In today's digital age, having a business website no longer guarantee success. With millions of websites live online, standing out from the crowd can be challenging. Search Engine Optimisation is used to rank higher in SERPs and improve a website's visibility to potential customers. By ranking high in search engines, businesses can attract more website traffic, increasing conversion rates and revenue. In this article, we'll delve into how to use SEO to double your conversion rates with five actionable strategies you can immediately implement.
SEO: A Quick Overview
SEO is a digital marketing strategy that improves a website's online visibility by ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
SEO increases organic traffic through visitors who find the site through unpaid search results. It contrasts paid advertising, which involves paying for ad space on search engines or social media platforms. Paid advertising is effective in the short term; SEO offers long-term benefits such as increased visibility, credibility, and organic traffic. Studies have shown that for every click of paid search results, 8.5 clicks on organic results are generated.
Google, controlling at least 92% of search engine market share worldwide, generated approximately 83.9 billion visits worldwide in April 2023. With the lionshare of users visiting the Google Search engine, it pays for businesses to stay updated with the latest SEO trends and algorithm changes in order to maximise traffic and online visibility. While this article is not about how to optimise your website to rank better in search engines, you can still use a checklist to ensure a site's optimisation.
The Relationship Between SEO and Conversion
When users search for keywords for a particular topic on search engines, the search engine provides a list of relevant websites matching the user's query. When users click on one of the unpaid results to visit the website, this is considered organic traffic. To be able to be shown at the top of SERPs, your website must be SEO-optimised.
Higher organic traffic can increase chances of conversions because the users coming from search have a higher intent, meaning, they have specifically entered their pain point, problem, and are looking for solutions to it, right there and then when they’re performing the search. Thus, if a website produces content, provides a product or service that addresses these pain points and problems, the user is likely to buy or convert.
To calculate the conversion rate, divide the number of people who performed the desired action by the total number of visitors and multiply that by 100. For example, if a website received 10,000 visitors in a month and out of those, 200 visitors made a purchase, the conversion rate would be calculated as:
Conversion Rate = (200 / 10,000) * 100 = 2%
According to electrIQ, with correct tricks and pairing of organic traffic and SEO, business could experience greater customer satisfaction and conversion rates. Their clients notice organic conversion rates are 33% higher than all other traffic channels.
Contents to Increase Conversions
To become a customer, a target customer will go through 3 stages - awareness, evaluation, and conversion. To move through these stages, content should meet their need at each stage.
Top of the Funnel (TOFU)
At this stage, the target customer must be made aware of their problem and your solution. The content should entertain, educate or inspire using blog posts, infographics, social media updates, photographs and newsletters.
TOFU aims to make target customers "problem and solution aware". It raises awareness while providing valuable information.
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
This middle funnel converts the goal of the first funnel into a lead. Lead magnet content can be educational resources, software downloads, quizzes or surveys, and webinars or events. It incentivises target customers to submit information and may choose to receive future marketing.
Bottom of the funnel (BOFU)
The bottom funnel converts leads into customers. This type of content can be a free trial, demos, comparisons and customer stories. BOFU should make the target sales push through making a purchase from having leads of your solution.
5 Actionable Strategies to Double Conversion Rates with Your Organic Search Traffic
The marketing funnel consists of several stages a potential customer goes through before purchasing or becoming a lead. Businesses base their entire marketing strategy on the AIDA model - attention, interest, desire and action. By understanding these stages and employing the right tactics, you can optimise your content to increase organic traffic and achieve better conversion rates.
Strategy 1: Conduct Comprehensive Keyword Research
Keyword research involves analysing and identifying the most relevant and valuable search terms users use to find information.
Understanding Search Intent
Search intent is why users type a particular keyword into a search engine. Understanding what users are looking for helps marketers to create content that meets their needs. Broadly, there are four types of search intents:
- Navigational Intent
- Informational Intent
- Transactional Intent
- Commercial Intent
Once marketers understand the intent of the users searching with a particular keyword, they can create targeted and helpful content for users at each stage – helping to drive conversions.
Utilising Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific phrases that are less competitive and often provide higher-quality traffic, allowing marketers to target users with clear intent. In addition, long-tail keywords allow marketers to rank higher in search engine results pages, as 70% of overall search traffic is from long-tail keywords with 4-6 words.
Utilising Keyword Research Tools
Keyword research tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz can help marketers understand search trends, identify new keywords to target, and track the performance of existing keywords. Using these keyword research tools in tandem with understanding search intent and utilising long-tail keywords can help marketers create effective strategies to drive conversion and sales for their businesses.
Strategy 2: Optimise Your On-Page SEO
On-page SEO optimises individual web pages to rank higher and earn traffic in search engines. It includes page titles, heading tags (H1, H2, H3, H4), meta description tags, image alt text, anchor text, URL structure and content optimisation.
Creating Compelling Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Title tags are the text that appears as a clickable headline for a given result. At the same time, meta descriptions are summary text underneath the title tag. These elements should be compelling with relevant keywords to inform users what content they can expect from clicking the link. In addition, title tags should not be more than 60, while meta descriptions should be 155 characters.
