Want more traffic from Google?

Great!

While doing your research, you must have seen this…

A business which has just started a few months (or a year) ago eventually gets to the top of a Google search and makes a lot of buzz on the internet.

How did they do it? Do they know some secret SEO strategy? Or maybe they bribed Google’s employee to give them an advantage?

Fortunately for everyone, bribing is not the secret to their success.

It’s a simple, solid SEO strategy they adopted to make it possible.

In this post, I’m going to expose the full SEO plan that growing brands follow to skyrocket their ranking on search engines.

It’s a six-step process, and I’ll explain everything step-by-step.

Ready?

Warning: If you’re lazy, want some kind of shortcut, or think SEO is a one day game, I’d suggest you leave this page right now. It’s not for you.

Still here?

Awesome!

Here are the six steps (you can skip ahead by clicking on the links below):

1. SEO tool setup (Monitor performance and growth)
2. Keyword research
3. Content strategy
4. On-site optimization
5. Off-site optimization
6. Technical SEO

Let’s get into each section one by one.

Step 1: SEO Tool Setup (Monitor Performance and Growth)

An important thing you need – before anything else – is a proper system in place so that you can easily measure your website’s performance and growth from day one.

SEO is a long-term investment. You can’t afford to run the whole strategy and end up with no metrics to measure your ROI.

Though there are many tools available in the market, the following two tools are essential when you start.

Add your website into Google Search Console

Google Search Console a.k.a. GSC (formerly known as Google Webmaster tool) is a free web service by Google for webmasters that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google search results.

GSC has many valuable features including:

• indexing your content fast
• knowing which queries your site appears in the search results
• monitoring backlinks
• fixing website errors
• Submitting your sitemap (more on this later)
• and lots more

Here’re the steps to add your site to Google Search Console:

#1. Login to your GSC account and click ‘Add Property’

#2. Next, add your homepage URL into the given textbox.

That’s it!

The last step you need to do is verify your website.

Here’s a detailed guideline on how to do it:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35179?hl=en

Setup Google Analytics

Another tool from Google’s family is Google Analytics. It allows you to monitor your website traffic and analyze the visiting pattern and behavior of your readers.

Here’re some cool things you can do with Google Analytics:

• Determine the source of your website traffic
• Identify your top performing pages
• Identify your worst performing pages
• Determine where your best visitors are located
• Find out where people abandon your site
• and much more

Again, adding GA to your website is simple and straightforward. Here’s the process:

#1. Login to your GA account and click Admin

#2. In the left panel, select the account in which you want to add your website, and then click “Create Property” button

#3. Fill in your website details and click “Get Tracking ID”

Now you need to add that tracking code to your website. Refer to this guide for more details.

Pro Tip: Integrate your Google Analytics account with Google Search Console. You’ll get a whole lot of useful SEO information inside your Google Analytics account.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1308621?hl=en

Step 2: Keyword Research

Keyword research is the first step of any SEO strategy.

You can’t rank well until you know what words or phrases you want to rank for, and what content you need to develop for that.

The purpose of keyword research is to find the right keywords for your business, to know what it’ll take to rank for them and come up with some content ideas as well.

Let’s see how to do it effectively.

Collect core keywords

A common mistake most businesses do is jumping straight into a keyword research tool from the beginning.

And it can costs them big sometimes.

They end up wasting hours and found nothing suitable. Or worst, come out with a wrong targeted list of keywords.

The first thing you need is to brainstorm and jot down some words and phrases that you think relates to your business goals.

For example, if you’re a sports shoe manufacturing company, you may come up with terms like jogging shoes, sportswear, running tips, buy running shoes, and many more.

It’s basically your brain dump process. And these words and phrases will push your keyword research process in the right direction.

At this stage, some unrelated terms will come to your mind but don’t worry about that. Just jot down everything. You’ll filter those irrelevant terms later on.

Pro Tip: Think of angles and demands you want to cover and then think of possible search queries people may use for that.

Discover long tail keywords

Okay, now you have a list of some keywords. But obviously, these aren’t the words you want to target.

Most of them will be useless to you. And some of them will be so competitive that ranking for them is almost impossible.

For now, you need to use these terms as a base to go further in your keyword research process.

You have to find some long tail keywords that are less competitive and have the potential to bring you the moderate amount of targeted traffic.

If you don’t know what long tail keywords are, these are phrases (3+ words long) that are highly specific, and the people using these keywords are more targeted to their problems and tend to buy more often.

Though broad keywords holds huge amount of traffic, long tail keywords have a much higher conversion rate.

And the best part is, long-tail keywords account for 70% of all web searches.

In other words, long-tail keywords are how people actually search the internet.

