SEO Archives - Hi Digital

How to increase organic search traffic to your website

Posted on December 22, 2020December 22, 2020 by Vicky Drew

Getting their website listed on page 1 or position 1 of Google’s organic listings is a common goal for many website and small business owners. Understanding how to increase organic search traffic to your website is the first step in achieving this goal. However, the truth is that increasing your SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Position) takes time, sometimes years, and there is no quick win but the higher you rank the more rewards your business will reap.

Don’t be phased by the effort and time needed and don’t give up! In this article, we’re sharing our top 7 tips to increase organic search traffic to your website and give your SEO strategy a kickstart so you can earn your place on Google amongst the competition.

What is organic search traffic?
“All visitors to your website coming from a search engine, such as Google or Bing, excluding paid ads.”

A quick Google search on any topic will deliver pages of results for users to scroll through and find the content or webpage they are looking for. Depending on the search phrase there may be paid ads at the top of the Google page and below these will be the organic search results, when a user clicks on the latter to visit a website that is organic search traffic. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the type of digital marketing which is focused on increasing a website’s organic search traffic by getting each webpage listed higher in the organic search results.

How to measure organic search traffic
It’s easy to measure your website’s organic search traffic thanks to website analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console, both are free and user friendly. Now is a great time to create an analytics account as you can benchmark your performance now and monitor improvements after you’ve implemented our tips to increase organic search traffic for your website!

The main types of website traffic
A healthy or strong performing website will receive traffic from several sources, these volumes may fluctuate over time as your digital marketing activity shifts. For example, when you run a campaign on Google Adwords “paid search” traffic may deliver your highest volume of visitors. Below are the typical types of traffic to websites:

– Direct: All traffic when the user types the company url into their browser and all traffic where the referrer or source is unknown.
– Organic search: Traffic from search engines that is not paid for.
– Paid search: Traffic from any ad on search engines via Google AdWords or another platform.
– Referral: Traffic via another website that is not a search engine.
– Social: Traffic from a social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In etc.
– Email: Traffic from correctly tagged email campaigns.
– Other: Any traffic that cannot fit into one of the above sources or has not been correctly tagged.

The importance of organic search traffic
Organic search traffic helps users who do not know your brand name discover your website on search engines when they are actively searching for your products and services – the size of the opportunity here for brands is huge! For example, if you are a property law firm there are a lot more potential clients searching for “conveyancing solicitor” than there are for your firms name – and your competitors could well be capturing this users instead of you.

Small businesses and emerging brands who have correctly implemented on-site SEO and have an ongoing SEO strategy will find that organic search traffic is their biggest source of targeted traffic which consistently drives them leads or generates sales.

7 tips to get more organic traffic to your website
Getting ahead of major brand in terms of SERPs is tough and to be honest a bit unlikely if you’re competing on a hyper competitive search terms such as “womens dresses” or “swimwear”. The good news is Google is HUGE and there is a place and opportunity for every webpage whether you are targeting niche longer tail keywords or generic search terms. The trick is knowing where to focus and how to do it! To get you started, we’ve compiled our top 10 tips to help increase organic search traffic to your website:

1. Improve user experience across your site
Google favours websites that offer a user-friendly experience and provide users with the content or answers they were looking for. When a user clicks through to your website they need to stay there and browse your website, if they click straight back to Google this may flag to Google they had a poor experience. If your website has a high bounce rate it may struggle to rank well on Google, to lower your bounce rate always ensure you add quality content that is optimized for the web and designed to engage your target audience.

2. Speed up your website
A slow website not only frustrates users it may also fails to impress Google’s bots, the lower the site speed, the lower the SERP – especially if your competitors have a faster site. One of the best ways to reduce site speed is to reduce the file of size of any images just be careful you don’t reduce their quality and create a poor user experience. There are many free site speed checking tools to choose from, why not Google them and see you ranks first?

3. Conduct keyword research
If you know what your target customers are looking for, in their own words, you can create content to answer their questions and engage them with your brand. Be creative when selecting which keywords to target and consider less competitive keywords as you’re most likely to be able to rank higher for these and get more organic search traffic than ranking lower for a hyper competitive keyword

There are many keyword research tools for you to choose from and begin compiling a list of keywords or search phrases to target. We recommend Answer the Public, Moz and AHREFs.

4. Optimise your meta data
You must literally spell it out to Google what each of your webpages are about so that it will show your web pages to users Googling topics you talk about. On your website Google reads page title, meta description, image ALT text, URL and more. Make sure you include relevant keywords and search phrases to help search engines find you and increase your organic search traffic.

