Use Social Networking to Boost Website Traffic
On its own, writing stellar content for your website isn’t going to make you any money. You need to figure out a way to attract potential clients to your website, who can be converted into dollars. This is the ultimate goal of every business.
SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. SEO measures how optimized your website is for the search engines that offer it up when someone types in a related search query. SEO is a huge factor in making sure you get traffic to your site — and more specifically, the right kind of traffic, people who are looking for you to solve their problems or answer their questions.
If your website isn’t generating a profit, then you need to ask yourself some hard questions — for example, what benefit does it really have for your business? No need to panic if you’re still waiting for a breakthrough; you’ll find the most important SEO factors below, along with some hands-on techniques that you can put to use right away to increase the traffic to your website. So, without further ado, read on to discover how to increase your website traffic with SEO tips.
Promotion Is King
One way to promote your website is by paying for online ads in hope of snatching a client once they land on your page. This model can be a huge money pit. And as soon as you stop paying for online ads, usually the traffic to your site drops like a rock. It’s also frustrating because it can cost more to lure people to your website than the revenue they bring in. This is the reason to stop paying for traffic and get people to be interested in your website organically. In other words, attract people because of your content, not because of your ads. The most rewarding solution to paid marketing is content marketing or blogging.
While it’s easier said than done to “just create great content,” it’s possible to build on that concept. The truth is that there’s way more to SEO than just writing content. One piece of the puzzle is attracting attention by proactively positioning your articles to be seen by your audience. It’s really no different from dating. You can be the best-looking person with all sorts of positive attributes. But if you never leave your home, you won’t meet other people to date!
The Real Purpose of Content Marketing
Even if you attract a boatload of visitors, it means nothing to your business unless those visitors become paying clients. Getting thousands of likes and shares for well-written content isn’t your number one goal. The real purpose of any website is to support your domain authority — and, let’s be honest, to make you money.
Most of your visitors who become clients typically look for answers to questions about your industry or about your business. For example, they might search for the term: “homes for sale in Asheville” or “best dentist in New Jersey.” It can be difficult to rank for these types of search terms as the competition can be fierce. But by supporting your website pages, linking to them from your blog, you can help them to rank higher.
What Drives SEO?
In the past five years, Google has totally revolutionized how their algorithm works — how they decide how to serve up the list of search results. Many SEO techniques that worked before have had to be abandoned or changed to fit new standards. Today, there are at least 200 factors that affect the rankings of a website. It’s still generally agreed among SEO experts that having inbound links from other websites helps rankings.
Keep in mind that Google doesn’t like websites that it catches manipulating their rankings by creating untrustworthy (or “spammy”) links back to their site. Link-building still exists, though, and it’s a vital part of SEO. But by all means, you must make sure that the links are pointing towards your site from a credible source with a legitimate reason.
After all, Google is right about the value of creating good content to rank your website. What they forgot to tell you is that good content is only one part of the puzzle. Getting other people to link to your articles is the mountain that needs to be climbed. Lacking the endorsement of other websites is what’s keeping your website from being ranked on page one of Google.
Promote Your Content Like Your Life Depended on It
One way to get others to link to you is by creating such amazing content that it gets picked up by others — and it goes “viral.” This approach is known as the hope-and-pray method. Usually, it’s a very unreliable way of running a business.
You can easily turn blogging into a full-time job and write content until your face turns blue. But unless you already have an established group of followers to promote your content or an everlasting bank account to pay for marketing — you need to take the matter into your own hands to get others to talk about you through promotion.
Finding Online Friends with Benefits
Promoting your content through social media is an affordable way of helping others find out about your work. But you’re setting yourself up for failure if you think that social media is all about you. The secret to establishing any friendship is to look out for the other person’s best interest ahead of your own. This concept works both offline and online. One of the best ways to have your content to be picked up by others is to share their content first.
Becoming friends with influencers in social media can be meaningful for your website’s ranking. Be generous by linking to other bloggers with quality content that’s relevant to your topic. Sharing their content with your audience is most certainly going to be reciprocated.
The topic that you write about doesn’t matter at all. As long as it’s related to your industry, it’s going to be fairly straightforward to dovetail others’ references to expand your own article. The three most popular best practices to link out to other websites from your own content are:
- Hyperlink from within the content
- Provide a list of additional resources
- Write a roundup post about a topic
As an example, curate a collection of articles into one round-up article called: “The Best Plumbing Blog Posts” of the past year. It may turn out to be a huge draw. People like a bunch of information in one place; you can put it at their fingertips.
The Key to Making Content Marketing Work
By using content marketing sites and by bookmarking sites you find, your articles can get a boost in the search engines. A favorite content marketing site is Scoop.it. It’s a powerful platform for making your content more visible. As an example, you can summarize content about a topic, add extra perspective to the topic and post it on the page with a link pointing back to the original post.
The key to getting SEO value out of using the above platforms is adding your own comments to create unique content. It’s not enough to copy and paste a link on the page. You can’t just grab a piece of the original content and use it for yourself. To be acknowledged by Google, you still have to satisfy one of their many requirements by creating your own unique content. Using these two content marketing sites may be one of the best SEO strategies you can put to use right away.
Start Ranking Today…
As you can see, there are many different ways to giving your website an SEO boost. Writing content that people crave is one way. Learning how to promote it properly through social networking is another. Doing both will propel your site’s ranking.
There’s no doubt that it takes a great amount of time and effort before you see the needle moving. But by taking one step at a time and coming up with a plan, you’ll end up on the top of page one in a Google search. Start writing today — and start promoting tomorrow.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.