In a rush?

Don’t worry! To summarise the blog for you we have created 4 key points which can help direct and generate more traffic to your website. This is done through optimising your content and ensuring that you are making your blogs search-engine friendly. There are several factors that combine together including SEO which in fact play a huge part to helping websites get found under more searches resulting in higher traffic numbers being directed to your website.

Keeps your content fresh & new

If you happen to stumble across a website which hasn’t updated their content for years, you most likely lose some trust in the information which is being shown. There could be two possibilities to why the website is so outdated. The first one being that the company is no longer operational, and two, that the information which is presented on the site is out of date and no longer true and has been changed since the last time which it was written.

Google doesn’t want its users to be directed to websites which show old and outdated information meaning that websites that do stay active and post out fresh content will be ranking higher and receive more traffic. This means that producing fresh, regular content will benefit and increase your SEO (HostGator, 2018).  

You can also make use of something called Evergreen Content, which is when you create content that is designed to last a very long time, or never go out of date. We wrote more about why using evergreen content is a good idea in this blog here.

Increase the amount of time users spend on your site

Although Google hasn’t officially stated that the time that users spend on your website directly affects your ranking but it has become apparant that it is a factor which they do pay close attention to. This is because Google wants to provide its users with searches which are helpful and relevant. If users are clicking on a link and then leave looking for something different on the search page, it tells Google that the initial link is not helpful and therefore may not present it as high. This can be down to the content you have written being incorrect or unhelpful.

Pages with more text and detail are also more likely to have their users stay on the page for a longer amount of time. If there is more of a reason to stick around then people will! In fact, SEO researchers found that longform blogs are more likely to perform better than shorter ones (Backlinko, 2020).

Long-tailed keywords

Keywords are what help your business get found under specific searches. If you are part of an industry which is very competitive and you & your competitors are all fighting over the same keywords, you may struggle to make it to the first page on Google. This is where long-tail keywords come into play.

Long-tail keywords are much more specific to you and who you are as a business. For example: ‘Responsive Website Design in Kidderminster’ or ‘Mens Nike shoes in size 12’. Usually, long tail keywords drive less traffic, however the audience that views them are more focused & valuable. This is because when people are using very specific phrases,they are specifically interested in your offering, so they are closer to the point of purchase in the sales funnel.

The idea is to broaden your horizon and allow more users to find you based on more specific search criteria. You can incorporate this method into your blogs by using keywords and phrases that refer to the specifics of your product or service.

Internal & External Links

Internal and external links are also a significant factor to boosting your SEO. These links act as bridges between different pages and/or websites. They are a great way to build your trust within Google through referencing articles and websites that are already trusted by Google such as the BBC.

One of the biggest SEO mistakes is not including internal links within your website. Blogs create an opportunity for you to do this on a regular basis as you are able to link blogs together if you a refering to an older entry or you can create banners that link to you contact or home page where users can visit for more information.

The idea is to strategically inform Google yourself what the blog you have written is all about through the use of internal and external links. The use of keywords will also help Google better understand the context of your blog.