I read a couple of great internet marketing articles recently that I’d like to share with you.
#1 – How to Increase Search Traffic
Check out this kickass case study by Jason Acidre…it’s all about re-optimizing his existing blog.
What he did was quite simple, yet very effective:
- Determine variations of search queries that are sending highly qualified traffic to the site (often keyword variations that aren’t primarily targeted for existing pages/posts).
- Optimize the pages/posts to match and be ranked/served on those long-tail searches.
Find effective long-tail keywords on Google Analytics
I personally try not to use Google Analytics as you can see from this post. It’s not that I don’t think it’s an effective tool, I’m just paranoid. Note: You can still use Jason’s suggestions with other analytics tools like Piwik or Open Web Analytics.
But, most people use GA, so Jason has provided some great steps to export your organic search traffic data into a CSV file, and then segment the data by 2 metrics:
- Average Visit Duration
- % New Visits
He then uses the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to check each keyword’s search volume to see if it has enough searches to be useful.
Jason also recommends looking at the Top Landing Pages data and adding “Keyword” as a secondary dimension so you can see which pages get the most traffic and for which keywords. Simple but brilliant.
Re-optimize your site
- Choose 20 keyword/page combinations (found above) to start with. For each keyword/page…
- Update the HTML Title tag to include the keyword.
- If it’s impossible to change the Title tag (it could already be ranking well for its primary keyword and changing it wouldn’t make any sense), edit the HTML Meta Description to tackle the keyword. Sometimes this may just require adding a single word, because you can rank for a long-tail keyword if part of the keyword is in the Title and the other part is in the Description.
- Link internally between pages using anchor text containing the new keywords. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to track pages from your site that internally link to the page you want to optimize.
- Build new signals. You now want search engines to re-crawl your site and discover the changes you made. Some ideas are:
- Publish a new blog post.
- Share the old links on social networks.
- Build new links.
If you follow this process every month, your traffic should continue to grow
#2 – Keep Visitors Longer
Chris Gilchrist over at HitReach wrote this article about making your website more interesting and linkworthy.
Some of the ideas are quite creative!
Here’s a few of ’em:
- Liven up the “People” page for your corporate site by using cartoon overlays on rollover
- Make your “Privacy” and “Terms & Conditions” pages more exciting by using images and normal English
- Add a visual timeline to your “About Us” page
- Make your “Contact Us” page more fun by replacing the employees with a picture of a giraffe and giving the mustaches
- Add “Fake” (hilarious) products
- Add interviews, videos, etc to your “store” website to spruce it up
- Add gamification! No brainer
I guess the whole point is…be creative and have fun with it.