These days, having a website is essential for any business owner. Customers in your city or town will most likely look for you online. These days, more than 70% of small businesses have a website, a number that’s increased in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating the development of remote work and e-commerce. Yet simply having a website isn’t enough. There’s no point in having all the solutions if the people who would benefit the most never find them. In an increasingly competitive digital marketplace, “if you build it, they will come” is no longer the mantra to live by. You need the right SEO techniques in order to see your business grow.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) improves your online visibility, which drives more traffic to your website. If your website is trustworthy and optimised, with strong calls to action, that traffic becomes conversions and sales.
More than 60% of marketers say their biggest challenge is generating traffic and leads. SEO takes the organic (i.e. unpaid) approach to taking you to the top of search engines so you can focus on making those conversions.
SEO Techniques to Boost Traffic to Your Website
Learning how to increase more traffic to your website can help to boost conversions and your brand awareness. But what are the different SEO techniques that actually work? The most effective SEO techniques include:
Using the right keywords
A web user typing a particular keyword into Google is how a relationship with your brand starts. By knowing the keywords people are searching for to find products like yours, you can more easily draw in new visitors. Using Google Analytics, you can search for the terms that visitors have used to find you in the past, while tools like Google’s Keyword Planner can help you find the right words for your next campaign.
Content marketing
Content creation is one of the most effective inbound marketing strategies for driving new visitors to your site. Companies that blog get 97% more links to their websites than those that don’t and 55% more visitors. One of the best techniques is to create evergreen content (content that remains relevant to readers over time) and regularly refresh it. Google favours fresh content because it’s more likely to be accurate. Even if you’re still ranking on the first page of Google, there’s a lot that an update can do for your business. Don’t underestimate the power of a compelling headline, too.
Demonstrating expertise
When deciding website rankings, Google prioritises brands that are known to be experts or authorities in their field. How do you build brand authority? Techniques include writing informative blog posts, posting regularly on social media, conducting your own credible research, building an association with other reputable brands and creating content hubs, which are interlinked content collections based on a given topic.
Researching competitors
Competition is tough in today’s truly global digital marketplace. But competition has an upside: the opportunity to spy on your competitors and learn from their mistakes and successes. Tools like Ahrefs Site Explorer can give you an insight into your competitors' most trafficked pages and the keywords they’re outranking you for.
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) is a foundation that Google’s Quality Raters use to determine content quality. Trustworthiness is at the centre of the framework: how honest and accurate is the content? While E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor, adhering to E-E-A-T principles certainly helps you fulfil Google’s definition of quality content. You can do that by building your brand reputation, citing credible sources and providing practical solutions.
Building backlinks
When websites with positive reputations link to your site, you gain more credibility and authority. Backlinks boost your rankings and increase referral traffic, which is beneficial to your visibility.
Optimising internal links
Internal links take web users from one part of your website to another. Optimising your internal links is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve your website because you’re in total control. Linking to older pages in your recent pages gives these older pages a boost in visibility.
Writing intriguing title tags and meta descriptions
Search engines respond to queries by showing a page’s title tag. Along with the meta description, title tags give users a brief insight into what the page is about and motivate them to click further. It’s important to write compelling title tags that also reflect users’ intent.
A/B testing
A/B testing lets you road test two versions of a campaign so you can see which one performs best. Tools like Crazy Egg and Google Optimize let you test a control (A) version against a variant (B) version to see which one better fulfils your key metrics.
Using local SEO
Local SEO is the business of adjusting your SEO strategy to attract more enquiries from specific geographic regions. When you’re expanding into new areas, it’s essential, as 30% of mobile searches are related to location.
Other Techniques to Drive Website Traffic
SEO techniques are often best used in combination with other strategies to attract traffic to your website. Some of the best non-SEO techniques to use include:
Paid advertising
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is known for doubling every dollar spent and can boost a business’s brand awareness by 80%. PPC is an online advertising model in which brands bid on keywords, and advertisers pay a small fee every time their ad is clicked. Compared to the slower-burning SEO, PPC is the most effective way to go straight to the top of Google’s results, and it’s particularly effective on mobile devices.
Creating an online community
Building an online community of people who would benefit from the products and services you offer is an excellent way to start a conversation that leads people to your site. Social media already provides you with a space to build community, whether through a Facebook group, Instagram Live event, Instagram broadcast channel or Subreddit. In these spaces, you can create value and build connections while linking back to your website.
Giveaways and contests
Social media is also the perfect space to hold competitions and giveaways, which give you a quick boost in visibility while rewarding your long-term customers and followers.
Using email promotions
Email marketing is a powerful way to target new and existing customers and draw them to particular sections of your website. Two commonly used strategies are email newsletters, which provide useful information on news and events, and promotional emails highlighting specific sales or activities.
Boost Traffic to Your Website with Anchor
With so many SEO techniques out there, it can be difficult to figure out which ones are best for your own site strategy. With our SEO services, Anchor stays on top of the latest developments while sticking to the timeless principles that are always effective. Rather than optimising everything just because we can, we take a deep dive into your website to find what’s working and what isn’t and then take an integrated approach to fixing it. From transparent reports to detailed A/B testing, we find the way that works and present it to you in plain English.
Our strategy services can help you build your strategy from scratch, including helping you identify your unique selling proposition (USP) and gather data on your target demographics. We can identify what’s uniquely favourable about you and your brand and present that to your customers in a way that accurately reflects your brand identity. Our research-informed, data-driven strategy will give you the tools to connect with your target audience authentically.
To find out how you can increase more traffic by using the right SEO techniques, contact the Anchor team.
