How to Grow Your Organic Traffic With These 5 SEO Tactics
3
Min Read Time
Joseph Mullins
Choquer Creative Copywriter
It’s easy to stress over your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) as you try and do everything possible to boost your lead generation. But it’s important to remember that overloading your website with a bunch of keywords or links may not work in your favour. Instead, we should prioritize meaningful action with a targeted goal and build our SEO strategy from there.
If you’re looking to grow your online traffic, try implementing at least two of these 5 SEO tactics that the team at Choquer Creative has put together.
1. Increase your click-through rate
The best SEO strategies are ones that grab a user’s attention and fulfills their expectations when they click through. To increase your click-through rate you can do the following:
Rich snippets
Rich snippets is the term used to describe structured data markup that site operators can add to their existing HTML, which in turn allows search engines to better understand what information is contained on each web page.
Title & description optimization
Titles and descriptions receive lots of attention in the SERPs and have an impact on rankings. For a guide on creating effective title tags and descriptions, read our blog post.
2. Rank higher for keywords you already rank for
One of the most common ways people try and increase their organic traffic is through keywords. While it may seem advantageous to stuff a bunch of new keywords into your website, don’t do it. Keyword stuffing is not appreciated by Google’s algorithm and it can actually hinder your SEO.
Instead, you should try and rank higher for keywords that you are already ranking for. Try and push keywords that you rank for in the 4th-10th position, up to the top 3.
The higher you rank, the more organic traffic your site will get.
According to MARTECH, 25% of adults in the United States own a smart speaker in their home. Smart speakers have multiple functions including voice search, which is what you should be thinking about for your SEO strategy as they become increasingly popular.
Here’s an example. Someone on a computer would type “elephant diet”. But someone using voice search would say “what do elephants eat?”
Keep in mind that with voice search, users are more likely to ask a question, and they will only get one answer. This answer often comes from the featured snippet.
4. Design for mobile
Your website should be responsive across all screen sizes, but remember to prioritize mobile. In the past it was desktop, but now the majority of searches come from our mobile devices.
In March 2020, Google announced that it will now primarily use its mobile smartphone user-agent to crawl sites. This means that the mobile version of your site will be crawled and indexed ahead of the desktop version if the desktop version gets crawled at all.
As a result, any new site you build should focus on the mobile experience. How it appears and performs on a desktop is still important, of course, but mobile needs to come first. Ensure that your customers have a phenomenal user experience while browsing your website on mobile.
5. Add a blog to your website
If you’re trying to increase your organic traffic, a blog is the way to go. Blogging can increase your organic traffic because more indexed pages mean more opportunities for ranking. According to Hubspot, blogs are three more times more effective in generative leads than paid ads.
Not only do blogs give you an opportunity to implement new keywords and build links, but you can also connect with your audience and talk about your business.
For a guide on writing an SEO friendly blog post, click here.
Final Thoughts
Rsearching and implementing SEO tactics takes time. That's why Choquer Creative offers SEO services performed by skilled SEO strategists and copywriters. Contact us for more information.
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9.20.22
The Ultimate Social Media KPI List: Everything You Need To Boost Performance
Buckle up, folks. It's time to talk about social media KPIs.
The term "KPI" stands for "key performance indicator" and it's the thing that tells you whether your marketing strategy is working—or failing.
KPIs are one of the most important things to keep an eye on if you want to grow your business. So let's take a look at some of the most important social media KPIs for business growth.
Social Media KPIs 101
We know you’re excited to jump into the KPIs and how to use them.
But first: some quick questions and answers about social media KPIs.
What are KPIs
KPI stands for "Key Performance Indicators," which is just a fancy way of saying "what you're measuring."
KPIs provide data you can analyze to measure the success of your social media marketing efforts. There are a variety of different social media KPIs to choose from, depending on what you want to accomplish with your strategy (we’ll get to that later, don’t worry!).
Basically, if you're spending money on advertising and marketing, you need a way to measure its effectiveness. This will help ensure that your brand isn't wasting time with ineffective ads and can focus on ones that work!
KPIs simplify marketing strategies
You want to know how many people are seeing your content, how many of them are engaging with it, and how many actually buy or sign up for something as a result of reading it.
One of the most important things about KPIs is that they give you a straightforward and unbiased way to measure performance.
This objective data shows you which content is performing well and which content needs a re-vamp. From here, you can develop marketing strategies to improve success.
Your goal should be to pick a few KPIs (not all of them) and stick with them over time so that any improvements become more obvious.
Once you have your KPIs set up properly, you can use them regularly as part of your marketing strategy review process so you can constantly improve your efforts on each channel without having any gaps in data-collection.
Our biggest tip is to choose one social media KPI tracking platform. This ensures that your data is consistent and you can track changes over time.
Types of Social Media KPIs
Let’s take a deep dive into each category.
Reach
Reach is a social media KPI that lets you know how many people you’re “reaching” with your content.
It's important to know your reach because it tells you how many people are seeing your content. It can help inform which direction to take your content, and it's an important metric for any business or person who wants to connect with others.
