Among the various techniques and tools that a business needs to scale its growth, perhaps the most important is deploying the right measures of SEO. You might already be aware of the term SEO or Search Engine Optimization.
However, for the uninitiated, deploying effective measures of SEO improves the ranking of your website on the SERPs. It drives organic traffic to your website and helps build the authority of your site.
In this technologically advanced era, of superfast connectivity and growth, every business enterprise must resort to SEO to grow and reach its target audience. However, as easy as it sounds, SEO is a vast domain with several intricacies.
It is an umbrella term that has several aspects for one to consider. And that is why, for the growth and success of any business, it must pick the right techniques of SEO.
That said, it must be understood that Google keeps upgrading its algorithm in order to enhance user experience. Therefore, SEO techniques also need to be upgraded to conform to the ever-evolving metrics of Google.
The methods that would have worked in 2019 might not work as well in 2021. Therefore, it is essential to watch out for these upgrades in Google’s algorithm and figure out the best SEO hacks.
Having said that, we shall now look at some of the most effective SEO techniques that are expected to increase organic traffic in 2021. If you have been looking for ways to drive traffic to your website and reach out to as many people as possible, you have come to the right place.
Look for Means to Improve User Experience Across Your Website
- Now that said, if you want to rank on Google’s search results, the first thing that you must do is improve your website’s quality. You can get a professional like https://www.oregonwebsolutions.com/bend-seo/ to do the job. However, there are several ways in which you can do so on your own too. Always remember that content is the king. Therefore, you must make sure that the content you put out on your website is grammatically sound and has value for users. You must also see to it that your content is divided into paragraphs and sub-paragraphs so that it is easy to read. Users must be able to navigate easily from one part to the other on your site to enhance the user experience.
- Your website must have an authentic look about itself. If your website looks too amateurish and is slow to load, users might bounce off your site. A higher bounce rate shall reflect poorly on your site’s SEO and hinder your site’s ranking on the SERPs.
Therefore, the bottom line is that your site must be user-friendly, have a low-bounce rate and must have valuable and clear content on it.
Optimize Your Website for Voice Search
The second thing that you must do to drive organic traffic to your website is to optimize your site for voice search. People lead busy lives in this technologically advanced era. They would much rather use their voice to perform a search than type. Studies show that almost 25 per cent of American adults own a smart speaker.
This clearly means optimizing your website for voice search makes for an integral part of your SEO strategy. That being said, there are a few points that you must factor in while you go about optimizing your website for voice search. Let us look into those factors without any further ado.
- Studies and data have shown that long-tail keywords, when used to develop the web site’s content, farewell for voice search. Therefore, it is advisable that you identify at least one long-tail keyword and several semantically related keywords for your website.
- Develop a pillar post for your website that is interspersed with your semantically related keywords. And while you are at that, try to come up with content that is better than the content you seem to be currently ranking for, for your target keyword.
- Remember to use structured data so that it can help increase the chances of your information being used to provide answers to voice queries.
- Speaking of structured data, there are different types of structured data that help Google understand the content and theme of a page.
Optimize Your Website for Mobile-First
Voice search must be an integral part of your SEO strategy. However, experts suggest that voice search might not come much handy when it comes to conversions. You need to optimize your website for mobiles for conversions.
Studies show that more than half of all purchases take place via mobile phones. In fact, most of us would like to go about searching for a product or service on our mobiles, while commuting to work. No one has much time to turn their laptops on and browse through the internet.
In fact, if we were to furnish some data, you would know that-
- 77 per cent of Americans have a smartphone on them. Plus, almost 79 per cent of people who own smartphones have made a purchase online via mobile phones in the last 6months.
- 80 per cent of shoppers use their smartphones inside a physical store to browse for items, compare and contrast prices and find more options for store locations.
Perhaps the most important fact amidst all these details is that Google itself has gone mobile-first, which gives you all the more reasons to optimize your website for mobiles. Earlier this year, in March 2020, Google announced that to crawl sites, it shall now deploy its mobile smartphone user-agent. This means that it shall index the mobile version of your site ahead of the desktop version.
