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In 2018 more than 51% of overall content consumption was driven by organic search, capturing over 40% of revenue. Still, a Hubspot study claims that 75% of your potential customers will never go past the first page of Google results, so unless your website is among those results too, you’ll have significantly fewer website visits and much lower chances to attract new potential customers.
Your chances for business success are much higher if you take full advantage of the power of organic traffic and use it to reach more customers, and eventually, close more deals. Here are 6 bulletproof tactics which will help your content rank better in searches.
Focus on your readers
When thinking about growing your reach, instead of putting all your focus on SEO, try focusing on your readers too, to point you in the right direction. Your content needs to resonate well with your target audience and to be able to create such content, you need to have a clear idea of who your buyer personas are.
This means you’ll have to spare some time to get to know customers you serve, and their habits, needs, motivations and pain points. You’ll also need to get an insight into ways they search for information, what type of content they prefer, and which keywords they use to find it on. When creating content, such targeted marketing efforts receive much better results than generic marketing – using buyer personas can increase website traffic for 210%, and organic search traffic for 55%.
Blogging
Blogging is one of the most effective ways to increase the number of non-branded keywords your site ranks for, and at the same time boosts your organic reach and traffic. You can use your blogs to post high-quality and perfectly-tailored content on hot topics in your niche, which fit the needs of your buyer personas. Still, don’t be frustrated if you don’t see the results of your blogging right away. Data shows that as the number of your posts grow, your traffic will jump significantly too – having more than 51 blog posts on your website corresponds to an increase in traffic by 54%.
Fix non-performing content
To put the power of Google organic traffic into the best use, you need to identify and fix content which is not giving you desired results and is, at the same time, wasting your crawl budget. When rating your site, search engines don’t crawl through all of your content but focus on a limited number of pages. Since you don’t want crawlers stuck into ineffective content before they had a chance to see the quality pieces, it’s better not to risk, but to avoid the scenario, by eliminating the obsolete material.
In order to apply this fix, you’ll first need to identify both your top-performing and non-performing content pieces, in terms of traffic, backlinks and ratings. If you notice any high-quality content which is not being effective, try optimizing on-site SEO, such as metatags, image ALTs and headers. Also, redirect the traffic from non-performing pages to relevant, higher-performing content. You should do this content audit every few months, and ensure that the pages which bring you more conversions are always the first one to be crawled by search engines.
Guest posting
One of the most efficient ways to boost your reach with organic traffic is to follow basic link building tactics, such as guest posting. Guest posting means publishing your content on someone else’s blog or website, while at the same time providing backlinks to your website too. The more backlinks you have to your site, the more people you’ll be able to reach. Also, this will help your website or blog be seen as authoritative and trustworthy by search engines, resulting in higher ratings in searches, bringing you more organic traffic.
Still, you don’t want your content to be linked to just any website out there, as there are many low-reputation and malicious websites, and linking to them can bring you more harm than benefits. Make sure to only publish and accept links from trustworthy sites and blogs, in order to prevent such links from harming your SEO efforts.
Find the right keyword opportunities
If you want to optimize your content for search engines, in a way which will bring you more organic traffic, don’t just focus on the most popular keywords in your industry, but also use long-tail keywords which are more specific to your service or your product. This will help Google search engine identify your website as relevant for a specific topic, and boost your search rankings, making it easier for your potential customer to find you.
You should regularly do the keyword research, and find the best keyword opportunities for your website. Look for relevant high-volume low-competition keywords, and use them to compete with the sites that have similar domain rankings, and which you can actually beat. Sites of your competitors can be great goldmines for finding such keywords.
Improve your click-through rates
Once your content has reached the Google results first page, you have to convince your target audience to click on your instead of competition links. You can do this by optimizing for CTR, which will bring you more organic traffic, and consequently send signals to the search engine to give it even better ratings it. Start with identifying pages with high performance but low CTR, and make their meta titles more SEO friendly. Also, use clear meta-descriptions of your content, as they will appear on the search results page, as a part of the larger snippet. If you describe your content properly, this snippet will act as a small promo for your webpage, and boost your CTR and your ratings too.
By leveraging these tactics, you’ll make your content more relevant and trustworthy, making it easy to be discovered both by your potential customers and search engines, resulting in the increase of your organic traffic and at the same time boosting your reach.
