Nearly 9 billion searches are made on Google daily! So with that being said SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a critical element in generating traffic to your online business whether you are into affiliate marketing, coaching, selling an online course, social media management, or whatever it is you do.
Now understand that many people are intimidated by SEO but it does not need to be hard or scary for you. There are easy ways to grow your traffic organically.
It’s very possible and even easy to get hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site per day using the right SEO techniques. However, there is no magic bullet when it comes to traffic generation and ranking #1 on Google. If there was everyone would be getting rich overnight. It’s easy and simple but it just takes a little time and persistence. How much time you ask well that depends on you but I would say roughly between 6 and 9 months to really get booming traffic daily that you can profit from on autopilot.
Here are some useful tips for you to follow that will greatly affect how much organic traffic you get from search engines.
1. Have Longform Content
Not just any long-form content it also has to have optimized images and optimized video. Video is completely blowing up so if you have YT videos embedded into your site it will set you apart from most of your competition.
On your long-form content for your top terms, you want those to be hubs of content. You want that content to list all the frequently asked questions, all the greatest images, and all the best videos on the topic and you want to link out to other areas or silos of content within your website that explain more about the topic. This is going to be really important, especially for those top competitive terms.
2. Check Your CTR (click-through rate)
If you go inside the Google Search Console there’s a really cool report that’s going to show you the click-through rate for the different pages on your website. If a certain page has a very high click-through rate that’s great and for the page that has a low click-through rate try to figure out what you’re doing on those other pages that are higher. Then you can improve your lower pages and something to consider is numbers really work quite well in your titles because it’s more attention-grabbing when people see it.
3. Update Your Most Important Content
Frequently update your most important high-volume pages that drive the most conversions every 6 months to make sure that your blog or website is totally up to date. You’re going to update your secondary content on a yearly basis so every single page on your website is updated once a year at a minimum. If you do that you’re going to continue to see fantastic growth on your website for the content that you have. This method shows Google that you are really serious about giving your audience the best information possible and you will rank higher in the SERPs for it.
4. Page Load Speed
If you have a WP blog I would highly suggest using a plugin called WP Rocket. It’s the top plugin that webmasters use to increase their load time. Google stated in 2018 that it is a very, very important ranking factor. There is also an indirect impact of slow load times which is a higher bounce rate. The higher the bounce rate is the more potential visitors and customers you will lose. Google recommends your page load time should be under two seconds but strive for 1/2 a second if possible.
Another simple thing you can do is to make sure that you have an HTTPS certificate. I got mine for this website on Fiverr for only $5 and this will make your site more secure and increase its creditability. Another option is you can get a Free SSL certificate with a HostGator plan.
5. Use Social Media
You want to get social shares and you want to continue growing your social media communities as well as expanding your engagement as that’s a very important thing to do. You can build an entire business model off of social media at this point but also when you get these social shares your website will get indexed very quickly. When new blog posts and new pages get a lot of shares and a lot of interaction from the users on these platforms they’re going to shoot straight to the top of the rankings.
Pro tip: if a page or blog post you previously shared on social media has dropped in search rankings, re-sharing it multiple times can aid in improving its position. So don’t hesitate to give this strategy a try.
6. Increased Brand Searches
Your website is your brand so the more people that search for it in Google the higher it will rank as a result. Google has gone on record saying that pages that get searched for more and brands that get searched for more often will rank higher in Google and that’s looked at as an indicator of quality and can help your search rankings so that’s what you should be doing to get more of an edge on the competition.
Running YouTube ads and Facebook ads and doing creative campaigns will build up your brand so you get more brand searches. It’s a good idea to do this because that’s going to allow you to get higher click-through rates from brand recognition in the SERPs and it’s going to allow you to get more direct traffic and all of that basically comes down to higher search engine rankings.
