There is no single strategy to increase organic traffic acquisition instead hundred in numbers. I’m discussing an ideal approach to rank a keyword, including the crucial steps.
1. Whole website optimization for a compound effect
The overall website performance has a ripple effect over the results of a single keyword ranking. That’s why we need to fix maximum website issues to make it more friendly for the visitors and search engines. Most of the issues are listed in the above analysis report.
2. Improve website performance
After several updates by Google in the past, it’s confirmed and tested that websites with robust performance (speed) rank and perform better.
I have some critical points through which we can hit the bull’s eye of the performance metrics.
Roadmap to increase speed performance:
- Optimize the code of the website, including Javascript, CSS, and HTML files.
- Cleaning the code
- Minifying the code
- Compress all website images
- Use Defer loading where possible
- Use Lazy loading where possible
- Use a dedicated server to host all website content
3. Target page optimization
To achieve a keyword/s ranking, we need to optimize its target page according to all aspects which google values. I believe optimizing a page according to the best practices of semantic SEO (entities) instead of just keywords will definitely give you an advantage over the competitors that generally don’t practice entity-based SEO.
Here is a vital optimization checklist.
3.1. Meta Tags Optimization
3.1.1. Title & Description
We will improve the target page title and description to make it more effective for Google to rank and more convincing for the user to click on our page from SERP.
3.1.2. ALT Tags
We will add all images with relevant alt tags to make them rankable on Google and a traffic acquisition source.
3.2. Content Optimization
We will optimize the target page’s content by considering our main keywords and overall goals. Apart from keywords, I believe targeting and optimizing entities on the page will give us an advantage over the competitors that generally don’t practice semantic SEO.
4. Content Marketing
Content marketing isn’t easy as it seems to be. Generally, people just follow what competitors are doing in their content marketing. But it’s not just that. Here’s what I can bring to the table with unique (fantastic) strategies to do what others don’t do first.
4.1. Semantic topic clustering
Keyword clustering will be the foundation of our SEO/content strategy. This way we’ll have topics data for months or even years to make us focused on the track and produce targeted results even faster.
- We’ll scrape all industry terms our target audience is searching.
- Cluster them by reverse-engineering Google SERP to identify parent and child topics.
4.2. Publish new content
Publishing new content is always easy if you are not doing actual research or not relating it to the overall company goals beyond just typical SEO.
I prefer creating content according to the sales funnel stages that I map out at the first stage for each product/service.
What are the Sales funnel stages we’ll be building content for?
- Attention
- Awareness
- Discover
- Consider
- Convert
What are the content types we’ll be investing in?
Informative Definite Guides:
General info articles for visitors acquisition in the attention and awareness stage.
How-to Guides:
A Step-by-step how-to guide that will go into detail and cover each aspect of the topic. This content type we’ll be covering in the discovery stage of the sales funnel.
Comparison guides:
In the consideration stage, users generally search for comparisons before making their final decision. This content type comes in handy where we’ll be providing information and convincing users to choose us over others as well.
Infographics Hub:
Not everyone is capable of creating useful infographics in a massive number. We can take advantage from here. We’ll be making multiple problem-solving infographics related to the industry concepts for our infographic hub on the website. This can massively help us rank and get traffic through image search and serve brand-building purposes.
Industry Glossary:
Another superb strategy would be to create a glossary hub on our website to answer all relevant industry terms. Believe me, I have seen many websites getting huge traffic on their glossary pages.
Template Library:
E-books:
E-books are great lead magnets that help get visitors’ emails by offering them a free guide. We’ll be repurposing our blog posts and shaping them as lead magnets that someone wants to download. There will be a proper dip campaign to nurture the leads and ultimately turn them into our business customers.
Case studies:
Case studies often help in the same way as a lead magnet like E-books. This help answers two questions. Why are we the best? And How are we best?
