your service or product could be the solution they are looking for.
Search engine optimization can help you increase organic traffic and create more responsive leads. The State of Inbound Marketing A report produced by Hubspot lists two powerful statistics that help solidify the importance of search engine optimization:
- SEO leads have a 14.6% completion rate, while outbound leads have a 1.7% completion rate.
- Leads from inbound links (referrals) are five times more likely to become customers than outbound leads.
The report offers a lot of additional insights into inbound marketing. I recommend reading through the full report when you have the time. Hopefully, by now you are desperate to dive into search engine optimization, and I have four main starting points for you to focus on.
1. Content
Content has become the king of search engine optimization. It is now necessary to create unique, engaging, and curated content for your website. This starts with the landing pages. Both the number of landing pages and the content of each page can affect your website’s SEO. You want to make sure you have enough landing pages for the content your business needs without duplicating the content between landing pages.
I know it’s tempting to create a large number of landing pages, but doing so creates visibility issues. Search engines are unlikely to show similar or identical landing pages. The search engine only selects one of the duplicate landing pages when a search takes place.
For the content itself, you want to focus on one main factor, meaningful content. The content you write should all focus on the value or solution that is being offered to the viewer.
Here are some examples of unique landing pages:
- The About Page: This is a brief summary of the company’s history and value proposition. This way, a lead can quickly understand your company and the value it can gain.
- The homepage: This is the first page that many viewers see on your website. Add meaningful graphics, links, and brief descriptions of your company and product. This will serve to keep readers interested and further progress on your website.
- The Products and Solutions Pages: This is the largest part of your website and provides details about the features, benefits, and different types of products or solutions that you offer.
There are many different pages you can create. Landing pages can vary depending on the product you are offering and the industry you are selling in. As with all marketing content, it is important to understand your demographics when creating your website content.
2. Keywords
Keywords are a notoriously difficult aspect of configuring SEO. It can often seem like a game of constant A / B testing until keywords are found that are having the greatest impact on your organic traffic.
I recommend choosing the keywords for your content carefully. Don’t leave them out entirely, but don’t fill your content with keywords either. It is important to curate the keywords that will be used to maximize your SEO. A good way to avoid keyword stuffing is to use keyword synonyms and secondary keywords instead of using the same keywords over and over again.
For example, let’s say you’re blogging about cooking a pizza from scratch. You want to have pizza as one of the keywords, but the others should be related concepts or products like batter, cooking, instructions, and pizza place. The keywords should all be relevant to the topic and target the right demographic group. Chances are, the keywords I used as examples aren’t the best options. You also want to research the popularity of the keywords you have chosen. Those who are searched for frequently will end up with many competing websites vying for the top spot on the search engine.
3. Backlinks
Backlinks are another essential part of SEO. Links to your website and published content that comes from other websites, be it community forums or professional blogs.
A lot on your keyword usage and the content you create. To get backlinks, you need strong brand awareness, popularity, and value creation. You also need content that is easy to navigate, read, and highly referenced.
When you first start, you may not have the brand awareness and content to get backlinks. If so, you’ll want to join community forums and other discussion platforms like Quora. You can also publish articles on Medium. These marketing methods will help you reach a wider audience and provide a natural approach to creating and sharing backlinks to your website.
4. Google search updates
Google has created an algorithm that deals with how content is displayed to a user during a search. The algorithm is constantly changing officially and unofficially. These changes are often minor, but they can affect the keywords that produce the best results, the parameters of what counts as a legitimate backlink, and can even change what type of content is given priority in the search. If you want to play an active role in maximizing your SEO, you need to keep abreast of changes to the Google algorithm.
As long as you’ve created a meaningful user experience for your website, these changes generally won’t affect your SEO. Nevertheless, you should keep an active eye on the Google Search Console and your Google Analytics. If you see a decrease in traffic, it may be time to review what has changed with the algorithm and make adjustments if necessary.
