Search engine optimization, or SEO, is one of the most essential parts of your digital marketing strategy. It’s how websites and pages get ranked on Google and other search engines and greatly affects one’s visibility, engagement, and conversions.
SEO makes it easier for search engines to find the best content, bring in organic traffic, and match consumers with their appropriate business. Without it, it would be nearly impossible to get your stellar content noticed — even if it is the best.
But times are changing, and with that, so are SEO trends. As Google continues to revise its algorithms, the structure for how to rank higher and boost visibility changes. It’s essential to keep up to generate more leads and bring in conversions.
Here are three tips to drive more traffic to your content in 2019.
1. Optimize your site performance
You want to make sure that when someone clicks through to your website, there’s as minimal lag as possible. If we have the attention spans of goldfish, then one of the most essential parts of driving traffic is having a website that loads quickly. Google includes page speed in their search ranking algorithms because it’s essential to the user experience (UX).
It’s helpful if you use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to track how fast or slow your site loads for users.
Image optimization
By now we all know that images are great for helping our content come alive. However, images if not optimized for web can slow down your site big time. Thankfully, there are tools to help you compress your images and make your site load faster, which is crucial for SEO.
Check out tools like TinyPNG or Kraken to compress your images for faster loading times.
Content delivery network
A content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), could also help you optimize your site performance for better traffic. It’s a system of servers distributed to deliver web content to users depending on their geographic location. In other words, a CDN keeps your web pages sturdy, speedy, and reliable so that they load for users no matter where they’re at.
Cloudflare is a popular CDN you can use that moves static files closer to visitors for a more secure internet experience. It accelerates mobile links, uses its private network to navigate visitors through the simplest, least congested paths, and adjusts how content is delivered to users based on what device they’re using.
2. Revamp content with vigor
There are many ways you can optimize your content to drive more traffic:
Rewrite old articles that have the potential for success. Put more focus on keywords and centering your articles around them for better search engine rankings.
Create long-form content. It not only performs better in search engines for greater visibility, but studies show it also earns more backlinks and is more engaging to your readers. When it comes to content promotion, long-form brings in more shares and user engagement. Think about it: if your content is longer, it makes sense that users will spend more time interacting with it. Overall, it’s an important part of SEO optimization because it increases conversions.
Utilize other forms of content in your posts like audio, video, and images. In a study done by Render Forest, it’s expected that by 2019, 80 percent of Internet consumption will be video on a global scale. Images are a good way to spice up content and give it a refreshing look.
3. Invest in keyword research
Keyword research is everything when it comes to SEO. It tells you what phrases and keywords attract customers, what they’re looking for, and why they’re interested. It shows you what topics are high and low in demand and you can use that to your advantage to rank higher in Google. You need to know all these things if you want to drive more traffic to your site next year.
Using refined keywords also ensures that the right kind of audience is being directed to your site. It’s a waste of time for someone searching up local plumbers to get redirected to a hair salon. Keywords make sure that only the best, most fitting content gets ranked to the top of search engines, and that’s why it’s so important.
Use tools like Google Keyword Planner to search for keywords that are most sought after but need more content.
Next, you need to create a list of keywords that your consumers are looking up in relation to your content. Long-tail keywords, which are longer and more detailed phrases, are essential for SEO as they’re more specific and get noticed by search engines faster.
According to Wordstream, 50 percent of searches are four words or longer. That means it brings in organic leads and traffic that convert to paying customers easier than other methods because the consumer is coming directly to you. The more targeted, the higher the conversion rate.
Once you’ve created a list of keywords to use, let’s say for a blog post, come up with similar phrases. This is to see if similar phrases or keywords rank high with low competition compared to the others. If so, that’s your goldmine.
Over to you
If you’re looking to boost traffic and leads to your site, these tips will help get you started. It’s critical not to overlook things like content length and page speed because these either enhance or break the UX. Optimizing already existing content also helps your visibility rate. With the right strategy, your content could be first ranked on Google.