Lay More Emphasis on Topic Clusters Instead of Keywords
As we mentioned earlier in the article, Google keeps upgrading its algorithm to enhance the user experience. It keeps trying to understand what the intention of its users is. It wants to understand what exactly the users are looking for and what kind of results they expect so that it can furnish better results.
Understand the Pulse of Your Target Audience
The first thing that you have to consider is your target audience. You are developing your website to enhance your target audience’s experience, and therefore, you must try to understand what they want. You must look into the demographics of your target audience to better understand what they want from you. This way, you shall be able to create brilliant and valuable content for your target audience.
You might risk creating content that caters to a large number of topics if you do not understand who your target audience is. This way, you shall not be able to rank on the SERPs. Though it is essential that the content you create caters to a large number of people, that alone is not enough.
You cannot target everyone with a single piece of content for a broad term such as ‘Android’. This term, for instance, can involve users looking for Android mobile phones, as well as Star Wars fans looking for more information on ‘droids’.
You Need to Organize Your Content into Topic Clusters
The next thing that you must do once you have looked into the demographics of your target audience has organized the content in clusters, or under different themes. This means you need to have the following divisions in your content-
- You must have a pillar page, which is the most important page on your website. Your pillar page must help you to rank for a broad range of keywords. Therefore, put in some thought, research and effort into developing the pillar page of your website.
- Once you are done with creating the pillar page, you need to create the cluster pages. These pages must be related to the topics discussed on your pillar page and must link back to it. The aim of cluster pages is to discuss topics and answer questions related to the pillar page in greater depth and details.
Consider Writing Longer Content
Various studies have been made over time that aim at looking into the advantages of writing longer content. These studies have found that lengthy content pieces are able to acquire more backlinks. Backlinks help you with rankings and traffic. Therefore, the more backlinks you have, the better shall your ranking be.
However, it is not always possible to write long content for every topic. Plus, people might not even read through these lengthy content pieces for specific topics. The trick here is to identify the topics for which you need to write lengthy pieces.
Also, refreshing your old content might do the trick. If you do not have it in you to write a 2000-word content piece for your website, you might want to refresh your old content. You could add more words to your old content and take it from 1500 words to 2000 words.
However, be careful to choose the right piece to update. The best content pieces that can be updated from time to time are the ones that have the potential to drive more organic traffic. You can find out the right candidates for content upgrades by visiting the Landing Pages section of Google Analytics.
Always Use YouTube SEO to Your Advantage
The final measure to drive traffic to your website in 2021 is by leveraging the benefits of YouTube. YouTube is the second-most popular social media platform with 2 billion active monthly users. These users watch almost 1 billion hours of video every day.
Therefore, it shall do you good to factor in YouTube while optimizing your website. Always try to use the boons of video marketing to your benefit. Videos and multimedia enhance your website’s ranking on the SERPs, and you might as well consider using them. Listed below are a few ways in which you can do so.
- You must see to it that your video is SEO friendly. YouTube’s algorithm shall collect and use information about your video. Therefore, you must see that the filename, title, and description of the content you have uploaded are all optimized. These factors affect the rankings on YouTube’s search results.
- Come up with a great title for your video. However, make sure that the title you are coming up with is SEO-friendly and is clickable so that it improves the click-through rate. What you need to do is include your target keywords as well as some power words in the title to make it more clickable.
- Make sure that the description that accompanies your video is akin to a short blog post. YouTube’s spiders are going to read your video description to determine your ranking. Thus, make sure that your video description is adequately optimized.
- Always use enticing thumbnails for your videos to improve the click-through rates. Do not use a screenshot of your video as the thumbnail. Instead, create a custom thumbnail that features an image along with the title.
In a Nutshell
SEO is ever-evolving and expanding. Therefore, it is vital that business owners and marketers know how to keep up with the changing times and adapt quickly to the ever-evolving SEO. This is how they can scale their business and reach out to more people. The aforementioned tips shall be able to drive organic traffic to your website in 2021.
Do your research well and dig a little deeper before deploying these measures to enhance your site’s ranking. All things said, make sure that you understand the basics of SEO to build on those practices as the techniques evolve. With that and a little patience, you shall be able to start ranking better on the SERPs.