10 Ways To Get Better Search Results to Boost Traffic
When you have a website that is your storefront, your main job (aside from having superb products and services with attractive offers) is to get traffic to your site. The more relevant traffic you can bring to your site, the better.
FREE Checklist: SEO For Beginners
If you improve your website search engine optimization (SEO) you can get more traffic sent to your website from the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Here are 10 ways you can adapt your website to get better search results.
10 Ways To Get Better Search Results
1. Optimize for User Experience
When your visitors go to your website, they need the pages to load fast. But search engines need your site to load even faster to pay any attention to you at all. Make sure the site works seamlessly for both people and technology.
2. Develop Relevant Content
One of the best ways to get better search results and generate more ‘organic’ or free traffic involves how you write and format the content on your website and the keywords you use. The keywords are the words and phrases a person will type into a search engine to find what they’re looking for.
Take time to study keywords, your audience, and your competition, and set your goals so you can publish the right content. The right SEO content attracts people and search engines.
FREE Checklist: SEO For Beginners
3. Build Backlinks
A backlink is a link that you don’t own that links your website or landing pages. Google wants you to earn backlinks naturally from trustworthy sites. You can create a plan to earn them by posting relevant content, guest posting, and participating in discussion boards on popular authoritative sites.
4. Add Internal Linking
Just like you need links coming in, you need links inside your website that link to more content for your audience. Ensure that you connect relevant content to each page of your site. Not only will your audience find the content, but so will the search engines.
5. Optimize All Images for Visual Search
Images on your site should be visually pleasing and appropriately named, correctly sized and optimized by adding the right information to them. Although the search engines can’t ‘read’ images, they can read the descriptions that you give them. An ‘alt image tag’ are the words that you use to describe your image. Don’t just use the alt tag to say ‘image’ or ‘photo’. Use keywords to describe the image and that will be picked up by the search engines.
6. Fix Anything That’s Broken
Ensure that your website doesn’t have any broken links. Links that lead to nowhere will send up red-flags. Why? Because it will not enhance the user’s experience if they click on a link and it errors out. Get a plugin to double-check your links to avoid any issues with broken links. If you have software to keep track of links, it will be easier than trying to do it alone.
7. Optimize Your Error Pages
Every site has an error page that any visitors will be sent to if the content they want is not available for some reason. It may be a broken link or something else, but you still have an opportunity to attract them by personalizing your 401 error pages.
FREE Checklist: SEO For Beginners
8. Remember to Use Header Tags
On your website, you should designate headers with H1 or H2 Tags and use keywords. That will signal to the search engines that the content is important, but it also looks visually pleasing to break up text with different-sized fonts and white space.
9. Optimize for Voice Search
Initially, devices such as Alexa and Siri were merely entertaining because it was fun to ask silly questions just to see how “she” would answer. But the continued use of voice search has paved the way for a remarkable technology. And it has led to the rise of mobile assistants such as Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, as well as smart speakers such as Amazon’s Echo, Google’s Home, and Apple’s HomePod.
With more consumers using voice search, no other industry has gained from it more than small, local businesses. Optimizing your content and website for voice search is about creating content designed in the way we speak. Searching using the keyboard differs from when we talk out loud. For example, you may type ‘pizza restaurants‘ but if you were talking you would say, ‘Where’s the best pizza restaurant near here?’
10. Use the Tools of the Trade
Don’t try to do everything yourself manually. Enlist the help of software to help you make your site faster, automate linking, and more. Try using an easy-to-use plugin like Yoast SEO to help, or use a service as you can find through HubSpot with their SEO Marketing Software.
Free Checklist: How To Get Better Search Engines
Without search engine optimization (SEO) you’re just hoping that Google and the other types of search engines will somehow stumble across your website, figure out what your content is all about, and then hopefully send relevant and targeted traffic to your website.
You’ve put a lot of work into your website so it makes no sense to just pray for luck where traffic and success is concerned. There is no real “build it, and they will come” solution to getting traffic for your content. But there are techniques you can use to ensure that your audience finds you. For more tips on getting your website seen on search engines download my free checklist, SEO For Beginners.
