With over 50% of traffic around the web coming from organic search results like Google, etc. you understand what it means to improve your site SEO. SEO is an inevitable necessity for your site to grow in terms of popularity, visibility, and in ROI. Because if your site isn’t showing up in the top spot of the SERPs when web users are searching for services or products related to your industry or business, you’ll definitely not make a sale. And not making a sale means your business will soon die a natural death.
The question we get asked most often by our readers is:”how SEO drive traffic to a website”. They really want to know how those guys whose websites are on top of the SERPs got there and if SEO is important in achieving this. Our answer has often been “Yes, SEO is important in driving organic and valuable traffic to your website”. By implementing the white-hat SEO technique and constantly churning out informative, unique, and valuable blog posts or content, you’ll be able to rank your website over time.
However, there is one thing you need to know about using this type of SEO technique when compared to the black-hat or grey-hat SEO techniques. While the black-hat technique is illegal and frown at by Google and can lead your site from being penalized and de-indexed from the Google SERPs, its results are always fast and used by hungry webmasters or bloggers looking for a quick way to make money off their websites or blogs. But the results will only last for a short while.
White-hat SEO, on the other hand, is the Google’s approved way of improving your site SEO and getting ranked in Google’s SERPs, though Google’s algorithm for ranking a website isn’t something anyone can proudly claim to be sure of. SEO still counts if you’re looking for the most reliable and safe way to boost your website traffic.
To cut the to the chase, let’s go into specific: How SEO drives traffic to a website.
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a process of optimizing a site for a particular search term or search keywords to improve the site’s visibility in the search engine results pages (SERPs). To implement this effectively, a webmaster or blogger needs to look deeply into the search terms or keywords being used by customers to search for his products or service online and then create content around such keywords. This is what SEO is basically about. In a broader sense, SEO goes beyond just optimizing your content or web page for certain keywords alone, it involves designing your website for mobile, improving your user experience, leveraging white-hat backlinks technique, among others.
How Does SEO Work
Google, like every other search engine, has a primary motive of ensuring people using their search engine get high-quality, relevant, and valuable information. And to achieve this, they designed an algorithm that they use in determining which site or page should feature on top of their SERPs. In doing this, Google’s spider crawls different web pages or websites’ content to assess the relevance of the web pages to what web users are looking for. They consider relevant keywords used within the content, the number of sites linking to the website, mobile-friendliness of the website’s design, and many other ranking factors. And then they decide where the website should occupy on their SERPs. Google’s algorithm is complex and so there are more than a thousand ranking factors that Google uses in ranking a website and they never stop updating and refining their algorithm.
What Is Website Traffic?
According to Wikipedia, “web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a website.” This type of traffic is measured based on the number of visitors to your website and the number of pages they visit. Monitoring this traffic to know their source is a must-do for you to know which page on your website is doing better and which page needs more tweaking.
How To Use SEO To Drive Traffic To Your Website
So you understand SEO basics now, right?
Good! Let’s now go into the meat of the article which is: How SEO Drive Traffic To Your Website. There are different ways by which you can drive traffic to your website using SEO techniques. While some SEO techniques are not approved by Google, there are so many legit other ways you can skyrocket your website traffic without flouting Google’s rules.
Here are some of the ways by which you can use SEO to drive quality traffic to your website:
Improve Your Website User Experience
When optimizing your site for SEO, you need to take into consideration the main objective of Google’s being in business: helping users find easily the query they’re looking for so they continue to use the search engine. If your website fails to offer a positive user experience by being mobile-friendly, updated with fresh content, fast in loading, etc. you may not be able to rank your website on top of Google’s SERPs.
So the first thing you need to consider as you’re trying to drive traffic to your website using SEO is to improve your website’s user experience across the entire site.
Additionally, you need to create high-quality, well-formatted content. No matter how well written and informative your content is it may not convert or attract quality traffic if the readability and formatting aren’t properly done. By writing quality content isn’t in itself enough, you also need to make sure your content is easy to read by using a shorter paragraph, sub-headers, white spaces, images, bullet points, etc.
Consider The Mobile-Friendliness of Your Website Design
As you’re about designing your website, think about your website’s mobile-friendliness. Designing your site for mobile is one step you need to take to ensure it ranks well and attracts better traffic. With Google going mobile and announcing mobile first indexing for the whole web on 5th March 2020, you already know how important it is to follow suite and design your website for mobile. Also, there are so many other reasons to show why you need to go mobile with your website including these statistics showing that 85% American own a Smartphone. As a consequence, you must consider this while building a website. The mobile experience of your website should be given priority as your desktop experience. What I mean is you shouldn’t neglect anyone at expense of another. But you should consider designing your website for mobile first.
Focus on Information-Rich Content
This aspect is especially important since Google is more concerned about the value you’re offering the users rather than creating content that focuses on keywords alone. What most people believe is that they can rank their website fast by only focusing on the keywords at the expense of providing valuable information the users are looking for. This isn’t enough for you to rank. You need to create lots of informative and valuable content consistently to rank your website on the top spot of the SERPs.
To create content that your readers will love and value, you need to understand your target audience, do your keyword research, and more. This will help you create content that will resonate well with your audience.
Create Long Content
There is no one-size-fits-all about how long or short your content should be but you should what topic you need to cover and what length of words will be enough for you to cover the topic extensively. But the truth is longer content work better in terms of backlinks generation and quality backlinks tend to affect your website ranking positively.
Wrapping Up
SEO is fast evolving and so you need to keep adapting to the changes as they evolve. By understanding the basics of SEO, its meaning, and how SEO works, as well as how to use SEO to drive traffic to your website, you can improve your ranking and SEO ROI over time. Although, there are many ways to improving your site traffic, using SEO is one of the surest and fastest ways. All you need is to try out each of the SEO techniques and consistently implement them to see how they can affect positive change on your website traffic.
