*The following is a guest post from Artur Meyster, Founder of Career Karma. *
Whether you’re a digital marketer or a business owner, driving traffic to your website is essential. Having online visibility is crucial when it comes to your marketing operations, and your website must not be an exception. This is particularly important if you have an online store.
SEO is a combination of many techniques; it’s not a single strategy that will magically drive more traffic to your website. People usually think that SEO is just stuffing keywords here and there. However, Google’s algorithms have become more sophisticated—you need to think about what users are looking for and create valuable content for them. Here are some tips that will help you attract more visitors to your website.
Advertising
This might be the most obvious and yet crucial factor when it comes to increasing your traffic. When you’re starting out from scratch, advertising is a great way to move things forward. Try Google’s paid advertising to get yourself out there and increase your traffic. You can also try posting ads on social media.
As part of your SEO strategy, you could try using commercial intent keywords, which are very effective. Although competition for these keywords is fierce, they provide good results for your marketing operations. Remember that you need to have a combination of both organic and paid SEO in order to succeed—don’t forget about your organic SEO!
Promote Your Content
Promotion is another vital step in the journey to boost your SEO. It’s not only about allocating your efforts toward your website; both your social media and website work together. Try to create a streamlined strategy where you orchestrate your target social media outlets and your website. This way, you can increase traffic in both. We know that increasing traffic for your website is the ultimate goal—promoting your content on social media is a great way to get there!
There is also content marketing. This refers to a very effective method that can help you to not only attract visitors but also boost sales. With content marketing, you share valuable content with your audience for free, so they grow more interested in your paid content.
Write Catchy Headlines
When it comes to creating appealing content, writing eye-catching headlines is very important. This is the best way to get people’s attention. But, please, don’t mislead your followers by using clickbait headlines that don’t actually reflect the content of the article.
Before using a headline ask yourself the right question: Is this title appealing enough? Does it provide valuable information? Is it concise? Successful companies like Buzzfeed spend a lot of time and effort writing effective headlines.
On-Page SEO
Although Google’s algorithms have changed over the years, on-page SEO is still valuable—don’t neglect it! Don’t forget to optimize your alt-text, internal and external links, and even your meta description.
Keyword search is still relevant and you shouldn’t forget about it. However, as we previously mentioned, it’s not about inserting keywords here and there—you need to be coherent with your strategy.
Guest Posts
Link-building is another crucial element when it comes to increasing traffic. However, it requires a lot of time and effort, so this may be part of your long-term game. Many people out there recommend black-hat SEO techniques like private blog networks or link buying. They do provide fast results, but they can also get you in trouble with Google and you may lose all your gains. There is a better alternative—guest-posting.
Guest-posting means exchanging content with other websites. For instance, you can give another site an article or infographic. The site will, in exchange, share some content with you. Alternatively, you can simply ask the website to exchange links in existing content.
Conclusion
These are some tips to consider to improve web traffic. Promoting your content, link building, and advertising will all positively influence your traffic. But there are other strategies you should consider. Having a responsive website and optimizing your email marketing operations can also be effective. The latter is particularly important because it also helps generate leads.
About the Author:
Artur Meyster is the CTO of Career Karma (YC W19), an online marketplace that matches career switchers with coding bootcamps. He is also the host of the Breaking Into Startups podcast, which features people with non-traditional backgrounds who broke into tech. You can find him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