Tip! Choose one target keyword to per webpage and include it in your meta data.

5. Get backlinks from business directories
Listing your website in business directories that have a great reputation with Google, such as Yell or Yelp, can improve your website’s reputation and increase SERPs for local keyword searches. They also make your brand discoverable to users searching for your product or services in their local area in these directories too.

6. Create local landing pages
When users local to your business need a product or service they often go straight to Google to find what they need. For example, they may search for “new build conveyancer in Leeds” or “best nail salon in York”. If you add a quality page of content to your website that specifically targets this keyword or search phrase the chances are it will rank highly on Google – more so than your homepage could.

7. Share great quality blog content
Blogs are an effecting way to increase organic search traffic by writing about topics your targets customers are Googling, once you have the prospective customer on your website you can guide them through to your websites more commercial pages where they can send an enquiry or make a purchase. For more about content marketing and blogging that improves SEO read our expert tips.

Digital marketing and SEO expertise
If your business goals are to increase traffic to your website or improve your brand’s presence online, then an accomplished digital marketing agency can be a valuable extension to your brand’s core team. Effective SEO strategies take creativity and skill, they are not learnt in a morning’s training session and digital marketing channels do not work in silos. Outsourcing your digital marketing needs to an expert with a solid reputation is a cost and resource effective solution to help you to achieve the results you want efficiently, and long term.

Ready to grow your brand’s digital presence?
It’s time to explore how digital marketing can help your startup brand or small business. Hi Digital are a boutique digital marketing agency dedicated to growing small businesses with effective digital strategies. We’d love to help you reach your business goals and be a part of your brand’s growth. Please email us info@hidigital.co.uk or please get in touch with using the form below to book a free consultation with us.

Alternatively, find out more about what we do or discover free digital marketing tips on our blog.

Content marketing and blogging tips to improve SEO

Posted on January 20, 2020September 12, 2023 by Vicky Drew

A blog that’s part of an effective content strategy can make your website, and your brand, more discoverable online amongst potential clients researching your area of expertise. However, blogging for business is a hit-and-miss form of digital marketing and reading a set of effective content marketing tips before you start is highly recommended.

A well researched and written blog can add SEO value, improves search engine ranking positions (SERPS), increase organic traffic and demonstrate your expertise – but it will require sufficient resources, mostly time and often money if you outsource to content creators. Whereas, a poorly executed blog will add zero value to your brand, target customers, and website – so you may as well not bother!

At Hi Digital, we often incorporate blogs or articles in to our client’s digital marketing strategies and we see the positive impact they have on increasing organic website traffic, and in time enquiries. In this article, we’re sharing our top content marketing and blogging tips for small business owners and start up brands to help you improve your website’s SEO and boost organic traffic.

What is content marketing?
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing and business process focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Types of content marketing
Blogging is one of the first types of content marketing that you may think of because it is the most popular. However, there are many types of content you can incorporate into your content strategy such as video, case studies, infographics, user generated content etc. Every brand or business should identify the right mix of content types that will add value to and attract their target customers, and our content marketing tips will help you understand yours.

Why is content marketing so important?
An effective content strategy is designed to add value to potential customers and to your business. Content marketing is all about your brand’s target audience, understanding what they value and showing them how your knowledge can benefit them.

From your brand’s perspective creating great content your target audiences will enjoy can help you to build relationships and trust with them. However, your ultimate goal should be to stimulate interest in your products or services. At a commercial level, brands with an effective content marketing strategy often experience:

– Increased website traffic
– Higher conversions rate
– More loyal customers

Blogging is great for business
Adding a blog to your website can be an effective tool for increasing traffic to your website from your target audiences, and you can showcase your expertise to them and set yourself apart from your competition. Blogging enables you to give your brand a voice and bring its personality to life, don’t hide behind your story or service pages, share your knowledge and ideas to give users more reasons to choose you.

Create a great content plan for your blog in 5 steps
Blogging is a time-consuming task, especially if you’re not a natural copywriter, many business owners or brand managers will start a blog for their brand full of great intentions but soon the frequency of posts trickle away as other areas of business take over. This pattern is very common, but you are missing out on potential customers.

We believe that through proactive planning you can find your blogging mojo and share fantastic content with exciting new audiences, here are five simple steps to create a great content plan for your blog.

1. Define your target audience
Before you start writing a blog it’s essential to understand who you are writing content for? Does your business want to attract busy Mums of young children? First-time home buyers? Marketing Managers at top global brands? Create a persona for each of your target audiences and describe their demographics, their current mindset, likely challenges, interests or hobbies, favourite brands etc.

