5 SEO Tips to Gain More Traffic in 2019

What SEO strategies will work best in 2019? As a marketer or business owner, that is probably the question on your mind as we delve deeper into 2019. The truth is, even if you don’t belong to that category of people, you as well are hungry for more organic traffic to your website.

You might think you know everything there is to know, (keywords, meta descriptions, meta tags and the sort) and done everything there is to do including utilizing numerous backlinks but your content remains in obscurity on search engines and nobody knocks on your site address. The interesting thing about SEO that might make it look difficult is that it is dynamic, ever changing.

But since you can’t give up now because you’ve come this far, we’re relieving you with some useful information to get what you’ve been looking for. Here are a few tips that will definitely make you more attractive to search engines and prospective visitors:

Create Better Content

The notion that bigger is better in most cases is especially true about content. When you have the ability, as a writer, to produce more comprehensive content and also keeping it constantly high-quality, there’s a better chance of your website traffic increasing. Countless studies that have been done suggest that the longer and more comprehensive your content, the better chance you have of gaining more traffic. The case could be different if you already have a high domain authority.

According to SerpIQ, the average length of content for the first result in the SERPs is 2416 words.

And when you think about it, you realize that a search engine’s sole aim is to show you the best answer to your query. Thus, longer content is provided by the search engine.

For example, If you’re searching for “SEO guide”, they wouldn’t show you results of a scanty 500-word guide when they could show you results of well-detailed, in-depth 5,000-word guides that totally cover the topic.

Another advantage of a longer content is that in general; more backlinks are received by them due to the fact that people are more likely and willing to link to a reliable piece of content. Moreover, quality backlinks are vital to increasing ranking in Google.

Another benefit of producing more comprehensive content is that it provides opportunities to add more keywords naturally.

The days where people could keyword-stuff an article and automatically start ranking on the first page and gaining a lot of traffic are long gone Google has gotten better at understanding what your content is about and do, you wouldn’t have to include writings like this in your content:

If you want to add weight, buy our amazing supplements that will help you add the weight you want to add.  Creating longer content also provides more opportunities to easily include keywords into your headings, as well as your image ALT tags.

Your ability to push yourself to create high-quality, comprehensive and lengthy content will increase your chance of ranking higher and will also lead to an increase in the traffic to your website.

Ranking In The Featured Snippet

When Google users ask a question- based queries such as “how to”, the feature snippet is shown to them more and more.

The whole idea is for users to be given the answers to the questions they searched for almost immediately, which will save them the stress of having to go through different links to find the right answer. Google’s aim is to make finding answers to queries easier for all users and as quickly as possible.

This is beneficial to website owners because being able to get your website to rank in the featured snippet will result in an enormous increase in traffic.

The first thing you need to do is decide what content you want to gain ranking in the featured snippet section. One way to do this is to find out what questions your audience might be asking.

A tool like Answerthepublic  can be used to decode some of the major topics or questions your audience might be interested in finding the answers to. After getting questions from your audience, you need to create content based on these major topics or questions asked by them.

On the other hand, you can improve your current content for the increment of your website’s visibility in the featured snippet.

If the ranking of your content is already in the top five results on Google, updating your already existing content instead of creating new content would be a better approach to take. The ideal answer should be below 58 words.

A glossary section was created by CrazyEgg where they explain key phrases that their audience might have questions about on their website and the results have been great.

Although their featured snippet provides a short answer to the question, when you actually go through to the link, there’s a much longer, detailed version that explains the entire topic.

Move Away From Keywords And Start Ranking For Topics

The increasing amount of search results being provided and new content being published each day has led to Google coming up with better and more efficient ways to help their users find the answers and content they’re searching for. Google will be helped to find your site and rank your content quicker when your content is reorganized by topic clusters.

Creating a piece of “pillar content” is the idea because it acts as a go-to source for overarching topics. Hyperlinks can then be used to link to cluster content. Each of the topics mentioned in the pillar content is taken by cluster content and broken down further.

For example, suppose our pillar content is SEO. Then, we might have cluster content pages concerning:

• Backlinks
• On page SEO
• Off page SEO
• Keyword research
• User Interface
• User experience
• Sitemap etc.

