How to Optimize Your SEO Strategy to Generate Web Traffic

The digital marketing landscape is more competitive today than ever. As a result, many small and medium-sized businesses struggle to keep site visitors. They also often struggle to maintain or improve their SEO rankings. Below we provide a six-point SEO strategy to help small businesses get better rankings, generate more leads, close more sales, and earn more revenue.

1. Begin with clear goals

It’s unfortunate that 70% of small businesses don’t have an SEO strategy, and even more tragic that this is happening in 2021. It leaves you disorganized and unprepared – and that’s assuming all goes well. Otherwise, you’re in deep trouble.

You must have a clear plan detailing why you’re doing SEO. This is crucial so you know what you’d like to achieve, and how to get there. You need to outline your KPIs, set performance goals, and identify milestones. Adopting the SMART-goal approach can help.

2. Take time to understand your target audience

The best SEO campaigns are founded on high-level targeting. Your marketing team should fully understand the target customers, their needs, and how to present solutions. So, you must prioritize the three most important targeting factors, i.e., location, demographics, and personal interests. Understanding all three allows you to know your audience’s search intent and ideal solutions.

However, don’t just store the information in your mind. Instead, create buyer personas to guide the SEO team throughout the campaign.

3. Learn from your competitors

This is known as SEO competitive analysis and refers to a conscious effort to better understand your main competitors, so you know what to do and what not to do.

Moz recommends focusing on three key things during competitor analysis. First, find out who your competitors are. Secondly, find out their main keywords and topics. Finally, determine the gap between your content and theirs – a process known as gap analysis. From there, you can devise how to beat each competitor.

4. Invest in keyword search and optimization

To align your SEO campaign with your marketing and overall business goals, you need to discover and enumerate your keywords and topics beforehand.
Fortunately, LYF Marketing has a valuable guide that can help you get started with keyword research. Generally, you should begin by using keyword search tools to discover the best keywords for your industry. After that, use Google Search to refine your keyword list.

5. Build valuable links

Although we all understand the importance of link building in successful SEO, only a few marketers get their money’s worth from their link-building efforts. Perhaps it explains why many marketers give up on link building altogether within a few years.
The first thing you must understand is that links directly impact site authority, trustworthiness, and ranking. So, quitting isn’t the solution. Instead, you need to clean up your links, invest in better links, and even consider professional link-building services for increased ROI.

6. Don’t forget about user experience

User experience has become an essential factor in digital marketing. Indeed, many big brands are spending up to 16.7% of their marketing budgets on user experience.

You must do the same when optimizing your campaigns for search engines. Think of and invest in strategies to impress your audience. For instance, videos are the best performing content type right now. So, you must find ways to incorporate more videos into your content.

Finally…

You can only be successful in the new marketing age if you abandon destructive SEO practices. For example, keyword stuffing, duplicate content, and intrusive ads. Instead, focus on newer SEO factors such as simple design, mobile-friendliness, quality content, and site security. And don’t forget about speed. By embracing the techniques above you can optimize your SEO strategy to generate web traffic