To find long tail keywords for your website, there are many tools available online. Here are a few of them:

• Google keyword planner
• Ubersuggest
• Keyword tool
• KWFinder
• Quora
• Answer the public
• Google Auto Suggest

Study your competitors

Every story has a villain.

And SEO is no exception.

Many other websites are targeting the same keywords that you have in your list. And some of them already rank on top.

To beat your competitors, you must know them well. You must know their strengths and weaknesses. You must know exactly where they stand so that you can make a plan to beat them.

So the question you may ask is how can I spy on my competitors.

Well, that’s not the right question. There are many competitor analysis tools available for this like Ahrefs, Semrush, SpyFu, and Moz.

The right question is what to spy. What information you should look for when studying the competitors.

When you enter your rival’s website address into an analysis tool, you may get bombarded with random numbers and complicated metrics. You may feel overwhelmed.

That being said, to know what to find is more important than knowing how to find.

Initially, you should be interested in only 3 things.

• What keywords are your competitors targeting?
• What content do they have based on those keywords?
• What are the sources of their backlinks?

That’s it.

Use any of the competitor tools listed above to spy on your competitors for the metrics I’ve listed. You’ll have a better understanding of how you measure up against them.

Identify the intent and context of each keyword

An important part of your SEO strategy – that is often overlooked – is finding the intent of your target searchers, and then understanding the possible contexts so that you can develop specific content that will solve a very specific problem.

When people start searching, they may have a specific goal in the mind. Or maybe they’re just looking for general information about the topic.

For example, when someone searches “interior house paint,” are they looking to buy the paint, tips on interior house paint, or design ideas for the phrase interior house paint?

Once you get the intent of your target searchers, you have to find the context of their search.

For example, a searcher looking for design ideas for interior house paint may want to brighten his kitchen, while another one may want to make his living room look bigger.

You see, that is two different context behind the same search (intent).

You have to brainstorm possible context for each keyword so that you can develop the specific content for the user.

Group the keywords and create a final list

The last critical part of your keyword research process is keywords grouping.

When you generate a lot of keywords, things become chaotic. Everything looks random and difficult to grasp. You need to organize the list and create metrics that you can easily understand and make a plan out of it.

Filter all the unwanted keywords. Separate broad keywords and sub-keywords. Add additional data like average monthly traffic, and competition.

Map out what keywords belong to what pages so that you can avoid creating pages that compete against each other for the same keyword.

It may feel tedious and boring, but this step is necessary.

Step 3: Content Strategy

You’ve figured out what your target audience is searching, and you’ve finalized the keywords you want to target and the intent and context behind each search.

Now it’s time to develop content around these topics.

Write Crazy, In-Depth Content

More than 2 million articles are published every day. And most of them are dreaming of ranking on the first page of Google search results.

But that doesn’t happen.

You can’t just churn out some random articles and expect results. That’s like throwing a dart at a bullseye… blindfolded.

You need to be strategic, aware of the existing top content, and able to find the gap you can fulfill.

Here’s the process:

#1. Enter your targeted keyword in Google and open the first result (not sponsored)

#2. Carefully look at the content and analyze everything. Content type, the structure, content length, keyword density, angle of coverage, usage of tags, and more. The more information you get, the better it is.

#3. After analyzing the content, ask yourself what more you can add to this. Are there any gaps that needs attention? Or maybe you can cover this topic from a different angle.

#4. Repeat the same process (from 1 to 3) for the next 9 search results.

#5. Now after analyzing the top 10 pages based on your targeted keyword, it’s time to write your content. And aim to write 10x better than all the existing content.

Add an ascension path to each page you publish

So what is an ascension path?

An ascension path is the next step that you’d like your readers to take after consuming your content. Whatever that next step is depends on your goal.

If your goal is to generate leads, then you can offer a lead magnet in the form of an easy to consume checklist. Your reader would need to enter their contact information in order to gain access to this valuable piece of content.

The most effective form of lead magnet aligns with the content they are currently consuming.

For example, if your article is about “11 Best Vegan Weight Loss Foods”, then you can offer a lead magnet called “The Vegan Diet Checklist” to generate qualified leads for your business. After reading your article, the next ascension path is crystal clear.

Regularly publish new content

SEO isn’t a one day game. It’s a long-term capital investment. And you need to be consistent with publishing new content.

The more quality content you publish, the faster you’ll grow. Search engines will get the impression that you’re active, and readers stick with you, too.

So, is there any standard or mark for how often you should publish?

Fortunately not. It varies depending upon your niche, business model, and market demands.

For example, if you’re an online publishing brand who writes about businesses, you may need to publish dozens of articles in a day. On the other hand, if you’re a small company providing website designing services, publish one post a week would be enough.

