4 Tips for Boosting Your Organic Traffic to Your Business Website This Month

4 Tips for Boosting Your Organic Traffic to Your Business Website This Month

If you run a brick and mortar store, you can attract customers by choosing a prime location, creating eye-catching signs, or celebrating your grand opening with balloons and a bouncy castle. If you do business online, however, building your customer base is more challenging. No matter how much time and effort you put into creating a superior product or service, you won’t make a profit if your customers can’t find you. While advertising online can help, it’s the organic traffic to your website that will drive your success.

Here are four tips to increase your website traffic and make sure your customers are there to stay.

1. Don’t Slack Off on Your SEO

You probably already use high-ranking Google search keywords on your website, but is your SEO truly optimized? One problem with the highest-performing keywords is the amount of competition. Secondary keywords, which are slight variations on popular topics, can yield better results.

If you have a page about coffee grinders, for example, “best coffee grinder” is a high-ranking search term, but you can attract additional traffic to the same page by including variations like “coffee grinder review” and “coffee bean grinder. Include subtopics like “burr grinders” or “conical grinders” and long-tail keyword phrases such as “best coffee grinder for espresso,” and “best coffee grinder for French press.”

A solid SEO strategy requires periodic, in-depth audits of all the pages on your site. Check for any broken links or 404 errors. If you have low-value pages with almost no traffic, delete them, so search engines don’t use up your crawl budget scanning them. If you have two pages containing the same keywords, merge the content into one page to avoid splitting the traffic.

2. Write a Blog

Rising to the top of Google’s search results takes more than a few strategically-placed keywords; those words need to appear in high-quality writing. Blogging is the most effective way to deliver a steady stream of content that will answer your customer’s most common questions or present solutions to their most pressing problems. Your expertise provides added value and builds customers’ trust.

Writing a profitable blog requires a carefully-planned editorial calendar. If you’ve written a blog about the best gifts for coffee lovers, it makes sense to release it during the holiday shopping season, whereas if you have a recipe for an iced coffee smoothie, you can expect more traffic in the summer months. Leave some space for whatever topics show up in your newsfeed, so you can piggyback on the latest trends.

If you have an older blog that was particularly popular, consider re-releasing it with updated information and additional keywords. A tutorial on removing coffee stains from clothing, for example, is always in demand.

Blogs also rank highly in Google search results if they include popular names. Invite other bloggers to write guest posts or interview thought leaders in your industry. Their fans may become yours. Even if you aren’t exactly friendly with some of the bloggers in your field, you can still mine their popularity by writing articles responding to theirs.

3. Backlinks Bring All the Clients to the Yard

The benefits of guest blogging work both ways. You can write for other outlets and include a link back to your website. These backlinks net referral traffic and allow search engine bots to index your site more quickly. In the past, the number of backlinks your site received had the most impact on your SEO, but since the release of Google’s Penguin algorithm, the rules have changed.

For backlinks to help your rankings rather than hurt them, they must come from reputable websites that have a focus similar to your own. A coffee vendor won’t benefit from getting a backlink from a used car site. Avoid using paid automated backlinks from harvest sites or other sources of spam.

Focus on making unique contributions to multiple outlets rather than including multiple backlinks on a single outlet, as Google will only count each domain once. One tool for finding guest blogging prospects is Ahrefs’ Content Explorer. Search for blogs with a high domain rating that have published your type of content before.

4. Once You’ve Got Traffic, Keep It

Regardless of how visitors reach your website, you need to provide a seamless navigation experience, so they stick around long enough to make a purchase. Above all, your website must be mobile-friendly. Fast loading speed is also essential; studies have shown 40 percent of visitors leave a site that takes more than three seconds to load, and above three seconds, abandonment rates rise to 80 percent.

Dwell time and visitor engagement are highest on websites with a clean, well-organized layout and reader-friendly typography. Write in short paragraphs with ample spacing and use headings and bullet points. Break up text with visuals, but make sure to resize or compress any large images that would be slow to load. To reduce your bounce rate, use internal links in your blog posts to direct readers to other content on your website.

How will you give your business website a boost in traffic this month? Share your ideas in the comments.