SEO Marketing: All I Want For Christmas Is Organic Search Traffic
Ho, ho, SEO! SEO, or search engine optimization, is key to building a strong, online presence. According to imFORZA, about 75% of users will never scroll past the first page of search results. That’s why it’s so important to invest time and money into SEO marketing if you want to get in front of your target audience. Whether holiday shoppers know what they’re looking for or need some guidance, creating a strong online presence can help ensure your business is top of mind during their online shopping this year. Here are some helpful tips to getting more organic search traffic to your website this season.
1. Create Relatable Content For Your Website
Make sure you’re writing high-quality, relevant content to publish on your website. Contrary to popular belief, you shouldn’t write content just for the sake of content. Quality is much better than quantity in this case. In order to create a winning SEO content strategy, we recommend you do the following:
- Identify Your Target Audience: Knowing who your target audience is will help you create content that will resonate with them.
- Define Your Core Topics: Determine what topics you are going to focus on. Make sure they are topics that not only align with your products, services, and brand, but that also are topics your audience will want to read about.
- Pinpoint Keywords That Work: Come up with keywords, or phrases, that will help increase your search engine presence through your content.
- Optimize Wherever You Can – When You Can: Optimize to help improve your rankings and reach the largest possible number of people in your target audience. Some ways to optimize content include: producing call-to-actions, generating backlinks, writing compelling meta descriptions and title tags, including relevant keywords, and more.
- Keep Information Relevant and Current: You should always be updating and repurposing content in order to keep them as relevant and as current as possible.
- Track Your Success: Track how successful your blogs and articles are. Are they producing conversions? Are they getting increased traffic? Closely monitor what’s working well and what isn’t.
When writing content for your website, you should also write like you’re writing for humans – not for bots. Make sure to use a conversational tone of voice and don’t be afraid to show your personality. This will help humanize your brand more, make you appear more authentic and real, and build trust with potential customers.
2. Include Relevant Keywords
Keywords aren’t always just words – they can be phrases too! You want to choose keywords your customers may be using to search for products or services like yours. They need to be relevant to your offerings and brand in order to be effective, though. This is where you should consider using keyword tools, like Google Search Console, Moz Keyword Explorer, SEMRush, and Soovle. They will help you narrow down keywords and choose the best ones for your business.
Here are some keyword best practices:
- Make A List: Start out by making a list of topics based on what your business offers. Make this list as long as you want because you can always narrow it down later based on your research.
- Identify The Search Volume: You can type in a keyword or phrase into your chosen keyword tool, and you’ll be able to see the monthly search volume for that keyword. This will tell you how important it is to your target audience, and if it is one worth using or not.
- Choose Low-Competition Keywords: You may have found one keyword to have received billions of searches, and assume that is one you want to use as well. However, you don’t want keywords that are super, ultra competitive. Most keyword tools will show you the overall difficulty score for each keyword that’ll give you a general sense of a keywords’ level of competition.
Pro Tip: Avoid “keyword stuffing”, which refers to the practice of overloading (or stuffing) a piece of content with keywords in an effort to get that content to rank higher on search engine results. Keyword stuffing can actually do the opposite, and come off as spam to your potential customers. This will do nothing more than harm your SEO rankings.
3. Prep Your Site For An Increase Of Traffic
Search engine optimization is designed to bring more people to your website. When people land on your website, you want to make sure it’s providing them with a positive user experience. First, check the site speed of your website. According to Google, 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. If you have a website that creates a satisfying user experience, you’ll also satisfy Google – and rank higher! Secondly, make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Chances are, most of your customers are using their mobile devices to research companies like yours. If they visit your website on a mobile device, will it be easy to navigate and understand? When a website isn’t easy to scroll through, chances are people will leave and that bounce rate will impact your search rankings.
4. Craft Campaigns That Speak To Their Needs
When coming up with SEO campaigns, you must think about what customers want and what is going to get you the most website traffic. Ask yourself this important question: why are people searching? Knowing what their goals are when searching online will help you better craft campaigns that will directly speak to their needs. There are three categories of user intent (and a few examples) that we cover briefly below:
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- Navigational: User wants to find a specific page.
- Search: “VitalStorm”
- User Intent: looking to find a link to that specific website
- Informational: User is just searching for information about a specific topic. They want to learn something.
- Search: “best and cheapest toilet brands”
- User Intent: seeking an article that covers this topic so they can learn more about this topic
- Commercial/Transactional: User is prepared to make a purchase, or find out more information (but with their end goal being to buy).
- Search: “emergency plumbing contractor”
- User Intent: looking for a site (or company) featuring this service
- Navigational: User wants to find a specific page.
Search engines are extremely smart. Google wants to connect people with the content that meets their needs in order to provide the best experience for them. If you know and understand the intent of your customers, create content that resonates with them, and use keywords that are relevant, then you will rank higher on SERPs (search engine page results).