SEO Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Website

7 Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Web with SEO

By Toni Talley, Communications Specialist, Blue Symphony, LLC

You listened to the experts and created an awesome website for your business. You feel like a legitimate business owner and are ready for your influx of customers. Then the thought occurs, “How will you get people to your site?” This is where SEO comes in to play. I first learned about SEO during college years ago and over time it has evolved tremendously. SEO is every marketer’s key to staying top of mind with a consumer, client, customer, brand, etc. - and it can be bit of work! So, what exactly is SEO? I’m glad you asked!; SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of growing the quality and quantity of website traffic, organically, meaning you didn’t have to buy ads. SEO is how one increases their website visibility on a web search engine such as Google or Bing. In other words, SEO helps people find your website. It’s working at its best when your website shows up on the first page of search results. You’re now probably wondering how to actually utilize SEO to achieve high visibility for your website?; SEO is broad and can be complicated, but the Blue Symphony team has compiled information to provide you with 7 core SEO tips to boost your visibility, essentially increasing your website traffic. Check them out below!
1. Keywords: Keywords are exactly that – KEY! Keywords are the first step to increasing traffic to your business. These words are what your prospective customers use on search engines like Google. For example, if you have a soul food restaurant, the words one may search to find your restaurant may be “soul food” or “soul food in Kansas City”. The words and phrases you use on your website are vital to how Google ranks your website which then determines which page your website lands on from a search. Being found on the first page of a Google search is a great indicator that your SEO is working. A great way to make sure you’re using the best keywords is to search words already being used for similar businesses and your competitors who rank high on search engines. Google has a Keyword Planner you can use as a start.
2. Quality Fresh Content: It’s not about stuffing keywords but rather providing informative and engaging content, therefore, the more people who share your content improves your position as an expert. Google gives priority to websites with authoritative and high quality content from experts. You can build authority for your content by having credentialed experts serving as guest bloggers or even featuring a presenter at live events. To add to the quality of content, regularly adding new and interesting content is also important for SEO. Let’s face it, nobody likes a boring or outdated website. Creating – and sticking to – a schedule to update your website can help you keep it fresh. It can be as easy as applying new content to an old post. Introducing content on your social media channels is another way to drive visitors back to your website.
3. Backlinks: Backlinks are links from other websites that link back to your website. Especially if you’re an expert in a specific industry, backlinks will be very beneficial to your ranking. For example, if you have a blog about vegan recipes and it’s featured online on a local news station’s website, the website address they post for readers to access your recipe on your page is a backlink. Backlinks sound simple but can be work. Check out this article on how to get high quality backlinks in 2020 written by Brian Dean of Backlinko. See, I just gave Brian a backlink!
4. Images: You probably already know that your website visitors like great pictures but did you that they can also impact SEO? Integrating an image as a link to your social media feeds also provide for great visuals. The alt tag and even the image’s filename can affect SEO. Be sure to include keywords and phrases in the caption of your pictures as another way to use SEO to increase website visibility.
5. Videos: Just like a cool image can make one’s website pretty, so can a video. Videos can enhance the visual for a website by providing engaging sound and animation. Again, adding keywords and phrases within the caption or title of the video adds cool points to your SEO strategy. So does hosting your video on YouTube. It’s the second largest search engine. Using that platform for hosting your content can be a great advantage. We’ll cover video SEO in more detail soon.
6. Snippets: Snippets are a preview of a webpage that show up in Google search results. Google chooses the snippets it will feature. Leveraging the key points above such as popular keywords, supporting copy, images and video improve your chance of Google choosing your webpage for a featured snippet. Good headlines, lists and even infographics also help increase your snippet visibility. Video snippets are a fast way to get right to the point of a video someone has searched, especially with a tutorial on how to do certain skills. Having keywords to identify where the searched snippet is located in the video can bring your video to the top of a search.
7. Voice Search: This is an emerging feature to the SEO strategy world with many businesses using this tool to increase web traffic to their site. An example of voice search is asking Alexa to play a news channel for you – e.g. “Alexa, open CNN” , or “Siri, find table décor on Pinterest”. Check out this guide to optimize your site for voice search.

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