So, is it necessary to write long, in-depth content only?

Absolutely, not.

You don’t need to write something groundbreaking every time. You can also try some short posts – not to rank for search engines but improves your authority.

What matters is that you’re consistent.

Update the old content

Some businesses make a mistake of focusing more on producing new content but forget their old content along the way.

Unfortunately, search engines don’t forget your content. It stays indexed in Google’s database for as long as it’s accessible on the internet.

As the time passes by, your content becomes old. What is fresh today, becomes outdated and stale tomorrow. And neither search engines nor your readers would prefer old, musty information.

You should keep your content updated because…

• • It gives the impression to search engines that you care enough to provide updated information to your audience, which gives a performance boost to your ranking.
  • Updating existing content is much easier than writing it from scratch
  • It gives you another chance to promote and reach to the new audience

Pro Tip: When you update your content, show “last updated” date instead of “published date.”

Step 4: On-site Optimization (a.k.a On-page SEO)

Writing great content is just one part of the deal. You have to optimize the web pages, too, so that the search engine algorithm can understand your content with ease.

Make SEO friendly URLs

Look at the following URL:

http://www.example.com/index.php?id_sezione=360&sid=3a5ebc944f41daa6f849f730f1

Does it make sense? Can you guess the content of the page by reading these numbers?

You can’t.

It’s complicated. For both, humans as well as search engines.

Now look at this:

https://example.com/content-marketing

Easy. Isn’t it?

It’s short, clear, and you can get the idea of what the content is about by reading the URL.

Google prefer URLs which is:

• short and easy to understand
• have the primary keyword
• Use a hyphen to separate the words. For example, https://yourwebsite.com/seo-strategy

Read more about URL structure here.

Write an SEO friendly title

I won’t sugarcoat this.

The title (headline) is the most vital part of any web page. It’s even more important than the actual content.

The headline is the first thing people read on a web page. If you fail to get the reader’s attention there, you’ll lose a potential buyer. And the fewer clicks you get, the more your position will go down in search engines.

Here’re some of my tips for writing headlines:

• Keep the headline under 65 characters. Longer than this will cut in the search results
• Include your targeted keyword in the title. Earlier the better
• Make sure your headline awakes curiosity or promise something

Create an optimized meta description

A meta description is an HTML tag that summarizes the page’s content. Search engines mostly show the snippet of meta description below the headline when someone searches for phrases.

Here’s how it looks:

Search engines examine the meta description to get the idea of page’s content so that they can serve the best results to the user’s query.

Keep the following points in mind while writing a meta description:

• Keep it around 155-160 characters only
• It should contain the focus keyword
• It should contain the call-to-action

Link to authority sites in your content

When you mention some facts and figures in your content, you refer to the sources.

These external (outbound) links help to increase your credibility because

• It shows you’ve done your research and have expertise in the subject matter
• It builds your relationship with other domain experts
• It makes visitors want to come back for analysis on future topics

Create internal linking

Internal linking is cross-referring to different pages of your website.

It’s as significant as external linking because a well-structured interlinking distributes link juice between the pages and enhances the site’s overall authority in search.

Create an excel sheet (or some other system) to archive all the important pages of your website and categorize them according to the topics and keywords so that you can easily find and refer to a relevant page when needed.

Fix broken links

Over a period of time, some links get broken in your website. It happens because the web page you have linked may not be available anymore. It might have been deleted or redirected to some other address.

Broken (non-working) links annoy users and discourage them from using the website which gives a bad experience to the user, and it’s not good from the point of SEO.

Search engines take broken links abnormally as it restricts the flow of link equity throughout your site. The more you have it, search engine robots mark you as a low-quality website.

To find broken links on your website, you can try any of the following tools.

• Dead link checker
• Broken link checker

Pro Tip: Look at your content archive and check if you have a related page that you can replace to fix that broken link.

Use ALT and H tags properly

ALT tag is used to give names to images.

Search engines are unable to identify images accurately, so a proper name is given to them in the form of text. If an image doesn’t load on the browser for any reason, the ALT tag description associated with that image will be displayed on the screen.

Another influential HTML tag is H (or heading).

It indicates the priority of the text as H1 for the main title, H2 for the subtitle and so on.

Use breadcrumbs

A breadcrumb is an internal navigation scheme that reveals the user’s current location on a website.

If your website is small or the structure is pretty simple, you don’t need breadcrumb. But if your site’s structure is complicated, you have to guide the users through the website in a logical way.

Again, it generates a better user experience which means more points from search engines.

Use schema markup

It’s a technique to structure and optimize your content in such a way that it stands out as a rich snippet in the search result.

