Every company could use more traffic to get more leads and obviously, we all want new clients-so what exactly has to be done to see this happen? The simplest answer: Improve your website ranking for a relevant keyword to drive visitors with buyer intent.
Strategies to Drive Traffic with Buyer Intent:
- Benchmark your objective
- Evaluate your current assets
- Research relevant sources of traffic
- Create killer content
- Syndicate and promote
Benchmark your objective
How many new clients would make you happy? What is a realistic number that would mark the success of an SEO campaign? Create a best-case and a worst-case scenario to give you an estimate on what would be an acceptable result from your efforts.
In his Whiteboard Friday piece on “How do you set smart SEO goals?” Rand Fishkin states:
It’s incredibly important that [SEO goals]…provide specific, measurable metrics you can work to improve.
Benchmarking a measurable goal will refine the selection of your keyword target phrase because you will need to make it fit the parameters to reach your goal. By making a measurable target to hit, you can also fine-tune specifics in your process that will lead to better results in future endeavours.
Evaluate your current assets
It’s best practice to run an SEO audit before any campaign begins in order to build your campaign on solid ground and with accurate data. If you’re attempting to rank your page for a specific topic and your site has a duplicate content penalty, you need to correct the issue before you will see any real results. If your site is taking at least 12 seconds to load each page, you obviously have a technical issue that needs to be addressed. You won’t be getting the true results of the efforts you put into developing a keyword because page speed would be holding your ranking down.
You can use a free website audit tool such as Deepcrawl to crawl your site and generate a report on the technical errors your website is producing. This software will give you an idea of any issues with duplicate content, duplicate descriptions, indexing, broken links, title length, page speed, content, mobile-friendliness, etc.
Research the most relevant sources of traffic
Although optimization is not done solely for one keyword per page, keywords are still targeted as a basic template for how the page is built. Target a phrase with the most relevance to your objective and list as many variations of the same phrase. This is where keyword tools come in handy because they will generate hundreds of ideas.
You will need to compare the monthly volume of searches and keyword difficulty to decide on the best option. Ahrefs is one of the top tools because the organic click-through rate is provided to give you an even closer estimate of how many clicks your site would receive on the first page.
The next step to keyword research is coming up with topic ideas for a strong outline of your article. Use keywords from your initial list as subtitles since they will contribute to the optimization of your page. Typically most websites will use those so if you want to separate yourself from the masses to make an extraordinary article you will need to get closer to the heart of your keyword and find issues that resonate the most with people who are searching it.
Wikipedia offers an excellent resource in finding subtopics for your keyword which creates relevance and provides thorough coverage to your keyword topic.
Ever wonder why Google puts Wikipedia near the top of so many searches?
One major reason is that the content is written and approved by those who are considered to have an expert opinion. The second is that their optimization is at an incredibly high level. Every page has an extensive background on the topic, a table of contents and links to related content. Search your keyword on Wikipedia and use some of the topics that they link to make your page super relevant and highly optimized.
Create killer content
No matter how competitive your keyword topic you will need to create content that performs. The skyscraper technique has been an effective method that continues to put pages at the top of search results. When Brian Dean first coined this method he boasted that the process doubled his traffic and his email outreach had a success rate of 11%.
Scout your competition on the first page of results to identify the standard being set in order to compete for the top spots. When assessing the top pages look for the topics that are used to make their pages relevant. You don’t want your page to leave any idea unaddressed.
The skyscraper technique means making your content better in every aspect so you will be looking at subtitles, word count, referring domains, number of images, videos or any additional media that could be used for better user experience.
Syndicate and promote
Once you’ve published your content you will need to get it in front of as many people as possible. The more traffic on your page and the more backlinks it acquires the better it will do in the rankings.
Leverage the power of social media
Post your content to your social media network. Sprout conducted a social media engagement study and concluded that the best times to post are weekdays between 9am-3pm. Schedule your content to be reposted in order to double your traffic.
You don’t want to spam your network but keep in mind that your post has a short window of opportunity of being seen before other posts push it down out of sight. By scheduling to repost your content you improve the chances of it being shared since more people will actually see your content.
Publish content tailored for popular blog sites
As part of your content strategy, you should have articles to publish on popular blog sites that will lead back to your page. Guest posting is the second most popular form of link building by SEO professionals and one link from a reputable website could propel your page to a top position.
You can estimate and plan for the number of guest posts you will aim to have published by performing a competition analysis to see how many referring domains are on the competing pages.
Reach out for top links
Create a list of the top blogs, authors and websites that would benefit from your content and reach out to them to let them know about the amazing piece of content you’ve published. Using the skyscraper method you can get a higher success rate if you reach out to those who have previously linked to your competition’s pages (as long as you have better content).
Search Engines Journal’s author Roger Montti says quoting a well-known influencer in the industry will improve the number of times your content is linked to in your outreach effort. When you have a quote from a recognized brand or author it gives your article more credibility and increases the perceived value of your content.
Creating pages that rank is not a quick process, however, with a focused effort in the right areas, a first-page appearance becomes an inevitability. With the first-page appearance for a relevant keyword comes the benefits of increased traffic, more leads and new clients for your business.
Note: This guide to drive traffic with buyer intent was crafted by Christina Carere. If you have an interesting article to contribute, then check our Guest Blogging Guidelines.