No traffic? Use these on-page and off-page SEO tricks
Your website’s content takes a lot out of you. You put in all that time for research and spend hours hunched over your keyboard only to have nobody read it.
It’s such a crushing feeling. Doesn’t anybody care about the insights you have to offer? Don’t they know how long it took for you to write up all this information for them?
Well, sure they're interested. They just can’t find your content!
Just because you publish something doesn't mean it'll be visible in search engines. So how do you get impressions and clicks? With a robust distribution method, including SEO, in particular.
Here’s how to harness the power of on-page SEO and off-page SEO ranking factors to improve your online visibility, grow domain authority, and boost conversions.
Monitoring the ROI of on-page SEO elements. | Photo by Miriam Jessier on Unsplash
These on- and off-page SEO elements are crucial to increasing traffic
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the ongoing process of making your content more visible and accessible on search engines. It's the number one way to cultivate a continuous flow of organic traffic and grow brand awareness, maximizing the reach of the top of your sales funnel.
Unfortunately, many new web entrepreneurs believe that the best way to earn "organic traffic" is by utilizing influencer marketing. That's probably one of the worst ways for a beginner to approach the brand awareness stage when used as the sole or primary distribution method. It's ineffective, undercuts your profits, and rarely yields the ROI that online business newbies expect.
On the other hand, some people believe SEO is merely plugging in keywords here and there to rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). While optimizing your content around a primary keyword or search term and its related secondary keywords is an important part of SEO, that’s not all it entails.
Think about the last time you entered a search query into Google, Bing, or another search engine. You got a few suggestions based on how well optimized the resulting web pages are for that term. Search engine bots organize these results based on:
Keywords
Title tag
External and internal linking
Meta description (the few sentences you see on a website’s search results preview)
Content quality and relevance
Core web vitals (e.g., web page speed, mobile-friendliness, etc.)
Website authority
And hundreds more factors
All this information helps search engines understand what your content’s about and where it belongs in the worldwide web.
You can think of it like this: SEO operates as a sort of roadmap that helps web surfers navigate to the best information on the internet.
For instance, imagine that you run an e-commerce platform about dogs and other pets. In that case, you’ll want to incorporate a continuous flow of content about these animals, such as how-to articles for pet care and community-driven stories about common pet ownership challenges. Why?
Blogs are an increasingly critical part of digital marketing. They help:
✓ Generate traffic and leads by improving SERP rankings (and therefore, improving visibility)
✓ Share valuable information with your readers, establishing yourself as a reliable source of expert information (increasing trust in your products and services)
✓ Promote your brand, services, and/or products through published articles and featured reviews
You can’t afford to go without it! But admittedly, it takes a LOT of hard work, and is a continuous process that you may need some help with from time to time, especially if you don’t know how to account for those lesser-known, “off-page” SEO factors.
Off-page SEO and on-page SEO factors can help increase your website's impressions and clicks. | Photo by Stephen Phillips on Unsplash
Lesser-known aspects of SEO
Keywords with high search volumes aren’t the only thing you need to worry about when working on your site’s SEO. The last thing you want is for potential customers to find your platform and immediately exit the site (known as having a high “bounce rate”) due to poor functionality, compatibility, or a lack of relevant content.
Think of the last time you visited a website that took too long to load. If you weren’t already sure the site had the info you need, you probably gave up after a while and looked for another page. This touches on two issues—site speed and content quality.
The latter is why experts say that the problem isn’t that people don’t like reading anymore: It’s that there’s so much content on the web, they must be picky about which pages they spend time reading!
This means that if you’re taking up too much of your visitors' web surfing time without fulfilling your promise for information, you lose their trust and they’ll move on to the next vendor.
Plus, as you provide the promised information, modern SEO best practices entail the integration of graphics and photographs, since humans process visuals 60,000 fast than text.
To boost your search engine rankings even further, you’ll need to work on link-building between high-authority platforms and your own website. The connections will signal the content’s quality and demonstrate its foundation of thorough research.
Other distribution methods, such as print media features, brand media collaborations, and sharing your brand’s content via industry events (e.g., expos, conferences, fairs, etc.), are all essential to improving your traffic flow as well. As powerful as SEO is, it can’t work alone, especially for brand-new websites in highly competitive industries.
An example of page-level search engine optimization
There are a lot of different page-level SEO techniques. Considering the vast number of factors influencing your content performance, you don’t have to stick to just one to rank well.
I’ve used a few different techniques myself. Here’s a time-lapse of my latest method, demonstrated during a content refresh.
The process used for a content refresh may vary slightly from that implemented for original content.
Leverage on-page SEO for your website
There’s a lot to this whole “SEO” thing, right? So much that you may need a little help getting started—and maintaining it (let’s be honest).
Don’t let your hard work go unseen. It’s time to learn the ins and outs of good SEO for your website content to support a strong traffic flow and help increase conversions. Schedule a Service Consultation with me for a demonstration of how I leverage on-page SEO to get more eyes on your company’s content.
