Evolve Digtias

Nowadays Digital Marketing is emerging as one of the most powerful and booming marketing strategies. The buzz around digital marketing is rising swiftly. Where the people are very much dependent on the internet for searching for information which they plan to purchase. In this scenario, Digital Marketing is the best method to create brand awareness and to generate leads.

51% of all the web traffic and 40% of the revenue are generated through organic searches. This is the sole reason why search marketing teams continuously aim to generate more search traffic. If you rank first on the page due to the keywords you will see the organic traffic increase and if you rank third on the page or in case you have a featured snippet for that keyword then you will see a jump in the traffic. In case you miss to rank on the first page you will miss the opportunity to drive the bottom line revenue.

There is no surprise in figuring out how to increase organic traffic is a Holy Grail of search marketing. Here following are some six tactics which will help us increase search traffic and reach your marketing goals for the long term.

Identify and Fix Non-Performing Content

Non-performing contents are those contents that fail in helping a site in achieving it’s marketing objectives i.e. driving organic traffic or conversions or winning referrals from other sites. If it’s not doing you any favors then there are also chances that it might be hurting your search traffic.

There are limitations on how search engines decide how many pages and which pages of a site to crawl and this is because of non-performing contents that take up all your crawling budget. Search engines tend to abandon your site if there is a lot of non-perform and insufficient content even before reaching to the good stuff.

By identifying and eliminating the non-performing contents it gives search engines enough budget to crawl down to most important posts and pages. If these contents are positioned better in the SERPs then we can win more organic clicks for the long term.

How to Find and Fix Non-Performing Content?

Most importantly you need to identify the best-performing contents on your website in terms of backlinks, traffic, ranking keywords, and conversions. The best way to do this is we run a content audit over it:-

1.  You need to create an inventory for the target keywords with their related articles that are unable to capture much traffic for them. You can also do this by using Alexa’s Site Keywords tool.

2. You need to type in your site to get all the list of the keywords that are driving all the traffic to your site.

3. You must use filter to exclude the terms that have already captured a large share of traffic by filtering for Share of Voice which is between 0 to 5.

4. With this, you will have a list of keyword that is driving some traffic to your site. You can always download the spreadsheet of this keyword to keep a track of which of them are driving traffic to which of the URLs on your site.

5.  You can always cross-refer with each URL’s performance on key organic metrics, including organic traffic, bounce rate, time on page and click-through rate (CTR).

6.  You must access the qualitative factors such as content quality and timelessness.

7.  You can always identify SEO errors such as broken links, dead-end pages, and duplicate content by using Alexa’s SEO Audit Tool.

8.  You can use the content audit templet to organize the information and take away.

Once you know your non-performing contents then you can take up a combination of next steps:-

Refresh: - This is for the on-page SEO with low performing blog posts. To climb up in the SERPs you need to optimize the meta tag SEO, header and ALT images. You can individually inspect pages for improvement with the usage of On-Page SEO Checker.

Redirect: - we must redirect the traffic form low covering pages to relevant high covering ones.

Canonical Redirects: - you can use them for similar pieces of contents. With these tags, we can tell search engines which versions to prioritize.

 You should very frequently conduct the audit so that there is optimized organic traffic performance and also ensure that your site is not weighed down by non-performing contents.

Find New Keyword Opportunities

Even if we apply the strongest keyword strategy, there are possibilities that there will be gaps in them. But let me tell you this is natural, with this there will be new and relevant keywords emerging all the time and this will be adding up to new product features that open up new keyword opportunities. Then it takes good time for content production to incorporate those opportunities into keyword strategies.

You should not only accept the gap-filling keyword strategy. If you want to increase both search traffic and brand visibility you need to identify opportunities and build them into keyword strategy interactions.

How to Find Keyword Opportunities

Let’s say to start with you must identify “low-hanging fruit.” There are some high search volume, low competition keywords that your site isn’t ranking for in the first place. One of the ways to do this is you can use Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty Tool.

1.    You can plug in your entire site or a relevant keyword into the tool. This will pull up some of the related keyword opportunities, which you sort to find the most popular terms.

2.    You can always filter out the terms that are beyond your site’s Competitive Power. This is an Alexa metric that tells you which terms you can realistically rank for and which you can’t. It’s based on your site’s past performance in organic search.

3.    Map the search intent of the keyword opportunities by actually googling them and seeing what type of content ranks best.

Optimize for Higher CTR

Positioning the on-page is only the halfway through the organic search traffic battle; rather then your competitors you need to convince your searchers to click on your results.

There is a double benefit when we do optimize for click-through rate (CTR). First and most important is you need to entice your searches away from your competitor's site on to your own this will increase your organic traffic. Secondly, high CTR will send positive signals to the search engines and that will help Google prioritizes your search results.

 How to Improve CTR?

There is no single action that will boost up your CTR. You can take a holistic approach with these following steps:-

1.    To identify which content on your site has a low CTR from the results page you can use the Google Search Console. If you want to excel and get organized by CTR you need to download it. The best optimization opportunity is represented by low CTR yet high performance in conversation and engagement.

