Five years ago you could write a blog a week and get quite high organic traffic. Not anymore! Everyone is creating content nowadays, Google’s algorithm is regularly being updated, organic results are being pushed down the search results page and only the best content gets seen.
If you want to blog, you need to create very good quality content. In this article, we’re going to help you get higher up those search rankings by taking you through how to optimize your website’s online content.
Niche down to rank higher in search
You need to find the little gap in your market. That sweet spot where people are looking for information and not many people are serving them.
For instance, if you were to write about websites then you would really struggle to get seen. There are hundreds of people writing about websites.
However, if you were to focus on membership websites, you could probably get up a lot higher because search demand is lower. You have an opportunity to be very specialist and build authority in your niche.
How to figure out what to specialize in
There are lots of tools that can help you niche down and figure out what to specialize in. One of these is LSI Graph, which allows a limited number of free searches.
Google groups keywords together, it has a package of terms it is looking for in relation to a topic. LSI Graph produce a list of related keywords Google likes for your search term.
Let’s say you’re a sales coach and you search for that term, you will get related keywords such as ‘sales consultant’, ‘improve sales’ and a host of other terms for you to use. If you can group as many of those as possible together, you’ll get attention quicker.
How to optimize for mobile devices
How we use the internet has changed over the past few years. The growth in mobile devices is huge with many people choosing to use their phone or tablet to go online. This means you need to adjust how you produce content to optimize it for mobile.
People have short attention spans and expect to be able to find what they are looking for quickly. If you don’t serve what they are looking for, they will move on.
The structure of websites is changing to give people a nice experience on mobile. You need to think about those different screen sizes and how the layout is going to work for someone scrolling through on a smaller screen.
Consider your font sizes. They don’t want to be too small, or blown up. Pay attention to different elements and make sure they don’t overlap on a mobile device.
Focus on content your visitors can consume quicker. People like rich media experiences, which means different ways to access your content.
Demand for video has grown massively in recent years. By adding video to blog posts, you are keeping them on that page for longer.
Google pays attention to dwell time as a means of judging the quality of content on the page. If people stay on one article longer than another on the same subject, Google will bump it higher up the search rankings.
Audio is good for this as well. If you have a podcast, and people are coming to your site to listen to that, you will get a boost in traffic because people are spending longer on your posts.
Get rid of the clutter at the top of your blog posts. People are not going to share something they haven’t read yet so don’t have social share buttons at the top. Avoid an image above your content.
Make it so that the first thing your visitor sees is the headline and optimize your first paragraph to get your reader’s attention and make them want to read on.
Focus on content your visitors can consume quicker. People like rich media experiences, which means different ways to access your content. #Youpreneur Click To TweetHow to optimize your content archive
If you have got a lot of content on your site, look at Google Analytics and see what your top 10, 20, 30 posts are.
If you have content which is performing poorly, then kill it off and redirect it towards your quality content because Google will disrank you for poorly performing pages. These are called zombie pages. Don’t get rid of pages on a whim, make sure you are redirecting them to relevant pages.
If you have an e-commerce site and you have a lot of old tag pages and archive category pages, redirect those towards high performing product pages and search result pages.
Take a look at your top performing blog posts and consider how they relate to a key service you offer then put internal links in directing visitors to your services. Update your content with new information.
Don’t forget to share your content out again on social media. Focus on linking together content which is working well. This will provide value to your website visitors and get them to spend longer on your site.
By linking your existing content you can see a traffic boost of anything from 8 percent to 50 percent. And it doesn’t take long to do it. Spend five or ten minutes a month looking at related content and linking it together.
Don’t forget to go back to LSI Graph and work some of those grouped keywords in. Over time you will see a natural boost.
Quick wins to boost your traffic
Content marketing is a long game. However, you can get quick wins by looking for little niches. Deep dive into the questions people are asking about that niche and you can climb the rankings quickly.
You need to spot those gaps. There won’t be huge traffic volume there but you can rank for something which gets 200 searches a month.
Another thing to do is look at your favorite blogs and ask yourself what they do, then go back to your site and apply that user experience. The more content you have on your website, the more important it is to optimize it.
Your website can be a valuable business asset and you want it to work hard for you and make the time you have spent creating content pay off. Optimizing your content for your audience and search engines will bring you more website traffic and ultimately, help you to grow your business.
Wrap Up
If today’s video has helped you in some way… perhaps answered a few questions you’ve been having, or helped you develop a new idea or two.. let me know what your biggest takeaway was! I’d love to hear from you.
And don’t forget, you can watch my free training course ‘The Youpreneur Launchpad’ over on YouTube… it’s focused on helping you build, market and monetize your expertise better than ever before. I’ll see you in the next video!
Chris founded Youpreneur® in 2015. He is a serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker and author of the bestselling books “Virtual Freedom” and “Rise of the Youpreneur”. He hosts our podcast, live events and coaches our clients inside the Youpreneur Incubator. Chris is based in Cambridge, UK.