This social media KPI has its limitation though. While reach lets you know whether or not your content has been seen, it doesn't tell you anything about engagement with the content. We’ll discuss engagement in the next section.
Engagement
Engagement is a social media KPI that looks at how often your audience interacts with your content and how likely they are to recommend it.
It's a way of measuring how well you are doing at engaging with your audience, and it goes beyond just measuring clicks by looking at the time someone spends on your site and whether or not they come back for more.
Because engagement has been shown to have a direct correlation with retention rates—the longer someone stays engaged with your product/service, the more likely they are to buy it or continue using it.
Conversions
“Conversions” are visitors who took the action you wanted after viewing your content.
So if you have an e-commerce site, a conversion could mean someone buying an item. If you're running a blog, a conversion could mean someone subscribing.
This social media KPI provides important insight into how effective your content is at driving desired behaviour.
List of Social Media KPIs
Follower count
We've all seen it: the follower count. It's like a badge of honor, a sign to other people that you're worth their time and effort. And it definitely doesn't hurt to have more followers than your competition.
But what if we told you that this social media KPI is actually one of the least important ones?
Sure, seeing your follower count go up is a great feeling. But how many of your followers are engaging with your content? And how many followers are buying from your business?
So while it's great to increase your follower count, don't let that be your only metric for success—after all, quality beats quantity every time!
Impressions
Impressions are the number of times your content was shown to people over a given time period.
It's a great metric for measuring the reach of your content on both Google and social media.
Measuring impressions can help you understand how many people are seeing your content and if they're engaging with it. This can help you make changes accordingly.
For example, if 70 people saw your content over the span of a week, but only 4 people engaged with it, then you may need to re-evaluate your content and target audience. This is because while your content was seen by 70 people, only 4 were influenced enough to click on it, like, comment, subscribe, etc.
Traffic
Traffic refers to the number of visitors that come to your website from search engines, social media platforms, or other websites.
The traffic KPI helps you determine which content gets the most visitors and which one doesn’t. You can use this information when planning content strategy or developing new products or services for your business.
Traffic By Source
Traffic by source is a very useful KPI that measures where your audience is coming from. For example, did a specific user across your content through Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn?
This social media KPI can be used to monitor marketing efforts on specific social media platforms. For example, if you just launched a marketing campaign on Instagram, you can monitor how effective it is at directing new visitors to your content.
Social share of voice
This social media KPI measures the number of times your brand was mentioned on social media compared to how many times your competitor’s brand was mentioned.
Clicks
Clicks measure the number of times someone clicks on your website from the Google search result page.
To optimize this social media KPI, make sure your title and meta description is intriguing and encourages people to want to read more.
FAQs about Social Media KPIs
How do you measure social media success?
The key to understanding social media success is figuring out what your KPIs are.
Think about it: if you don't know what you're trying to accomplish, then how can you actually know whether or not you're succeeding? You need to be able to define what success looks like so that you can see whether or not your efforts are moving towards that goal.
Once you've got some ideas about what success could look like—like increasing sales by 10% or getting 500 new followers on Twitter—you'll need to start evaluating where your efforts are falling short. That's where KPIs come in handy: they let you measure progress towards those goals and show whether or not there's still room for improvement (or if things are working well enough).
How is social media growth measured?
The most important thing to remember about social media growth is that it's not just about getting more followers.
There are many other KPIs you should keep an eye on. For example: how many people clicked on your website from the social media post or the number of people who engaged with your social media post.
The best way to measure social media growth is by tracking a set of KPIs every month. This will let you see where you need to increase efforts, and where you’re doing well.
An example of this is if you just launched a marketing campaign. After you launch, you can use KPIs to track the effects of the marketing campaign on business growth. This will provide you with solid, consistent data on what works for your business and what doesn’t.
KPI vs Metric
KPI vs Metric is a frequent question that gets asked.
While these terms are often used interchangeably, their uses are slightly different.
All KPIs are metrics but not all metrics are KPIs.
We understand it can get confusing so we’ve put together a simple KPI vs Metric comparison chart with examples.
Which social media KPI is most important
The most important social media KPI is engagement.
It's tempting to focus on things like total followers, but those numbers don't mean anything if your audience isn't interacting with your content. Engagement is the best indicator of whether or not your content is resonating with people.
We're Here to Help!
Choquer Creative has helped over 100 companies improve their digital presence and marketing. KPIs are an important part of our strategy. Contact us if you have any questions about KPIs and social media marketing!
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SEO
1.18.21
Are Redirects Bad for SEO? 7 FAQs about Search Engine Optimization
Are 302 Redirects Bad for SEO?
The short answer to this is, not really. First, let’s make the difference between 302 redirects and 301 redirects. Redirects are simply a way to send both users and search engines to a different URL from the one they originally requested.
302 redirects are temporary redirects. These redirects are perfect for when you’re redesigning your website or adding new webpages. This lets Google know that the original page remains indexed in Google and no value (link equity) is transferred to the new, temporary URL because Google knows this is just temporary. Hence, when a redirect is used properly, your SEO remains unbothered and you will retain any rankings, traffic value, and authority that page might have.