Knowledge Base:
A KB or help centre helps increase customer retention, and you deliver more consistent customer support. It enables you to become an authority in your niche, which does help in the overall ranking.
4.3. Previous Content Optimization
The ideal practice is to update a blog post minimum after every six months. Since Google prefers and values fresh content, sometimes it helps boost the traffic overnight.
We’ll be optimizing content according to the intent of the User and SEO best practices.
5. Advanced schema markup
As analyzed in the audit, our website is just serving “local business” schema markup, which isn’t enough. However, there are plenty of valuable options AutoLeap can try and get even more traffic (CTR) than its rivals. A correctly implemented schema markup mainly helps google what the website is overall about and gives you more visibility on search.
Some ideal types we are missing:
- Reviews/Rating Schema
- FAQs Schema Markup
- Blogs/Article Schema
6. High-quality backlinks
Building and acquiring high-quality links isn’t a single-day job. But it requires even months and years to build and contribute to overall website success.
Here are some top-notch strategies I believe are worth trying.
6.1. Unlinked Brand mentions:
We will start with turning “Unlinked brand mentions into linked mentions”. These links are the most effective low-hanging fruit.
6.2. Competitors Backlinking
We will start mentioning our brand(website) on all the pages/listicles where competitors are mentioned but not us. These can also be an easy spot with high relevancy profile.
6.3. Structured business listings
We’ll set up structured business listings channels on all relevant platforms where our target audience exists. This can also be spied from our rivals.
6.4. Competitors backlinks spy/reverse-engineer
I’ll scrape all types of competitors’ links in this strategy. Generally, we’ll be strategizing this for each service/product we are focusing on ranking.
6.5. Blogger Outreach
Blogger Outreach Management for guest posts and link inserts. We will be using a tool for this.
6.6. HARO (advanced)
HARO strategy (sending out quotes as a journalist to be published on authority sites with a potential backlink).
6.7. Reverse HARO strategy (Invented by own, and it’s working crazy!)
This is an effective and tested strategy in which you play smart.
Requirement: 1 more similar-niche site with the main one (autoleap.com) –
Process: We will reverse the simple HARO in step (6) and start getting journalists’ quotes for our secondary/similar site. After giving a link to a journalist through their quote, we will ask for a link in return for our main site. (It’s just a favor, and around 80-90 % of it has worked.)
6.8. High Authority and Relevant Forums
High authority and relevant forums/communities engagement. (Quora, Reddit, etc.)
6.9. Pinterest for Image sharing
Almost every kind of audience exists on Pinterest. Then why not give Pinterest a try? We will be submitting our infographics and other valuable images to this platform for brand building and user (potential customer) acquisition.
6.10. Video & Podcast Marketing for traffic acquisition
We’ll be creating and sharing our videos and podcast on different channels for traffic acquisition.
6.11. Bonus Strategy:
Set up own channels for content distribution (aka content syndication). Some people call it micro-blogging for traffic acquisition purposes.
We’ll utilize our main site blogs to syndicate on third-party networks for following and industry leadership.
Here are some top platforms
7. Internal linking
There are some main internal linking strategies. But we’ll be using a reverse-silo internal linking strategy for building soft silos at their maximum capacity.
How will it work?
After initially defining our parent and child topics in the keyword clustering stage, we’ll use them again for semantic internal linking purposes.
Step 1: Each parent page will link to its child page without any question
Step 2: Each child page will link back to its parent page
Step 3: Plus, one cluster’s parent can link to another cluster’s child and vice versa based on relevancy. (A bit practical thing)
Final Thoughts
I suggest auditing your website first to make it technically sound for Google.
- Make the website crawlable friendly for Google
- Make every website’s element user-friendly
- Fix the page level indexing issues
- On-site Fix and Link-acquisition for the top-performing and money pages first
- Improve the outdated content
- Create new content according to the users’ needs
- Create funnels and conversions through the content
- Promote content according to the business Needs
- Measure and Improve results
Cheers!
