Quite unlike your commutes and road trips, traffic is a great thing for your website. Aside from the general interest in your particular niche and content, there are some golden rules for boosting your rankings and site traffic.
Even though there are high rewards for appearing more favourable to search engines, it isn’t actually the most complicated feat in the world. As long as you get on board with some SEO fundamentals, you can increase traffic on your website. Here’s how:
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Search Intent is King
Everything on your site should revolve around search intent, also referred to as user intent, essentially what an individual is looking to find. While the right keywords get you closer to matching search intent, you need to optimize your site in more ways than that.
Let’s say, for example, your website sells a wide range of home décor items in Sydney. You do some keyword research and discover that a lot of local people are querying “cute animal décor,” which motivates you to set up a ‘Cute Animal’ category on your site to rank higher.
Will you see more traffic? Almost certainly not. It’s a much better idea to create informative content that is relevant, i.e. reflects the search intent, but also caters to the large proportion of people simply wanting to learn, get inspired, or pass the time.
You can still nudge people towards product pages, but your digital marketing is now catering to more kinds of search intent, and thus valuable to a greater number of people. In our case of the home décor store, they increased traffic by building up a catalogue of authoritative articles including product links, each based on specific search intents.
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Frequently Answered Questions
People use search engines to get the answer to their question, but they can only search for a single question at a time. Your site content obviously needs to answer the specific search terms you’re targeting, but you should also aim to provide additional insight whenever you can by answering related questions.
Even if you’re an expert on a subject, it’s quite tricky to create content that answers all of the questions surrounding the original search. Including an FAQ section with your content is great for catching any common queries you’ve missed, providing your visitors will more comprehensive knowledge. You should also feature a few backlinks per page to guide people to even more related information
More generally, an FAQ section can increase traffic by the simple fact you’re answering more questions. When somebody searches for information, the answers they find inform their subsequent searches. Your FAQ section and backlinks offer people the answer to their next question, which keeps people on your site for longer.
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Carefully Consider Page Titles and Headings
The words title and heading are synonymous in many cases, but website coding is definitely not one of them. Title tags are those few words shown in blue on SERPs and they play a major role in defining your page.
Titles definitely aren’t the only thing used to label your site, in much the same way a name alone does a very poor job at describing the individual. Yet you certainly can increase site traffic with well-crafted titles, which should:
- Accurately describe content
- Include primary keywords
- Entice visitors to the page
At the same time, don’t forget about headings (H1), which act to summarize specific textual sections of the page. Your first heading will typically include the primary keyword also, while sub-headings use supporting terms. For the best headings, follow the same three rules above.
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Revive Outdated Content
What you say today may not apply tomorrow, and it surely won’t stay relevant year on year. Even your best-ranking pages will begin to slide downwards if you aren’t putting enough time into updating your content.
Whether you’re refreshing some poorly-optimized text or adding more information/sections to pad out the discussion, this kind of work increases the value of the page, which is exactly what search engines are hoping for, after all.
You can rework content as part of your periodic site audit, whether you’re doing them yourself of with an SEO agency. It’s the ideal time to add extra keywords, change metadata, and drop in new internal links, as well as address any other issues common across pages.
Pieces of the Site Traffic Puzzle
Truthfully, there are countless considerations when building a well-oiled website. Although there’s no sure path for improving traffic, some things are just fundamentally positive for visitors, including search intent relevancy, high-quality content, and of course the more technical aspects at the backend.
Adopting the best SEO practices in general will have a positive effect on traffic to your site, which is something that an SEO agency can help with. Imagine site visitors as house guests and everything becomes a little simpler. Speak to them politely, offer them what they’d like, and make sure everything looks tidy. If you can manage that, they’re sure to stop by again some time.