So, if for example, you have a page on your website called “what is SEO?” this is the pillar content that breaks down SEO. From there it will link to different pages that provide more details on each of the topics listed above.

The fact that this helps with interlinking your content to enable your audience to easily guide themselves to the information they’re searching for is what makes it work so well for SEO purposes.

Topic clusters build more relevance around keywords and this helps you rank better in search engines.

Google is able to relate your content with the chosen topic easily based on the way the organization of your content has been designed.

Optimize Underperforming Content

You may have an amount of organic traffic coming from a small amount of your content.

This simply means there is a large amount of content that isn’t performing as well as it could be. Many companies make efforts to create new, great content consistently, but if you’re looking to increase your traffic, you don’t actually need to create new content.

A better option is to identify the content that is under-performing and improve it to perform better. With the improvement of old content, your traffic can be increased significantly. A case study produced by Backlinko shows how one company’s organic traffic was able to increase by 348% in just seven days.

The first step is to identify the content on Google that ranks at the bottom of page one or page two and the keywords they’re focusing on.

Use the ‘search analytics’ tool in Google search console to point out keywords that get many impressions but have a low CTR and not many clicks.

This will help you identify keywords that are causing you to rank, but searchers aren’t visiting your site because you’re not yet listing high enough. Once these pages have been identified, search for other pages on your website where internal links can be driven into.

After your internal links have been added, change your metadata, title tags, and h2 tags a bit. Then, work on improving your content for these keywords and in addition, improve the existing content with additional high-quality content.

Build A Linkable Asset And Appeal To Influencers

In 2019, the only way to get legitimate backlinks is to create a linkable asset. If your article is a poorly composed, rewritten version of everything on the internet, people are unlikely to link to it and if you want the traffic to your website to be increased using SEO, then your content needs to be shared. The more your content is shared, the more people read it.

Creating content that people are going to want to share needs to be done actively.

However, the important fact that many people forget is that most times, your audience won’t be sharing your content. This is simply due to the fact that the people whom your content is targeted at, don’t run websites in your niche and because of this, they’re unlikely to link back to your website content.

The more links you get, the higher your content ranking will be and the more traffic you’ll receive.

In order to increase your website traffic through SEO, you need to start producing content that appeals to influencers.

 

How to do it:

First, you need to find influential people in your niche and identify what they care about.

In the dog industry, you might find vets, dog owners, or anyone else who would likely share your content. When the influencers in your niche have been identified, you can proceed by reaching out to them.

Share your content with influencers you’ve been able to identify, and if they come to the conclusion that it’s valuable and describes a topic they care about, they will most likely link to it, and or share it.

If you want to create a linkable asset, it is necessary for you to be able to identify what’s already working in your niche. To achieve this ability to identify what’s already working, use Buzzsumo.

When you click Go, you’ll be shown results of the top content being shared on the internet based on that particular topic. Once you have an idea of this, proceed to choose a format. However, keep in mind that the format is not as important as the content.

An “infographic” is just a format and doesn’t make a piece of content a linkable asset by design.

There are different formats you could choose from. Choosing a format should depend solely on what you hope to achieve with your asset.

Examples such as:

• Infographics
• Quiz
• EBooks
• Whitepapers
• Charts
• Case studies
• Interviews

Once your asset has been created, it’s time to begin with building links towards them.

If your niche is based on complicated topics and it’s important for you to distribute learning tools or lessons, backlinks can be gained from educational authorities.

In a situation where you want to find sites that have resource pages, search on Google: “[keyword] resource site:  [educationalsite].edu”.

When these have been located, contact them to see if you could be featured on their resources page.

Takeaways

Driving traffic to your website with the use of SEO will always be a difficult task because of the increasingly strong competition you’re faced with, especially competing against an SEO agency.

To rank better in Google search result, ensure that you continue to put these tactics in place. Start by creating high-quality content, optimizing your existing content and making your content appealing to those who will most likely share it and link to it, which will, in turn, increase the traffic driven to your site.

SEO doesn’t have to be so complex that you’re not able to find your way around it; you need to know the processes that will bring about the best results.

The approach and tips described here will help you gain more traffic to your site in 2019 if you start executing them now.