Using Header Tags to Structure the Content
Header tags are HTML elements used to break the content into different sections. They help search engines understand the page's structure and provide users with a better experience with an easy way to navigate through the content on a page.
Improving URL Structure
Optimising URL structure is an important part of on-page SEO. It should provide information about the content on the page and include relevant keywords for search engines and users to easily navigate the site. For example, if the target keyword is "best hiking bags", an optimised URL structure would be www.yourwebsite.com/best-hiking-bags instead of "www.yourwebsite.com/products/item1bag".
Strategy 3: Strengthen Your Internal Linking Strategy
Internal links are hyperlinks pointing to another page on the same website. They help users navigate the content, keep them engaged, and indicate relevance between different pages. Internal linking informs search engines about the structure of a website which helps it crawl more efficiently and rank content better in SERPs.
Linking to Relevant Content
When creating internal links, linking to relevant and related content is important. It helps provide users with additional information on the topic they are searching for and increases the time spent on the website, improving ranking. It also signals search engines about the relevance of different pages, which can improve their visibility in SERPs.
Using Descriptive Anchor Text in Internal Links
Descriptive anchor text is an important factor in internal linking. It makes it easier for users to understand the context, which helps keep them engaged and encourages better engagement metrics like click-through rates (CTR). For example, instead of "learn more here", a descriptive anchor text like "5 SEO actionable strategies" will be more meaningful and clickable. It will also improve organic search traffic and conversion rates, as users will likely take action when they clearly understand the content.
Strategy 4: SEO for lead generation.
SEO for lead generation focuses on optimizing your website to attract targeted traffic from search engines and convert that traffic into leads. This involves using keyword research to understand your audience's search intent,optimizing on-page elements like titles and headers with relevant keywords, and creating high-quality content that addressesyour audience's needs.
Other strategies include improving technical SEO aspects like site speed and mobile-friendliness,as well as local SEO for businesses targeting a local audience. Effective link building and a strong user experience are alsocrucial. Tracking and measuring performance helps refine the strategy to improve lead generation over time.
Strategy 5: Build High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are important for SEO as they help strengthen the authority of a website which helps it rank higher in SERPs. They are links from other websites to your website. High-quality backlinks indicate to search engines that your website is trustworthy and authoritative.
Link Building for Local SEO
Local link building is a strategy focused on acquiring links from local websites and directories to help promote your business within the local community. It involves finding local sites related to your industry and location, reaching out to them to create mutually beneficial relationships, and ultimately gaining their backlinks. It helps increase visibility within the local market, which can improve organic search traffic. According to Google, among the 76% of the local searchers using smartphones, 28% visit the physical place and make a purchase.
Leveraging Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a powerful tool to reach wider people with similar interests. It involves writing content and publishing it on other websites in exchange for a link back to your website. It helps widen your online presence, build relationships with influential bloggers and websites, improve search engine rankings, and drive more organic website traffic.
Strategy 6: Enhance Website Performance and User Experience
Website performance and user experience are one of the most important aspects of SEO. A slow-loading site leads to a high bounce rate as users won't wait for it to load. On the other hand, sites with optimised page speed and great user experience are more likely to rank higher in SERPs and better engage their visitors, which can help improve conversion rates.
Implementing Page Speed Optimisation
Slow speed is one of the most common issues for websites. It can be caused due to large images, too many redirects, and poor coding, which leads to a slow page loading time which affects user experience and SEO performance. To make sure your website loads quickly, use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify areas that need attention and implement measures such as optimising images, minifying code, and leveraging browser caching to improve page speed.
Evaluating the Largest Contentful Pain (LCP) Metric
The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric is a tool used to measure the loading speed of a website. It measures how long it takes for the main content of a page to display on the screen and is an important factor in determining user experience.
Ensuring Mobile-Friendliness
A mobile-friendly is essential for improving user experience and SEO performance. It ensures the page layout automatically adjusts to fit different devices and screen sizes. Tools like Google's Mobile-Friendly Test can be used to test how your website performs on different devices and make necessary changes accordingly.
Most people are now using mobile devices for searching online. About 64% of searches are from mobile devices. With this, optimising websites for mobile devices maximises traffic by deriving traffic from mobile users.
Conclusion
SEO is an incredibly important tool for businesses to attract users and increase conversion rates and profits. With some wise strategies and implementation, you can use SEO to double your web traffic and make you a success. This article looked at five actionable steps you can take today to do just that. The key lies in your willingness and ability to take action. So don't wait any longer: implement these five actionable strategies today to double SEO traffic!
About Author:
Kevin is the CEO, Founder of Aemorph. A seasoned entrepreneur and digital marketing expert. Kevin started in digital marketing, specializing in Search Engine Optimisation since 2010, and is helping Finance, Insurance, E-commerce, Medical, B2B, and SaaS companies.
Kevin is also a certified adult educator in Singapore, delivering high-quality, relevant, and easy-to-implement training to ensure learners can get immediate results and build upon their knowledge. He’s currently building Mint Superteams with a mission to train 1 million people and place them into companies
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