Once you’ve created a target customer profile or three you can define how your brand can communicate effectively with them. As part of your content strategy think about the tone of voice for your writing, the style and type of images, blog length etc. For example, a busy mum may welcome shorter articles or even a video on niche topics whereas, a Marketing Manager will welcome detail and knowledgeable insights, maybe even an infographic.

2. Know the topics your target audiences are interested in
The best performing and most read blogs are relevant, high quality and well-written about topics that audiences find interesting. So, how do you know what your target audience is looking for? The first and most obvious place to look is Google, your target audiences will be actively researching topics relating to your brand or business on this mighty search engine.

When you write a blog its important to focus the copy around 2-3 popular search terms as this will help Google find your blog and display it in the organic search results for users to find. Your most important target search term should feature once in your title and first paragraph, then dot each target search term through your full text a few times and don’t be too repetitive as Google may recognise this as spammy behavior.

Useful keyword research tools
There are two great tools that you can use to research topics for your content strategy and brand’s blog, and they are both free to use:

Google keyword planner: this is great tool for identifying popular search terms, simply add one or two words into the tool and Google will suggest related terms and how many searches they receive every month. You can use this tool for generic and niche keywords, group them in twos or threes et voila there you have some popular, relevant topics to blog about

Answer the public: once you’ve chosen your target keywords this tool is great to understand the context behind those keywords and the type of questions users often ask on this topic. This tool is great for helping you work out the angle of your blog post.

3. Write quality content at length
There’s rarely an occasion where you can learn something valuable from or feel engaged with an article that is only 500 words long. Recent trends show that Internet users have short attention spans and prefer messages that are short and punchy content (E.g. explainer videos). However, when it comes to informative written content marketing such as blogs you need to balance quality and length. You don’t need to write 2,000 words for the sake of it to try and impress Google’s algorithm, instead write great quality engaging content tailored to your target audience.

The ‘perfect blog’ length doesn’t exist and there are many contradicting reports online. We recommend blog posts are at least 1,000 words as Google likely rewards longer length articles over shorter ones, and this length allows you to talk informatively on your chosen topic. The secret behind making longer articles engaging is to break the copy up into digestible chunks of a couple of paragraphs separated by engaging sub headers. Never present one solid wall of text as it’s extremely off putting and uninviting to read, try featuring numbered lists and use images to add intuitive gaps and pauses.

4. Set a content plan and publish blogs regularly
From your keyword research in step 2 you should have identified at least 12 blog topics you are going to create some great content for. Publishing one blog a month on your website is a great starting point for small businesses and is the minimum advised to please Googles algorithm. However, frequency isn’t necessarily the most important factor when trying to improve your website’s SEO, again it’s about the quality of content, and the consistency of when you publish it.

If you are starting a new blog, we highly recommend launching with as many posts as possible so that Google can crawl and read lots of great content quickly and reward your website for it. Once you have a good content base add new quality content at regular and consistent intervals E.g. monthly, or if you have the resource twice a week. Create a simple blog calendar and allocate time for researching, writing and publishing each blog and stick to it.

5. Don’t forget to share your fantastic blog content
The great thing about blog content is that its highly shareable and this makes it a valuable content marketing asset, once you published your blog you can share it on your social media channels (Twitter, Linked In, Instagram, Facebook etc.), in email newsletters, on your homepage or other webpages, in online ads etc. Share your blogs frequently wherever your target audiences may be.

Finally, within your blogs enable users to learn more about your business by linking to other blogs and pages of your website. And, most importantly always include a call to action (E.g. get in touch) so that you can start a relationship with your readers.

Consider outsourcing your content marketing needs
Copywriting isn’t for everybody, the thought of writing 1,000 words every month may fill you with dread and slowly this task will move to the bottom of your ‘to do’ list. Outsourcing your blogging or content marketing strategy needs to an expert with a solid reputation is a cost and resource effective solution to help you to achieve the results you want efficiently, and long term. Think realistically about your time and expertise, can you effectively manage and publish a great blog for your business?

At Hi Digital, we create engaging content for several clients and provide a creative copywriting service to a wide variety or target audiences and industries. If you’d like to create a great content strategy for your brand, please email us info@hidigital.co.uk or please get in touch with using the form below to book a free consultation with us.

We are a boutique digital marketing agency
Hi Digital are dedicated to growing small businesses with effective digital strategies, and we’d love to help you reach your business goals. Find out more about what we do or discover free digital marketing tips on our blog.