Building an online presence is a multidisciplinary task. You have to develop your website according to the best practices of the industry, ensure you are able to promote your brand effectively to the right people, and avoid any reputational missteps that could be counterproductive to what you’re actually trying to achieve.
A massive part of this job is still trying to drive plenty of organic traffic to your website via any of the major search engines (typically Google). Even as it looks like the entire world has turned to AI to meet their needs vis-a-vis specific queries, the fact remains that search is still the number one place that most folks will start and end their search for answers, specifically when searching for local businesses.
Here, we’re exploring how you can gain the right sort of traffic that moves the needle and does it in such a way that keeps you in the good books of the big G and ensures that you come out on top for your most valuable keywords.
Understand Your Audience’s Needs
In far too many cases, businesses will simply create content or develop their websites that are only really going through the motions because they know that they need a site but are unsure how to get across to their target audience.
You can often see this in the lower ranking websites when they will have all the basics set up but are either scant on information, filled with so much AI slop that it becomes highly offputting to the average reader, or have taken a shotgun approach to cover as many topics as possible without any thought on what their customers are actually searching for.
This has two undesirable effects that include confusing the search engine bot by overloading them with random information or not offering enough, and of course, putting your audience off from bothering to navigate the site…both of which will have compounding effects on booting your website far below those of your competition.
When you understand what’s involved with using Google Search bot effectively and what your desired audience is looking for, you will be able to create a double whammy of enabling the search engine to parse your website and boost it upwards, and then once you gain visibility and users, allow your readers to find exactly what they’re after. So the question then becomes, how do you go about this? To ensure that your website meets your audience’s needs and that of the bot that parses it, you can use the following tips:
- Define who you’re targeting: This might seem like an obvious first step, but you’d be surprised at how many businesses fail to implement this tip effectively. Fighting out who your user is tends to be a far more involved process that can include developing user avatars, understanding demographics, and considering their psychographics.
- Analyze user behavior: We will cover this in more detail later in the post, but the point is that by using raw data, you can massively refine your website based on fundamental interactions your users perform.
- Consider user journey: By mapping out the journey that you want your customers to take on your website, you can better understand what they want and offer it to them with as little friction as possible.
- Be as clear as you possibly can: Clarity goes a long way in this game, particularly when it comes to search engine bots. The clearer you make your message, the easier it will be for anyone or anything that visits your site to navigate to where they need to be and take the actions that you want them to perform.
Create Valuable Content That Resonates
In some ways, this is related to the previous point, but it deserves its own section due to how important it is. Even if your website isn’t purely aimed at informational content (i.e., it’s an e-commerce site, etc.), you can benefit enormously by crafting the sort of content that ranks and draws in unique users based on their various keywords. For instance, if you are an outdoor adventure shop, you will gain lots of highly relevant traffic by researching and focusing on the terms that your users type into Google.
In this scenario, it could be posting about how to choose the perfect gear for adventures in various countries, regions, or states and then placing calls to action that direct them to the gear mentioned in the post or other related items.
Monitor Analytics To Adjust Strategies
Data will form the foundation upon which you will build your online empire. That might be a tad hyperbolic, but the point is that by gathering user data and using it to inform a plethora of tests, you will not only get to know your customers better but also hone your content and calls to action and ensure that you strip away any unneeded meat from your website, making it streamlined and able to convert them as efficiently as possible.
There are plenty of analytic suites that range from the most well-known, which is arguably Google Analytics (and that also happens to be free), to the highly complex CRMs that are often on the pricier end of the spectrum but provide you with an utterly mind-blowing amount of data to help you understand everything as much about your customers and their journey as possible.
Be Consistent With Your Messaging And Branding
Although consistency between your overall branding and your website doesn’t directly contribute to increased search engine rankings, it will help maintain a professional look that is appealing to users. If a customer hops from your website to your social media channels and sees a visible difference in your branding, it can give off amateur vibes that could be the difference between making a sale and seeing users abandon your website en mass.
Encourage User-Generated Content And Feedback
UGC has long been used by most businesses to prove authenticity and provide search engines with proof that they are a genuine, functioning business (which is something that they tend to like). You needn’t go crazy, but allowing users to add in reviews of products or your company, in general, goes a long way in showing Google that you’re a real business and other potential users that you walk the walk (provided your reviews are mostly positive, of course!)
Ranking a website might be far more of a challenge than it used to be, but if you put in the effort, you are still rewarded with lots of lovely, relevant traffic. Once this traffic hits your site, your next job is to convert it using data and an understanding of what they are visiting your website to do.
