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If you want to get lots of buying customers, it is paramount to get lots of traffic to your service or product pages. But this is not usually easy to achieve because there is always strong competition in every niche. However, you can achieve this goal if you know the right things to do. Below are some essential SEO strategies entrepreneurs can use to boost their traffic:
1. Understanding your target audience
Before you start driving traffic to your business, it is crucial to define your target audience. This is because getting traffic from the wrong people will be counterproductive, as such individuals will probably not use your services or products. Therefore, you should focus on getting traffic from your target audience.
Get started by knowing the demographics and pain points of your target audience. Once you know these things, it will be easier to create content that can bring the right people to your business.
Related: 6 SEO Tips to Benefit Any Business
The goal of SEO is to rank your website on top of search engines for your target keywords. So, it is not surprising that keyword research is a crucial SEO strategy. In fact, your SEO campaign can hardly be effective if you don’t include some essential keywords in your content. Therefore, as you start your campaign, you should invest in keyword research.
Simply put, keyword research refers to the whole process of finding the right keywords that can drive the target audience to your website. You need to look for the specific keywords that your customers often use when looking for the services or products you offer.
Doing keyword research manually can be tiresome and time-consuming. Luckily, tons of software can make the job easier and faster for you. Some of such programs are Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs. The software will help you to find the right keywords and even show you their search range.
However, you should be careful with the use of keywords on your website. You must ensure that you don’t overstuff your website with too many keywords. Overstuffing your website with keywords will make it difficult for people to read your content. Therefore, keep your content simple and readable by using keywords appropriately.
3. Site architecture optimization
Regardless of the quality of your content, your website architecture will play a vital role in determining the amount of traffic you will get. If search engine spiders and users find it difficult to locate content on your site, they will likely lose interest in your offerings. So, you need to optimize your site architecture.
In general, it is recommended that users should be able to reach the most essential web pages on your website with just three clicks. If the users need to struggle to find the most important pages, they will most likely never return to your website. Some will not even have the patience to find the pages before leaving your site. Also, you should consider using a short and easy-to-memorize URL.
Of course, content marketing will make a big difference in the success of your SEO campaign. Therefore, you need to invest heavily in how you create and market your content. Notably, content marketing involves numerous steps that will be explained below:
1. Create and publish high-quality content
When it comes to content marketing, the type of content you create will play a crucial role. Even if you drive traffic to your website through other means, low-quality content will send the visitors away.
Your content should provide credible answers to the varying questions of your audiences. Apart from being resourceful, the content must be well-written and formatted so that people can assimilate the information without any difficulty. If you are using written content, it should be well-punctuated and free of any grammatical errors.
You don’t necessarily have to create and publish content yourself. Hire freelance content creators to help you.
2. Use an interesting meta description
The meta description is a snippet that gives the readers an idea of the information in your content. This description appears below the headline of an article in search results. Make sure your meta description is engaging enough to motivate people to want to read your content.
3. Utilize engaging headlines and title tags
The title tag helps internet users to find your site when searching for related keywords. So, if you want to get more engagement on your website, you should make your title tag interesting. Also, you must make sure that your headline is engaging as it can draw readers to your website. However, it shouldn’t be too long.
Related: The Secret to Super Successful SEO
If the links to your website are on other websites, people can click them and visit your website to see what you are capable of offering. Besides, search engines tend to rank a site higher when its link has been embedded in lots of websites. Therefore, it is crucial to invest in link building for the website.
You can collaborate with lots of website owners to use this strategy in order to boost the traffic of your website. However, you should concentrate on building links to your website from credible, high-ranking sites. For instance, a single link from a well-known university website will boost traffic to your website more than several links from unknown blog sites.
6. Speed optimization
Nowadays, a typical internet user wants to browse through as many web pages as possible within a few minutes. So, it doesn’t come as a surprise that a fast, responsive website will get more traffic than a slower one. According to a report from Strange Loop, a one-second delay in the loading time of your website can lead to around a 7% loss in conversion rate. Given this, you need to focus on optimizing the speed of your website.
You need to get rid of anything that slows down the loading speed of your website. If you have plug-ins you are no longer using, don’t hesitate to remove them. Also, don’t upload unnecessary heavy media files that may slow down your site. Overall, make sure that your website loads within 3 seconds.
7. Optimization of vitals of your website
These are the elements that affect the overall user experience. These elements not only make more users visit your website, but also encourage them to return later. They include the mobile-friendliness and safety of your website. You need to talk to experts about what you can do to optimize the vitals of your website and improve user experience.
Today, billions of individuals are using various social media channels. These individuals fall into different age groups, social statuses, races, professions, etc. So, regardless of the demographics of your target audience, you can rest assured that you can find them on social media. As a result of this, every entrepreneur must take advantage of social media to boost their traffic.
Therefore, you need to get on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and other social media platforms to promote your business. You can get tons of people from these platforms to visit your website. In addition, add social share buttons to your website. These buttons will enable users to share your content on their social media pages, thus assisting you to reach more people.
Related: 50 Easy Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
9. Consistency
Although this is not a technical strategy for SEO, it is still an important strategy that can change the fate of your website. However, many entrepreneurs do lots of things at the same time. As a result of this, they may not be able to apply all the essential SEO strategies consistently. Unfortunately, this can be the downfall of their SEO campaign, as they will hardly get any positive results from their investment.
So, if you want the other SEO strategies to be effective, you need consistency or you can hire an SEO consultant. You have to create and publish content regularly. Also, you need to be consistent with the kind of content you are publishing on your website. Stick to topics that fit your offers. You must also be consistent with the way you engage your audience on social media.
If you are struggling with consistency, hire a content creator. Such an individual can also double as a content manager and help you to curate the content on your website and social media pages.
10. Analysis of metrics
The last SEO strategy for entrepreneurs is ensuring that metrics are analyzed regularly. As you continue to spend your hard-earned money on an SEO campaign, you need to be informed about the performance of the campaign. Therefore, you have to get some important metrics about your campaign and ascertain the things that are working and those that are not working. This will assist you to decide what you have to improve, change or stop. Google Analytics, SpyFu.com, Moz, and SEMRush.com are some of the best and most affordable tools for getting important metrics about your campaign.
In a nutshell, these SEO strategies can be the game-changers for lots of entrepreneurs struggling to get traffic for their businesses. However, they have to be patient and consistent, as the desired improvement will likely take some time before showing.
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This article is from Entrepreneur.com