2.    You can make your meta title list more SEO-friendly based on your priority list. This may include the usage of target keywords earlier or even by making the title more engaging can be great tricks. Learn from successful PPC ad examples: Marketing teams invest a lot of time in optimizing PPC ads for CTR and will likely have high CTR.

3.    The most influential factor in CTR is the meta description. You need to make sure that there is a clear call of action as well as there need to be exact keyword phrases that you want to rank. You should not forget to match the searcher intend: For example, the term “best tools for increasing organic traffic” has an informational/list intent behind it. The SEO meta description should reflect that.

 The work is still not done even if you have optimized the above factors. You still need to track and monitor changes in CTR for the refreshed content and correlate improvements back to the actions you took.

A blog to Increase Ranking Keywords Fast

One of the fastest way to increase the keyword and particularly in non-branding keywords which help in the ranking of your site is blogging. Blog posts are the best way as it allows you position your brand as an expert in your field which gives you top-of-funnel-information-posts and will allow you to showcase your product to the people who are searching for the related information. Blogging can also be relevant for your marketing funnel and B2B marketing strategy that will be filling sales funnel those need qualified leads off the back gated content. If the blog content answers real users need only that will drive the organic traffic.

 How to Increase Organic Traffic by Blogging

The time and resource hunger activity are all about blogging. It even takes longer time in showing results than other marketing activities like paid search ads. They pay to spend time caring for laying the groundwork for SEO blogging strategy so that the blog contents gain guarantee organic traction as soon as possible.

1.    If you already have lists of target keywords, separate them into two sections: informational and transactional search intent. 

2.    If you don’t have keyword lists, it’s time to do keyword research.

3.    Once you have a list of target keywords, categorize them by volume, buyer persona or even pain point. This guarantees that your content stays user-centric.

4.    Check out what competitors have for these keywords. You can use Alexa’s Competitor Keyword Matrix to discover which terms competitors are ranking for, then decide whether you want to go head-to-head with them.

5.    Create a content calendar based on the keywords you found in the previous steps.

 Exploit Site Architecture to Get Sitelinks

The architecture of the site plays a very important role in how the crawlers will access your site and how human searchers will be navigated and kept engaged with it. In case the site architecture is confusing then the crawlers would not know which pages or posts are important to your site. It can cause the users to bounce back from your site if they don’t find the information what they need. This might turn out to be sending negative ranking signals to the search engines and can lead to your site dropping in the SERPs result.

If there is a good architecture it will boost up your organic traffic by positioning your site higher in the results and this will also increase the chances of having a site link featured in SERPs.

Site links are those links that appear on the result pages that provide searchers with more options to click through your pages. This might also take up valuable real estate on the results page which pushes down competitors in listing below the folds.

How to Improve Site Architecture & Get Sitelinks

Site links are awarded automatically by the search engines based on their site architecture and cannot be guaranteed by the search marketers.

However, if the site architecture is good then it can help you in increasing the chances of winning site links. You can define a good site architecture by a logical flow of URLs, moving from domain to category to subcategory.

Following are the principles you need to keep in mind to improve the site architecture:-

You need to organize large sites into meaningful categories and subcategories. You must look for competitor sites to know what kind of categorizations will work for your site. 

You need to increase the discoverability by implementing shallow navigation structure where all the pages match up to the domain page.

You need to pay attention to the internal linking structures. You should know that crawlers need a link that will help them to hop from page to page and also site to site. Some of the pages must be uncrawlable if there are lack of links. If you have any dead-end pages on your site you can use Alexa’s Site Audit tool to discover them.

You need to add a sitemap. To tell your crawlers which are the most important pages of your website, which are the ones you’ll want to appear in site links for which you can use the sitemap.xml files.

 Dominate Featured Snippets

In the year 2016 Google has introduced a feature called featured snippets. These are enriched results that aim to answer searchers questions directly in the results page which also means that they never need to Google for whatever they need. The new features of Google like featured snippets and the knowledge graph helps in telling us that fewer people are being sent to our site via search engine results. But necessarily has to be that way. It is found by HubSpot’s Matt Barby that organic traffic was increased only after appearing in featured snippets. 

With featured snippet, smart structure and content can be keys towards increasing the organic traffic. You might be able to push your competitors to result down the ranking gaining more brand exposure.

How to Appear in Featured Snippets

Just like site links even featured snippet too need to be won. You can never request search engines to give you featured snippet. Some steps might help you to increase your chance of appearing in the snippet.

There are several different types of featured snippets in Google that include short paragraphs, lists, and tables. With these formats in mind, you need to follow some of these steps to get the chances of winning featured snippets:-

You need to identify keywords that produce featured snippet results and that your site is already ranking on page one for. The sites that are not on page one will not appear for the snippet.

There are some snippet friendly keyword phrases that answer questions like what, how or why. The contents that you are planning to produce should answer all these questions and the earlier the better.

You need to structure the answers for the crawlers. You need to recreate the question in the H2 subheading and answer it in the text directly below the heading with <p> markup, or try out an ordered or unordered list.

You need to use high-quality optimized images. Images are important as featured snippets usually show an image, so make sure crawlers find and identify your image quickly.