5 things to do to increase your search engine traffic

Increasing your search engine traffic is one of the things that’s recommended if you want more profit from your online business.

Unfortunately, gaining organic search engine traffic is increasingly becoming tough. Many marketers have thus turned to social media platforms where they get some results for as long as they are active on these sites.

Paid traffic can only be as big as your budget. If you’re doing Search or Social Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or banner ads on related properties, everything will reset to zero as soon as the allocated budget runs out.

Though Search Engine optimization (SEO) is hard, it’s the best source of long term traffic and the conversion rate is uplifting.

Let’s look at five activities you can carry out to steadily raise your natural traffic and make your online business more profitable.

1 – Anticipate Keyword

Keyword is the core of search engine traffic. Every reader you get from any Search Result Page is a direct result of a Keyword typed in by the visitor.

But recent developments in the industry have pushed the way keyword research and content optimization is done to a whole new level.

You can no longer stuff your content with keywords and get results. To produce the right content that targets a certain keyword and drive traffic, you must optimize for the intent behind the keyword.

While keyword research is about data from the past, keyword anticipation is about how current event shapes the future.

A proper understanding of Keyword prediction can always put you ahead of your competitors. Here is an example:

If a company announces the launch of a new product next month, we can already anticipate a keyword and start producing content for it.

Knowing how human beings function, it won’t be hard to think that some potential buyers are going to be searching for “ProductName Review” by the time the product finally goes to the market.  Therefore, any content optimized for the keyword and related phrases will without doubt rank well.

I have an example on my blog I want to share with you.

In the past, I collaborated with an SEO company. They had a product that apparently did quite well with positive reviews and feedback from the community.

For some reasons, the company decided to fold up. I saw that as a massive opportunity to create a money making blog post.

It was not going to be hard to think that users who loved that product were going to be looking for an alternative.

So I created a blog post and optimized it for the keywords “ProductName Alternatives” and “ProductName Replacement”. As expected, this ranked so well above tough competitors.

It’s quite easy to predict keywords from product names. You simply use product name plus some commonly searched terms. Let’s take a few examples:

• “Product name” replacement
• “Product name” review (like when a new product is being launched)
• “Product name” tutorials
• “Product name” scam
• Is “Product name” scam
• “Product name” alternatives
• “Event name” ticket sales
• Etc

2 – Long form content

In those early days of SEO, blog posts of 400 words were considered very good for search engines. As time went on, this length was gradually becoming less important. In today’s consideration, 1000+ content is gaining more attention. Longer content of 2000+ words have been found to rank better and for many more keywords.

Though this is highly dependent on the level of competition on the topic, longer content has broadly four advantages from the SEO perspective:

• It has a more considerable dwell time, which is an onpage SEO factor
• It gets more engagement from readers
• It gets ranked for many different keywords
• It potentially attracts backlinks from the community

Longer content allows you to touch on every aspect of the topic, thereby increasing your chances of ranking for many different but related keywords and so increase your search engine traffic.

Here are some helpful points to write long content:

• Focus on the topic
• Use quotes
• Use examples
• Define concepts and terms
• Answer common questions
• Create your own questions and answer them
• Balance it up with advantages and disadvantages
• Etc

I have written this post that can help you with writing an in-depth article

3 – Optimize existing content

Each time you do competitor analysis, you focus on knowing which keywords they rank for. The next thing is you start to compete with them on their keywords and for the most part, you end up abandoning. That’s because the competition is tough.

Why not look within to see what already works for you and tweak for better results.

Recently, I was able to raise my SEO traffic by more than 125% by simply focusing and optimizing existing content. I use Google Search Console for the exercise.

Go to your GSC account -> Search Traffic -> Search Analytics

There are a couple of things to analyze on this page

• The clicks
• Impressions
• Position
• The keywords (queries)
• The url

Make sure the Impressions tab is enabled.

• Sort by Impressions to come out with the top keywords that drive huge impressions and low clicks.
• Click the query and then select the Pages option to calculate metrics by pages.

This will reveal the pages on your blog that get those impressions on SERP.

That’s where you should begin optimizing the article.

Tips to optimize old pages

Now, you’ve gotten the keyword and an existing article on your blog that gets little traffic from Search engine. Depending on the SERP position as revealed by GSC, we can optimize the page and easily hit a better position.

First, get a list of keywords related to the main keyword you got from your GSC. You can use your favorite SEO tool to come up with this list.

A free option is to enter the keyword in Google, then scroll to the bottom of the page for related searches.

Use these keywords within your content. Add more paragraphs, graphics and videos. Make the article longer and more relevant.

Earlier this year, I had one article on my blog receiving traffic from over 20 different keywords. Using this same strategy, I found related keywords that were not used in the article.

After spending time adding more content to the article, making use of all the related keywords I found, there was a massive improvement in SERP position and this article now receives search engine traffic from about 50 different keywords. Amazing results!

Some entries on SERP get poor clicks

Here is an example I found while analyzing my blog.  With over 2000 impressions and sitting on position 3.0, 6 clicks are way too low.

This is poor and the following must be done:

• Tweak the post title and make it more compelling
• Edit the meta description and make it more relevant and attractive

4 – Don’t compete with the big guns

One of the craziest things you are ever going to do as content marketer is to put up a fight against your strong competitors.

There are some keywords that are just so impossible. Most of the keyword tools today have data that gives you the difficulty level for every keyword on the table. Difficulty levels of 50 and above are scary.

One of the things that drive people into this mistake is the search volume.  They want search engine traffic and think keywords with high search volumes are low hanging fruits. But the truth is that very popular keywords are generally difficult.

There are some less competitive keywords that can drive drops of traffic. Don’t neglect them. As you keep publishing content optimized for keywords with low search volumes and low competition, you are gradually going to build a website that’s receiving traffic from different angles.

5 – Create a concept

Here, you have to be smart and start something no one else has ever thought about. Today, we have terms and concepts that were started by someone like you.

Brian Dean created the Skyscraper Technique. This has become a concept talked and written about by big brands and almost everyone in the SEO industry.

In every industry, there are things that are still hidden. Someone needs to think and come up with them. Once you can start something that gains popular interest, you will rank well.

Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, Andrew McCollum created Facebook and today, it’s become a huge business.

Some years back, Pinterest meant nothing to everyone. But a man called Ben Silbermann and co used their thinking caps and today, it’s one of the most used social media platforms.

We use things others have created. It’s time to create ours and rank on search engines.

Bonus tips for increasing search engine traffic

Don’t forget to do the obvious when it comes to SEO:

• Optimize your website for mobile compatibility.
• Get rid of anything that will slow down the load speed of your website. Speed has become a ranking factor so move your site to high speed, SEO friendly server. Avoid unnecessary plugins. Most of these exerts considerable load on your blog.
• Kick away free themes from your blog. A majority of these are poorly coded. WordPress themes have become so highly affordable so do not settle for anything that compromises your success.
• Pay attention to content OnPage Optimization.
• Do not neglect Technical SEO.
• Guest blogging is an exercise you should highly consider.
• Etc

Conclusion

Search Engine Traffic is hard to get if you want to follow the crowd. It’s however easy if you want to find your way.

Have you used any of these strategies before? What were your results? I’ll be glad to read about them in the comment box below.