5 Essential SEO Strategies For Entrepreneurs to Boost Their Traffic The goal of SEO is to rank your website on top of search engines for your target keywords
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As an entrepreneur, you must do a little bit of everything for your online business to succeed.
One of these things is to know how to generate more online traffic to your site. There are many ways you can do this, but the best method is through search engine optimization (SEO).
The goal of SEO is to rank your website on top of search engines for your target keywords. In doing so, you can passively attract highly targeted visitors to your site who are ready to become your clients.
I could go on about how SEO works and how Google's algorithm works. However, I also know you're a busy entrepreneur. So, to save you time, I'll cover the five most impactful SEO strategies you should focus on when implementing SEO.
Step 1: Keyword Research
Every successful SEO campaign starts with finding the right keywords to optimize your site for. Ideally, you want to identify what your customers are searching for.
To do this, you can use Googles Keyword Planner to help you find related keyword ideas to your topic and their monthly search range. If you want more precise data showing how difficult to rank for a search term is, use a premium tool like Ahrefs.
Using Ahrefs, go to Keyword Explorer and enter your topic or niche in the search bar. If you're in the skincare industry, type in "skincare" and click on the search icon. This will then show you data about the niche and keyword suggestions you can use for your site.
From here, you can narrow down your research for keywords your customers use to find information about the topic.
If you want to educate your audience and build your authority, you should focus on targeting "question related keywords". Question related keywords are search terms which have an information intent e.g., "what skincare products do I need". Once you compile a list of question related keywords, you can create dedicated blog posts which answer these questions.
This can help you drive targeted traffic to your website whilst also establishing your brand as an authority.
Step 2: Content Marketing
Once you have your keywords, you must develop a content strategy to create quality content at scale.
It's not enough to publish a handful of pages and blog posts on your site and expect thousands of visitors to visit your website.
The key to ranking high on search results is by creating many pages on the same topic, that increases your websites topical authority and makes it easier for Google to understand what your site is about.
To ensure your content marketing strategy is consistent, I recommend developing an editorial calendar to create and publish content consistently on your site. You can then assign your writers to create the posts for you.
Using a project management tool like Asana to oversee your content strategy should make your job easier. From here, you can develop a workflow allowing you to review the posts and give your feedback to writers.
Finally, you want to ensure that your content is well-written. To do this, let your editor use Grammarly to identify grammatical errors for correction.
Step 3: On-Page SEO
It doesn't matter if you have the best content in your industry. You won't attract organic search traffic from your pages if there are problems with how you structure your website.
The first thing you must do is to optimize all your pages for their respective keywords.
To do this, ask your writers to produce the content using Surfer SEO's Content Editor feature. They should include its suggested terms and phrases to include in the content. Doing so makes the article more topically relevant to your keyword.
After publishing the content, you must ensure that Google crawls and indexes your site. In this case, run a technical SEO audit to identify issues preventing Google from reading your site.
Using Ahrefs Webmaster Tools allows you to run an in-depth audit for free. It also tells you what you can do to fix the problems regarding site speed, internal links, and more.
Implementing the changes is the most challenging aspect of on-page SEO. Fixing the issues requires technical website knowledge. You'll need help from a web developer or programmer to get the job done.
When done correctly, you can expect ranking improvements in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Step 4: Link Building
You will reach a point of trying to rank for keywords dominated by reputable and authoritative websites on SERPs.
In this case, you won't outrank them by sheer content alone. You need help from do-follow links from authoritative sites.
Do-follow links help pass authority from one site to another. So, if you get a backlink from a reputable site, its reputation trickles down to your website, making it more authoritative than before.
To help you identify website authority, refer to Ahrefs' Domain Rating (DR). It calculates the DR of each site based on its link profile.
The higher the site's DR, the more authoritative it is, the more reason for you to get a backlink from it!
But before you ask for a link from that site, you must refine your outreach approach to increase your chances of getting a reply. The key is giving site owners a reason to link back to your site.
Therefore, guest posting remains one of the most effective link building tactics. You provide content for websites for free in exchange for a link to your site within the article.
The site owners receive a well-written and relevant piece ready for publishing, and you get a do-follow backlink from an authoritative site. It's a win-win!
Step 5: SEO Outsourcing
If you're a busy person then it can be difficult to do all the above things by yourself, in which case it would be most efficient for you to outsource the SEO process.
However, you don't just want to hire any random agency or consultant and hope for the best.
You need to be strategic with your approach and hire the right people who can roll out a cohesive SEO strategy for you.
Start by reviewing agencies and freelancers offering SEO in your local city. Be sure to look at their customer reviews and ratings, which you should see on their website or on independent review platforms like Trustpilot or even Google Business.
However, one of the best metrics you can go off to determine if an SEO agency is good is to review their current rankings. For example, ClickSlice targets the search term "SEO agency London" and ranks on the first page of Google for this term, which is a strong signal that we're good at what we do.
When trying to find an agency to outsource the SEO work to, be sure to give that a lot of attention. There's nothing worse than hiring a company that doesn't practice what they teach.
Conclusion
SEO as a traffic source has the highest ROI compared to any other marketing channel.
Once you start ranking on top of SERPs for your keyword, you get most clicks from users worldwide. This could lead to hundreds—if not thousands—of organic visitors in a day.
Best of all, you won't have to constantly promote your website to sustain the traffic. Once you're ranking, expect to stay there for a very long time with little to no effort from you! And that's only possible with a solid SEO campaign in place.
With the strategies above, you or your designated SEO consultant should have a good handle getting your website on top of search rankings sooner than later.