Just like companies allocate marketing budgets for their promotional activities, many website owners have a budget set aside to encourage internet traffic to their websites. This usually includes paid advertising of the PPC (pay per click) category. But not all website owners are so lucky. Many websites are owned by start-ups or small companies which do not have so much of funds at their disposal. In such small or medium-sized companies, the number of employees is also quite limited, so most of the employees have to do everything, starting from web development to website optimization.
If this story sounds familiar to yours, then you will be happy to know that as far as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your website is concerned, you need not necessarily employ experts at a high cost. There are several things you can go yourself in order to boost your search traffic this year. Let us take a look at five of these simple SEO tools:
- Security – An increasing number of websites today have some sort of e-commerce element involved. If a website doesn’t have adequate security measure to protect the data shared by the visitor, people won’t have the confidence to visit your website. From an SEO perspective, Google and other search have already recognized it and made the security certificates (SSL certificates) an important ranking factor for websites. You need to ensure that your website has the correct SSL certification if you want it to continue getting good ranks.
- Interlinks – There was a time a few years back when backlinks to domain authority websites were all the rage. While getting noticed by experts is still a big deal, but you get much better mileage on rankings when you use SEO tools like interlinks. To do this, you need to place keyword rich content on different pages of your website and then interlink those pages using suitable anchor texts.
- Go Social – If you are the owner of a small business that is trying to use your website as a great tool for generating pipelines of enquiries and converting them to sales, then you need to look upon social media as an ally in your web development efforts. We have moved beyond the times when a business owner used to look at a Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram account as a source of entertainment after his or her work was done. Social media profiles can be used to generate interest in the company and direct traffic to the website.
- Seek Reviews – When you are a business owner and you tell friends about your website, they always shout out encouragement for you. But encouragement does not visitors bring. Those who are your well-wishers need to actually try out your products and services and place their reviews. This is what would actually help you and get some traction on your website. This is something you can request your friends to do quite easily.
- Reverse Engineer – When a business owner does not listen to his customers enough, he finds it difficult to understand what they really want. The case of a website is very similar. Most websites which have enough traction regularly get discussed on reviews and forums like Google, Reddit, Quora etc. The conversations about your website there would help you understand where you are going wrong, and what changes would bring in more traffic. Once you can see and hear the things that you need to bring in, you can then reconfigure your website accordingly and bring in the visitors.
It would be a good idea to get an SEO audit done on your website before you implement these five steps, and then repeat the SEO audit after the changes are in place. The improvement in your audit scores will be proof of the effectiveness of the above steps.