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How strong is your online presence?
Is your business ranking on the first three pages for your desired keyphrases? Does your website engage your users? Is your content meeting your audience’s search intent?
If you’re unsure or the answer is ‘no’, it’s time to make some changes.
The problem with cutting corners on the above is a direct, negative impact on your search engine rankings. Your brand starts to drop off people’s radar, your organic web traffic diminishes and your supply of quality leads crumbles.
It’s not a great place to be.
Fortunately, there’s more you can do to amplify your digital presence and create a steady flow of website traffic.
Let me show you.
1. Start with Strategic Keyword Research
Keyword research is the pinnacle of every successful online marketing strategy. If you don’t do it first, or you start it too late, you’re working blind with your website content – and that won’t bring results.
The process involves identifying, analysing and mapping appropriate search terms for your copy. These search terms (keywords and keyphrases) must match topics and themes relevant to your business, industry and product/service. This way, you improve your search engine ranking and drive more targeted organic traffic to your website.
Effective keyword research focuses on:
- Relevant keywords aligned with your content strategy – relevant to your brand, audience and content, and reflecting the topics your users are interested in
- High search volume terms
- A mix of short and long-tail keywords
- Keyword difficulty, which will determine how hard it’ll be to rank for a particular term
- Google Analytics – what keywords are driving traffic to your website and which ones need to be adjusted or replaced?
Expert Tip: Understanding the intent behind a user’s search is crucial for effective keyword research. This allows you to align your content with 4 types of search intent categories.
When choosing keywords and writing content, always consider what your users are searching for and what their end goal is, and never over-optimise! Keywords should be naturally fitted into your web copy and articles, not stuffed like your Christmas roast.
2. Grow Your Brand with Blog Management
Now that you’re armed with the words and phrases your audience is using, you can create helpful blog content around them.
There are some serious SEO benefits to blogs. For consistency, invest in a blog management service to ensure your content engages and converts your audience. Creative blog writers, such as myself, craft audience-specific content that targets your keywords and builds your organic search traffic. Personality-filled words written for the people you want to attract.
Expert Tip: Content marketing is crucial for boosting your search rankings. Start with 2 blog articles a month and re-assess your content topics and keywords every 3 to 6 months. Review your web copy every 6 to 12 months to ensure it’s aligned with your brand, audience and goals.
3. Apply SEO Best Practices
Want to rank higher on Google?
Then you need to invest in SEO.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is key to getting found online. With a strong plan in place – one that applies best practices and prioritises the end user, you can increase the quality and quantity of organic traffic to your website.
There are on-page and off-page factors to consider.
On-page optimisation involves the structure, navigation and technical aspects affecting the user experience of your site, while off-page optimisation is the process of building quality backlinks from authoritative websites to your own. Both rely on having a consistent flow of valuable content relevant to your audience.
SEO needs a long-term strategy with ongoing effort and optimisation – but the benefits are worth it.
Expert Tip: There are many best practices to implement on your site if you want it to perform. Because SEO covers a broad range of factors, consider working with an SEO specialist and/or SEO copywriter to increase your organic web traffic.
Don’t forget local SEO either, and take advantage of your free Google My Business and Bing listings.
4. Update Existing Content
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with content every time.
In fact, giving your existing web copy and blog content a refresh is a game-changer for boosting search engine rankings.
Why?
Because as new information becomes available, some content becomes old and stops performing. Your content, as well as the metadata and the images and links in it, need to stay relevant to your audience and keep up with the latest data.
In doing so, you can create an instant lift in its performance and increase the click-through rate of your site.
Make sure to:
- Start with a content audit to see what content needs a refresh
- Identify content gaps to fill
- Update all relevant parts of your content ie: metadata, call-to-actions, target keywords, headings, links and statistics
- Review the types of resources you have linked out to and swap with newer, better information
Expert Tip: It’s no secret that people (and Google) love fresh content – so include a content revive in your strategy to double your traffic. When updating articles check for broken links, speller and grammar errors and image alt-tags. Ensure old content is written to meet new EEAT and YMYL criteria too.
This is a well-written and informative post. Your clear and concise writing style makes it easy to understand the topic, and the informative points you provided were helpful. Thank you for creating a comprehensive resource.