In your business' never-ending quest to build brand loyalty, you've probably spent a lot of time developing a content strategy to maximize your website traffic.
Your customers need to trust the content that you provide for them on your website, the same way they know Northsail always delivers our projects on-time, on-spec, and on-budget.
It's also a good idea to spend some time thinking about how to optimize your content with SEO, so you can attract as much organic traffic as possible.
With that in mind, we've got some tips on how to increase your organic traffic that you can use the next time that you're updating your SEO strategy.
There are a lot of different ways that you can draw traffic to your website.
Some of the most common forms that marketers are familiar with is direct traffic (any traffic where you can't pinpoint the source of referral), paid search traffic (i.e., Google Ads, Amazon Ads, etc.), and of course, organic traffic.
Organic traffic is the traffic that your website draws through search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
This is possibly the most valuable form of traffic, because if you've done a good job optimizing your site to maximize organic traffic, you could start to see a traffic spike in visitors each month.
Before you get into your content development and strategizing about how you want to move your marketing strategies forward, you'll want to take some time to do website traffic analysis on your existing site.
Website traffic analysis is a great way to show you where your website is currently lacking, so that when you're developing your plan of action, you can focus on closing some of the gaps in your own search engine optimization tactics.
Investing in a website traffic checker is a great way to give you some very clear numbers on the number of visitors you're seeing through your organic search traffic, and then compare those numbers to the number of conversions that you're seeing on a weekly/monthly basis.
Also, a website traffic checker will also help make it clear where your search rankings are lacking, or places where search engine bots aren't indexing/crawling your content as efficiently as you'd like.
Not only does organic traffic make it easier to find your business amongst other competitors in your industry, but it also increases the amount of relevant traffic that makes its way through to your site.
A strong content marketing strategy will not only fill content gaps that your competitors are missing, but it will provide meaningful pieces of content for your visitors to enjoy.
If you're smart about how you design your content to match search queries, you'll also find that the visitors you're getting are of a higher caliber - closer to the bottom of your marketing funnel.
This means that your click-through rates and traffic from search engines will be higher, and the number of conversions you're seeing will go up as well; even if the number of visitors per month doesn't rise dramatically.
One of the most valuable SEO tools in your toolbelt is the use of target keywords in your content.
Not only will these naturally help build organic traffic (as long as the relevant keywords keep trending), but effective use of keywords is something that helps build credibility for your website within Google Analytics.
You can include these in your main landing pages, in blog posts, and other types of content, like long-form content (i.e., guides, eBooks, etc.).
If you're not sure where to start with keywords, consider paying for a keyword research tool that you can use during your marketing strategy planning.
Just be sure to focus on including a mix of popular keywords and long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are typically a bit longer, but they're also more specific. This means you'll be more likely to hit your target demographics, as long as you're tactical in which keywords you choose to include.
This might seem like an obvious suggestion, but you'd be surprised how often marketers and business owners try to stuff irrelevant content into their site (i.e., keyword stuffing, etc.), because they believe that it will bring in more organic traffic.
But this is actually a counterproductive move. Even if you're able to draw in a higher search volume through the use of irrelevant content, you're going to see your bounce rate spike alongside your incoming traffic numbers.
No one wants to read a random blog that has nothing to do with what your business is offering to your customers. It might seem proactive and educationally driven, but irrelevant blog content comes off as amateurish.
In short, it makes your business look inexperienced, disorganized, and worse of all, unreliable.
If you're going to be including internal links or external links in your content strategy, it's imperative that you ensure all these links work.
A single broken link can distract from your user intent, and encourage them to turn their attention to one of your competitors that has a more functional website.
Having broken links can also affect the search algorithms that Google and other search engines use to decide whether your website is the one that they'd like to recommend to people searching in your industry.
Plus, it has a huge negative impact on your user experience, which is what will encourage customers to return to your website again in the future; as long as your site didn't push them away the first time, and they're happy with your products/services.
In addition to valuable blog posts, you'll want to try and include some relevant video content for your visitors as well.
This can be a great way to help customers see the value in products that you're releasing, or appreciate new models of existing products, which may have different models/colors/etc.
With a bit of valuable video content for your website, you can dramatically improve your user experience, especially if you're in an industry where seeing is believing when it comes to product use.
BONUS TIP: All your content should be meaningful content, so if there's ever a question about whether it adds value to your site, it might be time to consider removing it.
In today's digital world, more people than ever are using their phones and tablets to browse the internet and even do their shopping.
Keeping this in mind, it's essential that the mobile version of your site functions just as well as it does on a desktop or laptop computer.
Without taking this into consideration, certain parts of your content strategy might become challenging to manage. Long-form content becomes hard to read. Title tags become hard to find and click.
In turn, this will negatively impact your search engine rankings, which can cause your business to miss out on potential customers that may not see your business pop up in their SERPs anymore.
Honestly, this might be the most important tip we can make for you. Not having a functional mobile version can be a death sentence for an online business.
High-quality or viral content is a great way to draw attention and engagement from your consumer base. Low-quality content makes your site feel unprofessional, even if your content's subject matter is really well written.
With all the focus in recent years on social media marketing, you want your followers to do social shares or leave positive customer testimonials when you make a post.
But with a low-quality site (or low-quality content/images on your site), you'll lose the ability to connect with a portion of your incoming visitors, even if you've got plenty of relevant topics and content on your website.
Not every content idea is a good one, even if it seems that way at first. Be sure to evaluate your content pieces ahead of uploading them to your site to ensure they won't accidentally be detrimental to your content marketing plan.
Guest posts are one of the most overlooked content pieces that could have a huge positive impact on your organic search traffic.
If you've ever heard of link building, you'll know that these are a great way to piggyback with another strategic partner that also has a solid following, and then use their credibility to promote your product/brand.
Often, these partnerships are best formed with more authoritative sites that also have strong on-page SEO, and also have a lot of relevant online content/original content.
Partnering with these credible sites will help add credibility to your own website, as long as you include authority links back to the guest's site.
In turn, these posts can provide great evergreen content for both your site and your partners - it's a win-win!
If you're planning a strong organic traffic strategy, you don't want to waste a ton of time putting together your website, so that you can start getting the conversions you need to succeed.
Thankfully, Northsail's newest service – Horizon - is here to help!
Horizon makes it a breeze to build high-performance landing pages, custom forms, and widgets - quickly and easily - without the need for the developer.
Best of all, you can try Horizon for yourself for free for 30 days, with no obligation or payments required. We won't even take your credit card information until after your trial is over.
If you're ready to take back control of your website projects and want to be able to control all your campaigns from a single, intuitive dashboard, then what are you waiting for?
We’ll send you important updates about the early access program and your free invite when we are ready.
Your contact information will only be used for the early access program, not for future sales and marketing.