For example, you search “best tools for SEO” on Google, and you’ll get the following result (things change with time so you may see a different image).

As you can see the result on top is coming from a website that ranks on position number 3 in the actual list for this keyword.

This is the rich snippet, and you’re seeing this result from “Oberlo” because they’ve optimized this page using schema markup.

For those who don’t know what schema markup is, Schema markup is code that you put on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users.

It helps your website to rank better for the variety of content types like articles, local business, reviews, and more.

Learn more about it here.

Maximize readability

Did you know when viewing a website, it takes users less than two-tenths of a second to form a first impression?

Of course, users couldn’t read the content in such a short time. They get a sense of how your website is designed and structured.

If they see a page with a long wall of congested text, full of distracting images or ads, they’ll quickly click the back button.

Content matter but if the design and appearance of the website aren’t good, even your great content can’t help you.

You have to present and design your pages in such a way that it appeals to your readers, instead of pushing them away.

Here’re some of my tips to enhance readability:

• Write short paragraphs and use bullets whenever possible
• Give proper white spaces between words and paragraphs. Let your content breathe
• Don’t use non-relevant images or other graphics that distract the users

Optimize your website load time

How long do you wait before you leave a website if it doesn’t load on your browser?

Let me guess …

Is it 3 seconds?

Or, if you’re a man of patience – like me – you still couldn’t wait more than 5-7 seconds.

No, I’m not making up these figures. A study says that consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.

Source: https://www.relentlesstechnology.com/insights/page-speed.htm

In fact, Google has also confirmed that they take website speed as a ranking factor.

To get Google’s love, you need to speed up your website. Optimize the code, compress images, and kill anything that makes you slow.

Following are some free tools where you can check your web page speed:

• PageSpeed Insights
• GTmetrix
• Pingdom

Create liquid pages (mobile friendly websites)

Your web pages should be like water.

You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot.

In other words, you should have a responsive website that has the ability to restructure itself according to the screen size of the user.

Why?

Because the number of people browsing the internet on mobile has already surpassed the number of people using the internet on desktop.

A study found six in 10 internet users start shopping on one device but continue or finish on a different one. People are constantly switching between devices and expect a website to give a soothing experience across all the platforms.

And so does Google.

Note: Don’t create a separate version of the website for mobile users. This will steal authority and link equity from your primary domain.

Step 5: Off-site Optimization (a.k.a Offpage SEO)

This is probably the most challenging part of an SEO strategy. Here you take actions outside of your website to impact your rankings in the search results.

Let’s learn about this.

Create a link building strategy

Link building is so important that some people call it off-site optimization. This is the most influential part that affects your search engine ranking.

In fact, I wouldn’t mind saying the difference between a website that ranks well and the one that doesn’t depend on the quality of your backlink profile.

You can’t just rely on your quality content and on-site optimization techniques to get SEO traction. You have to generate some quality inbound links to see the actual results.

Though I can’t cover everything in this post, the following are some tips:

• Simply ask your colleagues, partners, clients that have a website or blog to give you a backlink
• Guest post on other related blogs and add a link to your web page
• Find where your competitors are generating links from, and reach out to those websites.

Here’s a detailed SEO link building strategy that you can follow.

Create your social media strategy

Almost half of the earth’s population is on social media. That’s the biggest market in the world.

Your content is a waste if it doesn’t reach the right audience. Social media is an opportunity to reach the maximum number of people at any given time.

You need to develop a social media plan so that you can reach maximum people in a more efficient way.

The more people know you, the better your brand will be. The better your brand, the authority will boost. The more the authority, your ranking will increase.

Here’re the steps you can take to use social media to amplify your message:

• Get crystal clear on who your audience are, their demographic, their interests, and the social network they like to spend their time online
• Create a business profile on each social network
• Create a social media calendar to share your content, quotes, tips, and your industry expertise
• Engage with every person that interacts with your business’ social media account
• Build a community

Participate in the top industry forums

What do you do when you can’t find an answer on Google?

You ask a friend, or you get into a related industry forum and post your question there.

A whole lot of users are browsing related forums, searching new information, tips, reviews, and much more. There you have a chance to participate in the discussion, answering questions, and leave a backlink to your relevant page for more information if needed.

You’ll get new readers which means more traffic and ranking.

Here’re some big Q&A platforms where you can find industry-specific boards:

• Quora
• Reddit
• Yahoo Answers
• Answerbag

Register a local business in Google map (Local SEO)

Let’s do a task.

Open up Google on your mobile and ask “Thai food near me.” Magically Google will display you the location of a nearby restaurant where you can enjoy Thai food.

So, how does Google know about these businesses? It’s because these businesses are listed in Google’s database.