7. Discover Untapped Keywords
Here’s the truth. Keyword research is by far the most important part of SEO. Yeah. Even more important than backlinks, which we’ll talk about later. In fact, most people struggle with SEO because they target keywords that are just way too competitive. The truth is unless your site already has a ton of backlinks, there’s just no way that you’re going to rank for highly competitive keywords.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are already tons of low-competition keywords out there if you know how to find them. The best tool on the market to do this is Semrush. It allows you to get a quick analysis of your keywords. A complete list of all main keyword metrics, including volume, CPC, competition in paid search, top-ranking pages, ad copy, and more.
As I mentioned before, you just make a very long blog post about this keyword with images and maybe throw in a video and you stand a very good chance at ranking on page 1 of Google for that keyword and will also rank for other keywords.
8. Add XML Sitemap
XML sitemaps are specifically meant for search engines. An XML sitemap is a list of your website’s most important pages. It also categorizes your website’s content into posts, pages, and all of the different types of content you might have on your site. This categorization helps search engines understand the structure of your website. These categories all have their own separate sitemap. This helps with SEO because you want Google to crawl your updated content as soon as possible.
In short, XML sitemaps give search engines an overview of your content, they can provide backup in case of bad internal linking, they can assist with crawling, and they give important additional information to search engines, like when the content was last updated and how it all ties together.
But how do you create an XML sitemap? You can create your own XML sitemap with the AIOSEO plugin. If you have this plugin installed, it creates an XML sitemap for your site automatically.
AIOSEO splits up large XML sitemaps to keep them fast, and you can add your sitemap to Google Search Console and other webmaster tools. This will help search engines find your sitemap fast and allow you to check for sitemap errors. To add an XML sitemap to your site you could also find someone on Fiverr to do that for you for cheap but I recommend just using the plugin.
9. Build Backlinks
Backlinks help Google crawl your site faster which, in turn, helps new pages on your site get indexed faster and rank higher in the search results. They also send a lot of referral traffic to your site for free.
One thing that I do not recommend doing is buying backlinks, however. Google greatly frowns upon this and if you do it your site could actually drop in the rankings as a result of being penalized. Instead, you can steal your top competitor’s backlinks with Semrush and get a long list of backlinks with this tool in minutes and the tool allows you to reach out to the websites that have contact information so you can request that they link back to you.
This is kind of like cheating but it works! You can also see exactly how authoritative a referring domain is and where it’s located and more. This gives you a very competitive edge and will allow you to get a boatload of traffic to your blog or site as the end result!
10. Add Alt Text To Your Images
Image Alt text or tag optimization is good for search engines and for visitors to your site as well. This allows search engine bots to see what the picture is about because the bots that crawl your site can not see your picture. This will also help the images themselves be ranked in Google Images. If someone is searching for an image they can find yours and if they click on it it will take them back to your site on the page where it is posted.
Your image alt text should be no more than 125 characters and should accurately describe what the picture is but don’t make it too long. Try to keep it more on the short side if possible you don’t need to use all 125 characters. Also, say what is in the picture in the file name as well so for example if you have a picture of a red Ferrari name that file red Ferrari. The alt text itself could be “red Ferrari parked in the city” if that’s what you see in the picture.
So just keep in mind that alt text is just another component of the entire SEO equation that should not be overlooked.
Bonus Tip
Don’t use more than one page builder in your WordPress blog. If you have WPBakey and Eliminator and Siteorgion installed deactivate the ones you don’t want to use and just stick with just one.
I personally use Eliminator as it’s easy to use and very popular among bloggers. Page builders make your website load slower because there is more code being used. So if you have 2 or 3-page builders active on your WordPress blog then it will take much longer to load which will ultimately hurt your SEO.
SEO for Marketing – Summary
Search Engine Optimization is so powerful because it allows you to gain so much free traffic. Search traffic is the best type of buyer traffic because when someone is ready to buy something they do a Google search on the pain point or problem that they are having. They are not going to go to Facebook and look for some ad to click on they are going to go to Google before anything else.
Many top internet markers that get hundreds of thousands of visitors to their website monthly come from organic search not paid traffic. If you are building a blog or website around a very competitive niche it can take some time to get ranked in the search results but if you do your due diligence you can get amazing amounts of traffic and revenue for free!
