What Is The Role Of SEO In Attracting Website Traffic?
In the early days of the internet, website owners could improve their running through some straightforward tips. These shortcuts were easy to implement and effective. However, over time search engines have refined their ranking systems. But, what do we mean by SEO? And how does SEO help increase your website traffic?
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is a way of increasing the quantity and quality of website traffic through some tactics. While SEO does rely on algorithms, it is fundamentally about people. You must understand what people want from their websites and change your product accordingly. But the buck does not stop there; you must also focus on how you deliver the information to the audience. A spammy content might end up charging you a hefty penalty. Simply put, digital SEO services make the changes you make to your website to make it attractive to search engines.
How does SEO work?
Search engines help people find answers to their queries. To provide the most accurate answer to these questions, they search billions of words to provide the most relevant answers to the user’s queries. Most of the work occurs at the back end, and the process is called crawling and indexing. Search engines catalogue all the data and order it how well it answers the questions. It is called ranking, and the order of the content is from most relevant to least relevant.
The best websites score the highest on the result pages. They do so by applying the best SEO tips, such as image link building, niche edits, guest blogging, and others, to improve their content and overall website ranking. According to one Sydney SEO Agency, this means working on the on-site, off-site, content marketing, and technical elements that help a website to rank in Google search. As of 2022, there are more than 200 individual factors that contribute to where a website will rank in the organic search results.
There is a wide range of prominent SEO agencies in Australia (for example, Gorilla 360 offer SEO in Sydney) where as many as 55% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority.
Why is SEO important?
Keeping in mind the importance of SEO in digital marketing, it is important to emphasize its importance. Most online traffic depends on SEO since organic search results get more clicks compared to advertisements. According to research, only 2.8% of people click on ads.
Another important characteristic of SEO is that it generates long-term value. High-quality content can snowball traffic over time without any additional investment. Interestingly, all these SEO tips are easy to learn and implement. However, some people choose to hire professionals to do the task for them.
While doing SEO, experts recommend following white hat techniques. It is one of the most common SEO tips you’ll get. Notably, these techniques are the best practices that provide better results.
This is an area where most businesses need expert professional help, in order to maximize the return from their content marketing. For example, somewhere like Whitehat a Digital Marketing Company, can devise strategic content marketing campaigns that will provide your website with increased traffic that will, in turn, improve its authority as viewed by Google and other search engines.
Black hat techniques, on the other hand, are risky strategies. They run the risk of penalization and de-indexing, both of which can be disastrous for a company. It is important to know the weaknesses of your website before beginning the overall process. Try an online performance checker to determine how well your page ranks on search engines. Most tools provide in-depth information about rankings.
Some Basic Principles of SEO
Do not try to pull a fast one on your visitors. Think of website users as your friends instead of someone you have to hoodwink.
To keep the processes natural, try to ask yourself how everything you do helps your users.
Make content while keeping users in mind. Therefore, try to keep it relevant and easy to understand.
Try to make your pages valuable and unique.
Avoid automatically generated content and unoriginal content.
Keep things simple and crystal clear.
Best Techniques to Attract Traffic
Follow these SEO tips to improve your traffic.
● Optimize your content for voice search: Voice assistants are the future of the internet. According to research, 25% of Americans have smart speakers. In contrast, 75% of those people used voice research in their daily lives. However, this type of searching works differently than the traditional process. For example, voice research questions are lengthier than written searches. That is not all. Most online searches focus on local services. Therefore, users should write featured snippets to optimize their website for voice search. Users would also benefit from long-tail keywords.
● Focus on Mobile-first: The 21st Century is the age of mobile. According to research, more than half of all purchases are through mobile searches. Furthermore, once you focus on the mobile phone, you reach more people. 77% of all Americans own a smartphone, while 79% of those users make a purchase online. Most importantly, Google has already gone mobile. According to Google’s 2020 update, the mobile version of sites will be crawled and indexed before the desktop version.
● Write longer content: The fact is that website owners do not invest a lot of time in their content. However, that is one of the most common mistakes. Research suggests that longer content does better, and it gets more backlinks. It is not feasible to write 2000 words per post. So, rely on common sense to understand how long your content should be. Always ask yourself what kind of information everyone is looking for. How can you create long-form content without stress?
Refresh your content: Some kinds of content are evergreen. Use those posts and refresh them for the best results. You can check how well your content is doing through Google Analytics.
● Improve the user experience on your website: Poor quality content does not rank well. It is as simple as that. Websites that do not publish trustworthy, credible, and updated content do not rank high. Furthermore, websites with thin content have a higher bounce rate (It is the percentage of users who leave our website after they visit it). Experts believe that Google rewards websites with lower bounce rates and ranks them higher. Perhaps, the only way to do this is by improving the quality of your content. There are a few ways you can do that.
Make your posts readable: You can do so by writing quality content and formatting it correctly. Take a page out of our book and write in shorter paragraphs. You can also improve the visual of your content by mixing sentence length.
Formatting matters: Make the best of your posts by formatting them correctly. Use subheadings to make things visually appealing. Add some bullet points to organize the data. Furthermore, use some space to break up different ideas.
Keep it flowing: The best content is a piece of writing which flows. Improve the cohesion and connectivity of your work by adding connecting words. You can also add bucket brigades that bridge the content.
Present information in descending order: Here is how things go: start with the most newsworthy fact and then end the para on supporting information about the content. Reserve the chunk of the content for the main story.
Conclusion
SEO is an ever-evolving field. Most search engines are making changes to their algorithm after every few days. Therefore, businesses must conform to the changes quickly. Furthermore, those who know the fundamentals of content creation find it easier to adapt to the changing field. If you’re looking for ways to increase your website traffic, it would be best to use SEO as the primary approach.