Want to increase your SEO traffic? SEO, or search engine optimisation, is used to increase your website’s visibility on the search engines results pages (SERPS). Everyone with a website will most likely have heard of this if they intend to get free traffic from the search engines.
Getting SEO traffic isn’t always straight forward. Whether you can find free traffic from the search results depends on your particular niche/topic and the relative competition in your area.
In a competitive niche, it can be difficult to compete for traffic; especially when targeting competitive terms. A way round this issue is to look for and create content for longer tail keywords which offer less competition on the SERPS. To find low competition keywords with low SEO difficulty, you can start by using Google’s keyword planner.
Increase SEO Traffic – Keyword Research
The first step in increasing your SEO traffic is to create content. Since the search engines give you traffic only when you have earned it through content generation. Competitive terms have hundreds of thousands of competing websites vying for their attention. Terms like “affiliate marketing” for example are so competitive that you have little chance of ranking for them on the first page of Google.
But a term such as affiliate marketing mentors gives you more chance because there’s less competing websites using those three terms. Generally the more words you add to your term, the less competition you’ll find on the search results.
To find longer tail keywords you can start by typing your main “seed” keyword into Google’s keyword planner. You can also type them into Google and see what Google “autosuggest” comes up with.
Increase SEO Traffic – Compare Your Chosen Keywords on Google
Once you find a good long tail keyword, you can head over to Google and type it into a normal Google search. You’ll see a number beneath the search bar which shows the number of competing websites for the search term. Generally the fewer competing websites the better it is for your chances of ranking it. Then do a phrase match of the same keyword by putting your keyword in quotes “like this”. Look for the number which comes up under your search bar. Less than 40,000 is a good benchmark to look for.
So let’s use an example from the Google autosuggest image above: affiliate marketing training for beginners.
Here’s the image which comes up when I do a normal search for it on Google:
Then do the same search with quotes around your keyword. 90,100,000 is quite a big number. I tend to like to aim at keywords which offer 10,000,000 or less for an open search (without quotes).
With the phrase match you can see there’s very few results – only 97! So this might be a good keyword to consider creating some content around. With a newer website which has less authority, it’s going to be more difficult to rank your content than if you have a larger authority. So choose wisely. If your website is brand new, you’ll probably want to look for those keywords which offer very little competition, to give you more chance of it ranking.
Increase SEO Traffic – Content Creation
Once you have chosen your long tail keyword and done your research, it’s time to start your content. Use your keyword for your new blog post or article title. Use an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO. See also best free WordPress plugins for bloggers. This will help you optimise your posts and use your keywords in the right proportions throughout your content.
It will remind you to put your keywords in your article title, image alt attributes and through your meta description, description and SEO titles etc. It will also help you get your keywords used throughout your copy in the right percentages. Too much and it will appear spammy. Too little and the search ‘bots’ will think your content isn’t relevant.
When you create content for SEO it can take some time for it to be indexed by the search engines. Google may not rank your content at all, but that’s no reason not to do it. You can get content ranked more quickly and easily with the other search engines: Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo etc.
It might take several months for content to appear, so make it worth your while and write good quality content which will stand the test of time. You can also look at the currently top ranked content which you will be competing against to give you an idea of the length of piece you need to create. Create content which is better, longer and more useful that what exists already on the top of Google to give yourself the best chance.
Share & Promote Your Content
Yes – you need to share and promote your content once published. I use a plugin which automatically syndicates content when it’s published called Revive Old Posts. You can also use this plugin to automatically share older content too through your social media profiles.
You can also use other plugins to offer social media share buttons on your site. This encourages your visitors to share and helps you gain more traction from each post you publish. See this post again for some useful plugins.
Sharing content brings people to your content as well as helping your SEO through building social media back links. You can also create back links through blog commenting or reaching out to other websites in your niche and offering to guest post. Backlinks are a major factor in ranking content but if you target longer tail keywords like suggested here, there’s less of a need to do this in bulk. Linking can be time consuming if you do it yourself. But you can also enlist the help of back linking professionals. I use this company to help with my back linking.
Summary – Content Is King
Google uses a number of factors to determine whether to rank your content. Here’s just a few:
- Content – volume and quality
- Backlinks – where, when and who – (a natural back link profile beats a fast spammy one!)
- Visit paths and visitor time on your content
- Click away rate
- Social media presence and authority
- Followers
- Comments
- Etc.
There’s hundreds of factors which the search engines use. Your content will determine a large proportion of what happens afterwards, such as natural linking which is another huge factor. Natural linking happens when other websites naturally link to your as an authoritative article. This will happen only if you have created some awesome content. Content is king, so make sure you spend some time creating the best quality content you can. It will pay you later if you do!