If you have a brick and mortar business and you want to target a particular area, you should add your business to Google business listing so that local users can find you easily.

Here’s the guide of how to add your business to Google map

https://support.google.com/business/answer/2911778

Collect positive reviews about your product and services

People read reviews before they take a purchase decision. What others think about you does matter to people and search engines, too.

Search engines evaluate mentions and reviews of a website to adjust their SERP – especially in local SEO.

So, encourage your users to write reviews about your services so that you can get some SEO boost.

Here’re a few tips from Google on how to write great reviews.

Step 6: Technical SEO

Besides on page and off page SEO, there are some technical aspects that affect your search ranking. You have to consider them on the website.

Run your website on HTTPS

Security is a top priority for Google.

And Google wants all other businesses and webmasters to make sure they secure their website with HTTPS.

HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol over SSL) creates an encrypted link between a server and a browser so that all your data and communication happens coded and securely.

In short, HTTPS is a ranking factor. And Google has already confirmed it on its website in 2014.

Create and submit your website sitemap

A sitemap is an XML file containing a full archive of all the webpage’s URL of your website.

It helps the search engine crawlers find all the web pages and index them faster.

If your website is small (just a few web pages), generating XML sitemap is not necessary. But if your site is big (have hundreds or thousands of pages), you must create an XML file.

If you’re using a CMS like WordPress, chances are your sitemap file is already there. Enter the following address, and you’ll get it.

yourwebsitedomain/sitemap.xml

Though Google will find this XML file by itself, you can submit it manually, too.

#1. Login to your GSC account

#2. Navigate to “Sitemaps” from the left pane

#3. Submit URL where your XML sitemap file exists

Create a robots.txt file

A robot is a text file at the root of your site that tells Google what not to crawl and index from your website.

You may have some data (or files) on your web server that you don’t want to share in the public domain. It could be personal profiles, internal database information, or any other sensitive data.

And you want the crawler to ignore a specific directory or page from indexing into Google search database.

Is it important for SEO?

No, it doesn’t impact your SERP. It’s just that you help search engines to crawl relevant pages but not waste time indexing unrelated data.

Creating robots.txt file is quite easy.

#1. Create a text file and rename it to “robots.txt.”

#2. Enter the following code into the file (modify according to your need) and save it.

#3. Upload this file to the root directory of your website.

Read more about this here.

Create a custom error page (404 page)

If you open a page on your website that doesn’t exist, you receive an error with a message like “Page not found.”

The problem with this type of soft 404 error page is, though it says the page not found, it sends a success code (200) to the browser. Now search engines get the impression that this page exists and they index these non-existent pages in the search.

So, you should have a custom 404 error page on your website, and redirect all the ‘not found’ pages there so that users and search engines can figure out what has happened.

Define a preferred domain (WWW or non-WWW)

Define a preferred domain (WWW or non-WWW)

You may have noticed that some websites don’t have ‘WWW’ in the domain name while others have. It is because of the domain preference they set.

For search engines, “www.example.com” and “example.com” are two different pages. It’s your responsibility to tell Google what domain version of your website you want to use in the search results.

To set domain preference, follow these steps:

#1. Login to your GSC account

#2. Click “Site Settings”

#3. In the preferred domain section, select the version you want.

It doesn’t matter what you choose (WWW or non-WWW), but the significant point is you choose.

Set the website language

Do you have multiple versions of your website for different languages or regions?

If so, you should tell Google so that it can fetch the appropriate version of your page depending on the language and region of the searcher.

Though Google is smart enough to find the alternate versions of your websites, it’s better if you specifically direct search engine in the right direction.

Here’s the complete guide of how to do it.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Bonus Step: Keep Updated With SEO

SEO is evolving. What’s is working today may fail tomorrow. New updates and techniques are coming up regularly.

That said, you can’t rely on one technique permanently. You have to stay on your toe and stay updated on the latest SEO trends.

Here’re some useful blogs you can follow to keep updated with SEO:

• Searchengineland
• Searchenginejournal
• Searchenginewatch
• Inboundo

Over to You

I won’t bore you anymore. You’ve seen all the steps, and it’s your time to take action.

See you on Google!

If there’s one thing all bloggers have in common, it’s a desire for readers. Whether you’re posting about vegan recipes, B2B businesses or horseback riding, you want someone to care about what you have to say. So, how can you drive more traffic? What are the best ways to bring new readers to you?

From a business standpoint, the good news is there are plenty of free strategies that can boost organic site traffic. If you can dedicate time and energy toward building your blog’s value and promoting it online, over time you will reap the benefits.

From using long-tail keywords to guest blogging on other sites, here are 10 great traffic-building ideas to try. Whether your site is brand new or slow to grow followers, these tips can help you cultivate its reach.

