Marketing

How Can I Get More Search Engine Traffic?

Is your search engine traffic very low? Are you trying to find ways to increase it and get more visitors to your site? On this page, we offer a few ideas to help you accomplish this task, as well as some resources that you can use to grow your site and improve your online presence.

We’ll start with keyword targeting, which is one of the ways you can make the biggest difference in the amount of traffic you receive from Google.

Make sure you’re targeting the right keywords

One of the most common mistakes that companies make is going after very broad, highly competitive keywords on their websites. For example, if you sell bicycles, common sense would dictate that you should target “bicycles” on your website, right?

However, someone searching for the word “bicycle” could have several things in mind — the intent really isn’t clear. They could be researching types of bikes, looking for photos, wanting to buy a bike, or maybe they don’t actually know what a bicycle is or how it works! So even if you ranked #1 for this word, your sales might be extremely low because a large percentage of people searching this word isn’t ready to buy.

Also, you could run into the situation where a majority of the people who want to find or buy your product don’t even use the phrase you think they use. What if you target “buy bicycles” but most of your potential customers instead search for “buy bikes” or “buy mountain bikes”? If you target the wrong keywords, your traffic will be low, and your sales may be suffering.

This is one of the most common issues we see, especially for small businesses looking to improve their SEO. Fortunately, it’s very easy to fix — it just takes a little research.

If you don’t have the time, team members, or skillset for this task, consider SEO services from a reputable agency.

Target more long-tail keywords

In the example above, we talked about targeting “bicycles” as opposed to “buy mountain bikes.” “Buy mountain bikes” is a long-tail keyword — that is, a keyword that may have lower such volume, but shows a higher level of intent (and in this case, interest in making a purchase).

If you target these long-tail keywords on your site, you may see a drop in traffic from the “big” keywords you think you should be going after, but overall, your traffic and sales from longer-tail keywords will jump up. Overall, getting more traffic isn’t hugely important — it’s getting traffic that converts that really matters.

In our example above, your store might go from targeting the keyword “bicycles” to targeting “buy mountain bikes,” “buy bicycle parts,” or even “buy bicycles in [city].” This will bring your site traffic from people more likely to make a purchase, who have already done their research and may be price shopping. Give them a good deal and you have this in the bag!

We have a free guide that can help you both improve your keyword targeting and identify valuable long-tail keywords to use on your website. You can download it for free here!

Improve your website’s SEO

Of course, keyword targeting is only one piece of the puzzle. Your site’s overall search engine friendliness matters, too. If your site is not fast, well-optimized, sporting a lot of links, and using keywords in the right places, your traffic may remain low.

There are a lot of ways you can improve your website’s SEO. By improving your SEO, you are making it more visible in search engines for a variety of keywords, which will increase your traffic. To learn about these methods, just take a look through our resources section to learn about them!

Better SEO can also improve the entire user experience, like by reducing bounce rate, improving time on page, and even increasing conversion rates.

Add more original content

Does your website consist of a few pages about your business, history, products or services, and how to contact you? If so, this could be why you aren’t getting much traffic from search engines.

Google likes fresh, original content, and prefers to show users sites that have a lot of it. Also, website content like articles, blog posts, and guides give you more ways to add the keywords you are targeting to your site, which can in turn help you rank better and attract more visitors to your site. High-quality content can also attract SEO backlinks, which improve your backlink profile and ability to rank for competitive keywords.

If you do not already have one, consider starting a blog or opening a knowledge base to write about the topics you are an authority on — it will help you more than you may realize!

Start scaling your traffic

If you already have an initial flow of traffic to your site, start working on scaling it. There are several ways you can do this, depending on which stage of growth you are in, but you should look into the following:

• Pay-per-click ads (ex. Google AdWords)
• Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.)
• Word of mouth promotion
• Offline marketing methods
• Advanced SEO tactics (link building, content marketing, lead generation, CRO, etc.)

For additional resources that can help you increase your website traffic and improve your visibility in search, check out these three free guides:

• 101 Free Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
• How to Scale Your Website Traffic
• On-Page SEO Checklist

If you have any questions about increasing your search engine traffic, or are confused by any of the things on the report you received from us, please don’t hesitate to let us know! We would be more than happy to help you make sense of your results and give you some additional tips to improve your website and increase your traffic.

*Last updated: 1/21/22

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