A steady flow of organic traffic is essential for your business. Without it, there are no leads, no conversions, and ultimately, no paying customers. An occasional organic traffic dry spell is nothing to worry about, but if you notice a drop that persists for more than a few weeks, you’ll have to get to the bottom of things and give your SEO efforts a boost. Even if your website traffic is doing well at the moment, don’t forget that the SEO landscape is dynamic and ever-morphing, which means you have to keep pace with it and stay on top of things. Although certain factors that affect your organic traffic can be rendered somewhat unpredictable, by no means should you rely on luck alone.
Do you recycle?
How many times have you heard that visionary but overused-to-the-extent-of-becoming-corny quote about content being king? Way too many, that’s for sure, but we’ll have a different take on the whole “fresh content” idea.
The importance of relevant, quality content can’t be stressed enough, and stats back up this statement, since companies that publish more than 16 blog posts a month get 3.5 times more traffic than those that publish 0-4. Generating fresh content and finding hot topics to write about is crucial for your search engine rankings, as well as for the influx of unique visitors. However, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t tap into the power of repurposing and republishing your old blog posts that have either underperformed when originally posted, or simply decayed over time.
You won’t be the only one, since almost 60% of marketers take advantage of this clever tactic and recycle their blog posts 2-5 times. Basically, you have to breathe new life into your old content by updating the information, improving its structure, adding a new case study and screenshots, polishing your storytelling, and throwing in some killer keywords.
There are a couple of reasons for the success of this approach, and one of them is creating new opportunities for your “old” but updated content and presenting it to new readers, because odds are that a lot of people haven’t seen it when you first launched it. Another, which is even more important, is the power of social proof in the form of already existing comments and likes, as they can spark additional conversation and an exchange of opinions and ideas.
Build your online authority
Just like in the offline world, having a good reputation is critical for any business on the internet. If you want your words to carry weight, you need to distinguish yourself as an authority in your field. People are more likely to trust advice given by well-known and established experts, which practically means that if your online presence is strong and recognizable, visitors will flood to your website in search of relevant information.
Apart from actually being an expert, you need to show what you know and be helpful, as sharing your knowledge with others is at the core of blogging. One of the surefire ways of earning recognition and expanding your reach beyond your original audience is through guest blogging.
As straightforward as this whole concept may sound, it actually takes a lot of research and digging, because the point is not just to have your guest blogs published, but to find the most relevant publishers and earn authority backlinks, because that will ultimately boost your website’s relevance, Google rankings, and popularity. We’re talking about collecting and analyzing tons of data, which means that you’ll need an extra pair of hands, or even better, a powerful link prospecting tool to do the dirty work.
Another smart tactic for garnering online attention is by contributing to the likes of Quora and similar Q&A websites. Not only will you be able to drive some traffic to your site, you’ll also be able to use these informative communities for doing research on keywords, identifying both exact match ones and all kinds of variations for a particular search term, and understanding how people are actually performing searches. They’re, essentially, true gold mines of information.
Clearly, this whole process is extremely complex and won’t work without accurate and precise metrics that will help you monitor your progress, allow you to easily build custom reports for your clients and keep them posted about all your SEO efforts and their success rates.
Sharing is caring
There’s virtually no way to promote your business and have a successful SEO strategy without social media. With its 1.23 billion DAUs in Q4 2016, Facebook is indispensable as an efficient channel of communication with your target audience and a valuable SEO tool. The same goes for Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram, and you can achieve the best results by aligning all your social media efforts.
To put it in a nutshell, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that if you want Google to love you, you need to generate compelling and shareable content. The more your content is shared across various social media channels, the more it will affect your search rankings.
Apart from the fact that according to the latest SEO rules, blog posts that are approximately 1,900 words long perform better than shorter ones, it’s critical to optimize your content for sharing and help it reach a wider audience. Needless to say, high-quality content with useful information is a must, but there are some other X factors that can turn a decent blog post into a viral one.
Posts featuring images and videos receive significantly more likes and shares than those that aren’t visually oriented, and infographics dominate the stats as they’re 3 times more shared than any other type of content. One of the best ways to engage people is to inspire them with some emotionally charged content that they can relate to, and that’s the secret behind the tremendously successful Ice Bucket Challenge, which spread across social media like wildfire and raised awareness (as well as a stunning $115 million) for ALS.
Addressing some of the most common pain points that your target audience encounters and providing some easy and instant solutions is another way of making people click on the share button. The popularity of How-tos definitely proves that your helpful efforts will be appreciated. Last but not least, people want to be entertained, so do your best to offer comic relief, funny memes, humorous pop-culture references, or some of the most viewed content on the internet – cat image macros.
Increasing organic traffic to your website might not be the easiest thing, but with a lot of hard work and testing you will get there. Just make sure not to succumb to the temptation of crossing over to the Dark Side of the Force and using Black Hat SEO.