1. Optimize your posts for keywords

Every time you write a new post, you need to pick keywords you’d like that post to rank well for online. (If you want inspiration, try Google Keyword Planner, and go to the “Keyword Planner” tab under “Tools.” With this tool, you can compare keyword search volume to see how often certain words or phrases are typed into Google.) Then, implement your chosen keyword(s) into your URL, post title, headers, image ALT descriptions and paragraph copy. It’s also helpful to add an SEO plugin such as Yoast to your blog — it gives you built-in reminders for keyword optimizing each article.

2. Pay special attention to long-tail keywords

What’s great about long-tail keywords (i.e., longer, more specific phrases) is that they can be less competitive than short, simple options. While a huge number of websites are already writing posts about “blog traffic,” for example, there are likely fewer optimizing for “free ways to increase your blog’s organic traffic.” Choosing long-tail keywords helps you achieve higher search rankings faster, as you’re competing for a less saturated market.   

3. Optimize your images 

In today’s visually focused Internet, every blog needs good pictures. However, huge images can slow a site’s performance — and search engines notice. If images are reducing your site speed, search engines will be less likely to rank you well in results. So, what can you do? Always adjust your photos to the desired display size before uploading them to your blog. Likewise, compress the images so they’re the smallest file sizes possible. You can use the “Save for Web” feature in Photoshop and/or free tools such as ImageAlpha, JPEGmini or TinyPNG to ensure your images are optimized properly.

4. Guest post on other sites

When it comes to search engine optimization, backlinks (links from other sites pointing to yours) are important. Why? To put it simply, the more sites linking to your blog, the more authoritative it becomes to search engines. This is where guest posting comes into play. When you contribute articles to other sites online, you’ll typically get an author bio that allows you to link back to your site. This helps you keep building online authority to rank higher in search results. To find sites to which you can submit posts, look for established blogs in your industry that accept articles. Then, create guests posts that are high in quality and offer real value to readers.

5. Link internally

Just as search engines pay attention to what external sites link to yours, they also watch how you link within your own site. Use your navigation menu to highlight the most important five or so pages on your site. Make it a habit to link to related blog posts within your new articles. These practices communicate a hierarchy of content to both visitors and search engines.

6. Promote your content on social media

Part of marketing your blog content today involves being active on social media. Every time you write a new post, you should promote it on your blog’s Facebook page, Twitter account, Instagram profile and Pinterest. A tool such as Buffer can streamline this process for you. Social networks are so important because they act as discovery tools online. A new reader may find your post while searching for something else on Pinterest or Instagram, for example. Social media platforms also allow you to build connections that drive traffic to your site.

7. Post consistently

For the best long-term traffic results, you need to blog routinely. Whether you post once a week, twice a week or every other Monday, set a schedule and stick to it. Regular posting keeps your site fresh and gives readers a reason to return to your site.

8. Post evergreen content

With all the work you put into writing blog posts, you may as well write them to last. There’s no reason an article you create today can’t keep generating traffic a year from now. The key is making it evergreen. Write posts that will stay relevant rather than be limited by a current trend or topic.

9. Engage with other bloggers

The same principles of networking that apply to business apply to blogging. Relationships are the bedrock of growth. So, whatever your blog niche, tap into the community of bloggers writing about it. Read their posts, comment genuinely and build connections.  

10. Answer questions online

Online forums such as Quora are a goldmine of opportunity for driving traffic. Find a question someone is asking, and write a post that answers it. Then, go back to the forum and respond to the question, including a link to your site.

Even without investing upfront cash, there’s a lot you can do to drive blog traffic. Start with the free strategies above, which focus on two main goals: making your site more authoritative and promoting its content. What’s beautiful about these strategies is they keep paying off over time. In other words, follow them consistently, and watch your traffic grow — and keep growing — well into the future.

Author bio: Shanna Mallon is a contributing writer for Straight North, a Chicago Internet marketing firm providing specialized SEO, web development and other online marketing services.

In today’s world, competition is the word of the day. There is so much saturation in almost every field that competing and striving to be on top is everyone’s primary motive. Being ahead in the competition does not mean bringing someone down using some malicious means, in fact, if your competitors are doing better than you, it must be because they are doing something right.

This is where you have to be smart and learn their strategies and techniques about how to be more successful and then implement it better. Sometimes when original thinking is no more possible, you should go out of your way to learn from your competitors and plan the structure of your marketing strategy by simply analyzing and doing thorough research of your competition. In SEO and web hosting, websites that get the most traffic are the ones that are prospering. If your competitors are ahead of you, make sure you get an idea of what they are doing right, to identify where you are going wrong.