Where problems tend to arise is when people don’t know the difference between a 302 and a 301. 301 redirects, simply put, are permanent redirects. It sends the message to search engines, letting them know that your website or webpage has been moved permanently. This would be around a year or longer. After a year, check to see if people are still being redirected to your site. If they are, figure out where they’re coming from and try to fix the source before you cancel the redirect.
For example, people who use this type of redirect often purchase other, slightly different domains that they use to redirect users to their primary domain. These slight domain variations include misspellings and variations of a brand or other relevant domains with high “Domain Authority”.
PRO TIP: Use a 301 redirect when establishing which domain is your default site: “www.yourbiz.com” or just “yourbiz.com”. In most search queries for a website, people tend to omit the “www” when typing out website names. Hence, a permanent redirect there would guarantee they end up on your site anyway.
Are H1 Tags Important for SEO
The golden rule of blog content management is structuring content. Blogs with H1 Tags are easily identifiable by Google and by users alike. Adding structure to long blocks of text, especially long-form content can not only make this easier to read, but it can also improve your search ranking and how Google indexes your content. So yes, although it isn’t the absolute best thing you can do for your SEO, it is still essential.
CONTENT PRO TIPS:
Hire professional writers who will help you produce professional, industry-standard documents with regard to your field of work, market, or niche.
Acquire backlinks from high authority domains.
Update content and photos on your website.
Get as many reviews on Google as possible. Think about incentivizing your customers to leave a positive review.
Get a Wikipedia page and showcase your expertise to Google.
Are iFrames Bad for SEO
If you’re not aware already, an iframe is simply a frame in a frame. This tool allows you to insert content from other sources onto your webpage. An iFrame is a powerful element if you want more engagement on your site. It is entirely possible that when used correctly, they can contribute to better SEO. for your visitors. Ideally, an iFrame should be part of the content that you make, not as an integral part of your website. Beware that using iFrames excessively can increase load times. So tread with caution!
Isn’t it a security threat?
Some folks say it could be a security risk, but it is perfectly safe to use now. These attacks have reduced over the years and it only takes a bit of precaution to rid your worries. Ensure you pay attention to your sources while adding an iFrame and avoid linking from an untrusted website. The apprehension stems from the surge of iFrame code injection attacks back in 2008. ABC News was a victim among many others! The attack would redirect visitors to a malicious site, then install a virus to the visitors’ PC or attempt to steal sensitive information. Hence, is not recommended to include iFrame as an integral part of your website. But we use iframes all the time.
Do Images Help SEO
Images and video content, when optimized can bring in much more traffic than you think. So yes, Images do help SEO, and here’s how. You can also check out our extensive guide to optimizing the images on your website here.
Google can identify text extremely well, but it is still a bit iffy in terms of images. So you must make sure your image nomenclature is intact and easy to understand. Alternative text, commonly known as alt tags gives search engines a basic idea of what each image is about. Therefore allowing search engines to index images accordingly. However, they are not visible to your average visitor. Alternative text is a big win for website accessibility since it also helps visually impaired visitors navigate your site with audio-based software. This can be a godsend in terms of SEO. The more accessible your site is, the higher the ranking and the more traffic your site will bring in.
PRO TIP:
Google indexes SVGs, the same way it does PNGs and JPGs, so you don’t have to worry about SVGs hindering your SEO efforts.
For the sake of faster load times, SVGs can be your trump card since they are traditionally (not always) smaller in file size than PNGs or JPGs.
Do Keywords Help SEO
Yes, yes, and yes. Content is king and if your content had all the relevant keywords in place, rest assured, your website will have a lot more eyes on them than you think. This does not happen overnight though. Consistent, high-quality blogs that have been optimized for their respective content can gradually help your visibility. Keywords are one of the main elements of SEO. Simply put, you need to study and understand how people are looking for desired products, services, or information that you can offer. This is keyword analysis. There’s a myriad of tools out there to help with keyword analysis and research such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, Keywords Everywhere etc.
The idea is to make it easy for an audience to find you as opposed to landing on one of the countless other websites on the internet.
PRO TIP:
Google recognizes content written by a person and a bot and indexes them accordingly. So make sure you do not keyword stuff or have atrociously repetitive metadata.
Make sure the Alt Text for images on your site have relevant keywords in place to make them identifiable to Google.
Does Linking to Other Sites Improve SEO
Internal and external linking is one of the cornerstones of SEO. Outbound linking to relevant, informative sites, is a great way to provide important clues about the relevance of your page to search engines. Getting good backlinks (inbound links)from a high authority domain is a sure shot to more eyes on your pages too. Ultimately, search engines in general, want users to find the information/content they are looking for. So, when you include links to helpful content, you are doing them a favor.
The more links a page receives from other sources, the more popular it appears. This sends positive signals to search engines and can boost a page's rank in search results, meaning that more searchers will click and view the content.
How Do You Measure SEO Success
Google Analytics will be your best friend during the process. Remember that measuring SEO success requires analyzing multiple sets of data and using relevant metrics to understand engagement on your site.
Here’s a quick overview of our Recommended FREE SEO tools: