How to increase traffic by 313% with SEO
We all know that SEO can dramatically increase your organic traffic. But figuring out how is a mystery for many website owners.
Here’s the reality…
Every website is different, requiring different strategies that depend on numerous factors (the existing website, niche, search competition and so on).
That being said, there are several actionable steps that are PROVEN to work, based on a recent case study of 3 websites (in hospitality, e-commerce, B2B lead generation).
Here are some of these key steps, broken down by the most common challenges that website owners face when it comes to SEO:
1) Growing traffic without scaling content
- Promote your site heavily across the Internet. Social networks, forums, Quora, your email lists – wherever you can.
- Technical SEO: Optimize query / URL parameters to help Google know what to crawl (and what not to). Reevaluate your XML sitemap. Fix any 404s and use 301 redirects to send traffic to valuable pages.
- Beef up your thin existing pages – ideally nothing less than 500 words a page.
2) Increasing keyword spread (without stuffing)
- With the advent of the Mobile-First index, delicately “hiding” content is no longer a negative for on-page SEO.
- Use dropdowns and similar functionality to add more, keyword-rich content to your pages without endless scrolling or unreadable keyword stuffing.
3) Building backlinking
- Get more aggressive about building backlinks from high-quality websites.
- In the case study, one retailer needed to acquire 30-40 new linking root domains each month to stay competitive in search!
- Reach out to sites (and follow up!) with incentives for linking to your site.
4) Narrowing down your keyword focus
- Apply the 80/20 rule to your SEO: Likely 20% of your SEO focus will generate 80% of your success, so focus tightly on those efforts.
- Rather than focusing on hundreds of keywords (which will take time and resources), direct your efforts to 5-10 core keywords and build off that.