Identify your real competitors

Any company or website that you are competing for better web visibility and traffic should be your competitor, not just the ones pertaining to your product. Do a small analysis based on the location and the type of industry you are associated with and find out more about them through members directories. You can even set up alerts which will update you on the progress of your competing services.

Determine the keywords you are competing for

Once you have a hold of your competitors, start analyzing the keywords that your competitors are using and how they are getting more hits out of it. There are different tools available for it, like the Google Keyword Planner where as soon as you enter the URL of your competitor, it will list down all the keywords that they have been effectively using.

Comparing and learning becomes very easy this way. The role of the company hosting your website becomes very important here as they implement the keywords optimally. Bluehost web hosting service has been identified as a pioneer for this said purpose.

Create engaging content

The holy grail of any website is the content it hosts. It is what drives more and more people towards a particular website and generates a number of hits to go higher up the rankings in Google. Your competitors must be having more variety and quality content in order to stay up the ladder. It is an indication for you to up your game.

Do your research about what interests the common public more, maybe conduct a study or ask for opinions through your website and once you catch the pulse of the people, make sure you improve the quality of the content you write.

Optimize URL structure

If you look into the strategy of your competitors, one thing that they have got right is putting up URLs which are user-friendly and straightforward and can be easily targeted upon by SEO services. They must be meaningful and simple. Therefore, you should adopt this strategy too while creating your URL.

Meta titles and descriptions

Some people might say that this is a thing of the past, but if you look into the history of any SEO that has done well in the recent past, it is because it has been able to guide the viewer to the right direction using meta titles and appropriate description. Make sure that your website has the right mix of titles and descriptions to make your agenda clear to the people visiting it.

Create a social media campaign and remain consistent

Social media has taken a firm grip on all aspects of life, with marketing being a key factor for more web visibility and more traffic passing through your website. One mistake that bloggers tend to do is be normal. The normal and conventional methods may have worked all this while, but it is time for a drastic change which will set you apart from the rest of your competitors in the market. You should strive to create a campaign on social media that has never been seen or heard before.

The more catchy and innovative it is, the more are its chances of garnering the interests of viewers. Once you have hit the right spot, being consistent in maintaining the campaign also becomes as critical as it requires a lot of hard work and dedication to do so.

Link building strategy

Having a strong link is also necessary for having more traffic. Your competitors might have built the strength of their link in such a way that it is easily accessible by all. Make Strategies and build your link in such a way that is available in all appropriate portals and people can arrive at your website easily.

Again, your web hosting service provider plays an integral role here to keep the uptime of your website as high as possible, so that no one exits your website because of inaccessibility.

Healthy competition has never harmed anyone and setting the achievements of your competitors as a benchmark and striving to do one better can act as enough motivation for a successful leap up the ranks on Google.

1. Constant Content

2. Unique Descriptions

3. Coupons

4. Optimise Images

5. Avoid Duplicate Content

6. Meta Descriptions

7. Product Reviews

A thorough SEO strategy blends the evergreen principles of marketing with the evolving iterations of technology. Keeping with the pace of technology is an increasing conundrum for marketers who imagine a comprehensive one-fits-all solution—while considering the necessary facets of SEO that are an integral complement to an effective SEO marketing strategy.

Solving the SEO puzzle is a championed endeavor when advancements in computing and mobile-driven adaptations have doubled every one and a half years.

Designing a well-planned SEO strategy starts from the vantage point of the type of impact your marketing elicits through:

• its greatest amount of customer engagement; and
• its largest number of conversions from first-time visitors to repeat buyers;

observed by metrics that measure

• their interactions;

across a specified amount of time, from your business’ On Page and Off Page SEO.

The 3 Puzzle Pieces that Fit into an Incomparable On Page SEO Strategy:

Puzzle Piece One: Online Content

Your On Page Content is comprised of 4 smaller indicators that signal your online SEO’s value to customers through:
Quality Content—and it must be germane to your audience and double as an answer to each person’s unique situation.
Freshly Designed—your content must speak to your visitors’ and buyer’s experiences as they are invited to engage with more of your promotions and unique offers.
Engagement Measured—each customer receives personalized content that is also segmented to reflect only their unique interest(s).
Keyword Savvy—general phrases that easily can be ranked for (aka immediately recognized by search engines) won’t get you to the head of pack; select longer words (3-word combinations or greater) to get your content picked up by the search engines’ radars by choosing targeted key phrases that your audience(s) are already ‘searching’.

