This is a guest post from Sergey Aliokhin, a Marketing Manager at Ahrefs.
Your online business success depends on the traffic your website gains. The more traffic it gets, the more money you will earn.
However, do you need all the traffic that comes to your website? No, you don’t. You only need the traffic that is going to convert into sales or leads.
But how do you go about generating relevant organic traffic to your site?
In this article, we are going to reveal to you five actionable tips that will help you with this.
Let’s start!
SIDENOTE: if you have ever asked yourself how to climb the Google rankings, this video will give you a few actionable pieces of advice:
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If You Want to Get Quality Traffic – Target Right Words in Your SEO Campaign
As I’ve stated in the introduction – you should not be interested in just any traffic, you need traffic that will convert into your paid customers. That means you should understand what your potential customers want and what words they use during the search.
HubSpot has a very powerful blog that contains tons of high-quality content. But have you ever asked yourself a question “what keyword brings the most of the traffic to this blog?”
‘Top Pages’ report from Site Explorer tool will give you a clear understanding of the situation:
You can see that top position belongs to the keyword “how to make a gif” from the article “How to Make an Animated GIF in Photoshop.” This search terms generated over 109K visits per month and ranks over 6,6K keywords across the USA only.
What does this example show us?
It shows that if the keyword follows a user’s intent and you use it in your SEO campaign, you can see spectacular results.
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Use Long-Tail Keywords
There are disputes about using long-tail keywords on the web. Some experts claim that long-tails are less effective in contrast to regular keywords, while other SEO gurus state that you can generate traffic using them. Who is right and who is wrong?
Yes, long-tails have a pretty low search volume but if you optimize your content based on some concrete topic (not separate words), you will see positive results.
Google is getting smarter and can understand synonyms grouping the individual keywords into topics.
This means that the pages can rank for many long-tail keywords. Keep in mind that your success depends on producing high-quality and relative content on a given topic. Thus, you should carry out deep research on whether or not long-tails would be useful for you.
One of the best ways to find long-tail keywords ideas is using ‘Search suggestion’ report:
Skim through the list and find the keywords that seem promising to you.
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Don’t Shy Away from ‘Borrowing’ Competitors’ Keywords
Keyword research has always been a tricky thing, especially if you’re just beginning with SEO. Nevertheless, try not to miss a chance to find those keywords that would be beneficial for your campaign.
Likely, you can take a different approach to this.
You can actually uncover new keyword opportunities by ‘borrowing’ keyword ideas from your competitors.
Assume that I own a website that sells watches in the USA. The first keyword that comes to my mind is “buy watches online US” but I would like to know what other keywords I could target as well.
Google ranks World of Watches first and it seems like one of my potential competitors. I want to know what keywords this website ranks for and borrow the most relevant keywords for myself.
The ‘Organic keywords’ report will provide you with the list of keywords your competitor ranks for and you can use some of them for your SEO campaign.
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Don’t Forget About Outdated Content on Your Blog – Revise and Update It
There is a big misconception in the SEO world that the more content you publish – the better. And people think that traffic depends on the number of posts you publish on your blog. If your content isn’t popular and doesn’t find any recognition among your target audience, it makes no sense to keep it.
What’s more important, you can’t dedicate all your time to writing and publishing material randomly. How do you know which topic would be interesting to your audience?
Thus, you can choose another way, by revising and updating the old content that has brought you lots of traffic. Furthermore, Google likes to rank refreshed content higher.
I will give you the example to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method.
Back in the day, we published a piece of content that analysed the best tools for competitor analysis. It gained 50K visits per month organically, but we decided to breathe fresh life into it. Here is the result:
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Don’t Neglect Communication with Your Customers
Producing high-quality content is a proven method to grow traffic to your site. However, if your content doesn’t help your target audience get answers to the questions people have, it is essentially useless.
We stick to this rule here at Ahrefs. Thus, our primary goal is to make sure our users find the information they need.
If you take a look at ‘Top pages’ report for our blog, you will see that the majority of our content is “how-to” guides:
To uncover keywords containing the word ‘how’, you can use the Keyword Generator tool. ‘Phrase match’ report will give you a list of keyword ideas that include the ‘how’ element:
Voila, I’ve got more than 6K keyword ideas.
To Conclude
I hope this article has proven you that there is no free and absolutely actionable way to grow traffic to the website. Traffic always requires some investments, effort, and time.
Author’s bio: Sergey Aliokhin, a Marketing Manager at Ahrefs. Apart from working at Ahrefs, he likes spending his time with family, studying martial arts, and plucking fat bass guitar strings.