SEO – How to Drive Real Traffic Growth

How to Drive Real Traffic Growth?

Everybody knows driving web traffic is a good idea. And thousands of people out there claim to be good at SEO offering even thousands more ideas. It’s overwhelming, and if you’re an eCommerce or website owner how do you even measure your success? How do you know your team (if you have one) is executing properly. How do you know if your website and strategy are sound? You’ve come to the right place to get some SEO eCommerce Consulting from an SEO Expert Consultant.

This particular article is meant to simplify SEO down to two executable things:

1. Content production
2. Technical SEO infrastructure

Content Production – Quantity matters, quality helps

If you’re blogging once a week, you’re doing content production right? WRONG. You need to scale far beyond that, you need 500+ pages of content a year. If your team can execute that, that’s content production. 500 pages might break down to blog posts, adding paragraphs of content to your category and product pages, or even building landing pages.

Think big because…

There are nearly 1-billion websites out there.

What makes your website special? Why should Google pick your page to outrank the billions of other pages it could use. That 1-billion website number isn’t the number of pages, it’s the number of websites. You need to build a catalog of information. You may have heard the phrase “Content is King” before. Well the reason is in an information age, the more relevant content you produce, the more people can find your site. The more people who can find your site, the more people who may convert and become a customer. Relevant content helps boost your ranking because the #1 SEO ranking factor today is engagement.

Engagement means:

1. Time spent on site
2. Bounce rate
3. How many pages viewed before exiting
4. Number of interactions (button clicks, sign up for email etc.)

How do you scale SEO content?

There’s a lot of ways you could tackle this. Depending on the size of your organization, here are possible options:

1. Hire an agency.
2. Build an internal content team. Hire writers on staff.
3. Hire free lancers, meet once a week to brainstorm content ideas.
4. Write the content yourself.

Technical SEO infrastructure – The best content with bad tech drives zero traffic

Okay you’ve got a content production team, now you need the infrastructure to translate your content in a way that Google understands.

The basics:

1. HTML title – this is the title of the page as coded <title> of the page. If your title is “Blog” you are telling Google literally that it’s a blog. If you say “Best eCommerce Consulting Advice on SEO ever” that’s going to rank you for those key phrases. This has the strongest SEO impact on your page.
2. Meta Description – This is the description of your page. It should be uniquely set to include a value proposition. Why should someone click on your page? Put that reason here.
3. Keywords – Google claims they don’t use the keywords

Taking this a level deeper, you need to build a website with a good hierarchy.

• Home page
  • Category page
    • Sub category page
      • product
• Education/news/blog landing page
  • Category
    • Article

Building your url to look like www.brandnamehere.com/category-name-here-/page-title-here

On those pages, you need a layout to give:

• Headline 1 <h1>
  • Headline 2 <h2>
    • Headline 3 <h3>
    • Headline 3 <h3>
  • Headline 2 <h2>
    • Headline 3 <h3>
    • Headline 3 <h3>

This organizes your content so Google knows what’s most important. Beneath the headlines of course you would have paragraphs of text.

This is just technical organization. The advanced items delve into:

1. Schema
2. Markup
3. Engagement metrics
4. Page load time.
5. Responsive design

I’ve linked 5 articles that delve into each of those in depth. But I recommend you tackle all the organizational tech before attempting those.