Puzzle Piece Two: Website Architecture

Choose your website architecture to present Site Maps and indexed web pages that search engines can readily understand and visitors can breezily navigate.
Always remember that search engines like Google ranks web pages and not websites:

• Interlink pages to indicate to search engines that signal you provide valuable content.
• Reinforce your site’s relevance by giving each category its own page (i.e. Your Services, Offers or Calls to Action or CTAs, Promotions,
• Speed up your web pages’ readability so they are easily sorted, with images and other visual content that is optimized for immediate viewer consumption.

Create a copy of your site map and upload it to Bing, Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines charting websites that provide their searchers the greatest value.

Puzzle Piece Three: Website Coding

How easily can search engines recognize your website?

Are its web pages easy to crawl?
Apply keywords into your website coding to ensure it speaks your audience’s search-behaviors:
a) Write Meta descriptions so search engines can identify your site as a relevant source that answers web searchers needs;
b) use ‘<H1>’, ‘<H2>’, ‘<H3>’, ‘<Title>’, ‘<IMG>’ and other relevant organizational tags to streamline your content so its instantly sharable and eagerly consumed.
c) Orchestrate your web coding with a URL structure that also uses relevant keywords, and that make sense to visitors and automated search crawlers. without ‘stuffing’ or ‘link-bait’ (e.g. sending traffic via content that isn’t relevant to searchers) to sites that produce questionable content) that may signal as ‘Spam’.

The 4 Puzzle Pieces that Fit into a Viable On Page SEO Strategy:

Puzzle Piece One: Your Customer (web searcher) Persona:

Who she is, where she spends her time, and the online destinations she frequents that most represents your services and offers.
Her persona preferences are the indicators of her needs and wants that also are the signals of her habits.
Implement metrics that measure her offline engagement by:

• Search History,
• Geo-location,
• Physical Location, and
• Personal settings (segmented by ‘interests’), that are represented by
• Individualized patterns that are identified from the customer’s touch points (email, social channels, customer comments, etc.).

Puzzle Piece Two: Social Engagement

1. Where your audience spends their time:
   Social impressions and sentiments:

Represented as “Likes”, “Tweets” and ‘Shares’.

1. Where your business explores B2B and customer-driven interactions:
   a) Search engines like Bing recognize Shares as a viable indicator of searcher and visitor engagement.
   b) Google+ (Plus) treks searcher interactions as value-driven by search engine-based participation.
   c) Twitter identifies Follows, Re-tweets, and Impressions (projected viewer engagement) as individual-influenced metrics.
   d) Social Authority measurement indicators (e.g. Klout, Lithium) explore your business’ reach.
   e) Forums and on-topic participation provide invaluable insights into customers’ beliefs, desires, and buying patterns.
   f) Online Directories give ample opportunities to introduce more people to your business and services.
   g) Blog posts about your business and people-focused interests signal to readers and automation search crawlers that your focus is on quality-driven content that matters most.

Puzzle Piece Three: Link Value

Improve the value of your links by strategically designing them to best represent your business:
Relevancy of Links—make content that other websites will find useful to their audiences through back links.
Quality of Links—never ‘Spam’ or indulge in black hat (questionable) link creation; provide links that point to highly-valued web page content.
Quantity of Links—valued content attracts greater numbers of links search engines recognize as search-relevant; focus on delivering exceptional link quality that increases website engagement.
Anchor Text Links—design keywords to link to specifically-targeted content that search engines and audiences will immediate recognize as poignant, and shareable. Create linkable content that they readily can consume as:

• Customer reviews
• Anchored Links,
• Blog posts,
• Reader comments,
• Forum engagement,
• Relevant Videos,
• Online Directories,
• Articles,
• Press Releases,
• Social Media posts, and
• Photos.

Puzzle Piece Four: Brand Reputation

“This is the Age of Extreme Expectations.”

– Lithium.

Social media is an immediate benchmark of audience engagement. Shepard your business’ reputation by measuring your brand’s reach across a variety of online channels.
Improve your brand reputation by streamlining and amplifying your targeted audience reach:
Review Sites—Update your website’s sentiment impression with audiences on reputation-themed sites.
Reputation Management—Infuse only high-quality internal links, web content, and social engagement to create a valued digital footprint that favorably presents your website reputation; garnering new audiences and repeat visitors to your business.
Domain Authority—measure your website’s presence and maturity as it evolves with its:
Domain Age—develop your branding with your ‘keywords’ to reflect your domain and also your sub-domains as your business evolves.
Page Authority—search engines gradually index a website’s pages based on their value to visitors and the back links and social engagement they also generate.
Trust—the greater your business engages audiences, the more opportunities will open to welcome and to introduced them to your service(s) and your product(s).
The complement to your business’ brand reputation is the trust it engenders. Implement the practices in How to Solve the SEO Puzzle to deliver audience-driven content that increases audience engagement and increases conversions as part of your go-to marketing SEO strategy.