Previously we covered 3 No-Nonsense Ways to Improve Your SEO, and we’re following that up with three common SEO problems and how to tackle them.
Reduce Your Bounce Rate with Better Visuals and Workflow
The Problem: The biggest mistake companies make in terms of driving traffic, is not delivering a good experience once their visitors actually get there. If visitors arrive only to leave within seconds, that “Bounce Rate” is tracked by Google, and can count against your search engine rankings, making that hard-earned traffic work against you.
The Fix: Evaluate your site’s look and feel, making sure it’s up to date. You want visitors to have an easy and enjoyable experience when navigating the content you worked so hard in putting together. Organic inbound traffic through quality content that’s relevant to your audience is the lifeblood of your SEO, and if you do use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns (such as Google Adwords), do your research on effective methods first. A badly planned PPC campaign might create a higher bounce rate, which means both wasting money and potentially harming your site’s ranking.
Take Advantage of Social Media Marketing and Inbound Links
The Problem: You want your inbound traffic to grow organically, so that the people who are persuaded to visit your site are the people who actually have a reason to stay. Some people are often tempted to engage in spam-like behaviour or search for cheap tricks to get inbound links (that is, links to your website from other websites), especially if you’re starting from scratch. But spamming the world and getting your site linked by unreliable sources aren’t going to help your SEO, or your brand.
The Fix: One of the best ways to improve your SEO is to have a cohesive network of social media attached to your site. It’s a simple way to have your site linked from multiple places of substance across the web. When you start sharing your content on social media, it makes it easier for other people to share it across their networks, creating more opportunities to be found and helps your pages get indexed more quickly. Getting linked by a popular news or media site will also make a big difference, not only because of their higher traffic levels, but because it means being linked from other websites of substance with good SEO.
Use a “Quality over Quantity” Approach with Content Creation
The Problem: You need content for your website, and finding or creating content that is relevant and useful enough to retain users and/or increase traffic can be challenging. As mentioned in regards to reducing high bounce rates, having content that has value for your target audience is another vital component of building a solid SEO foundation. If you stuff your blogs and static pages with filler and poorly-made content, visitors will have to wade through it all to find the gems of content that you did put thought and care into creating. Or more likely, they’ll just go away.
The Fix: Create content, by all means, but don’t churn it out just for the sake of having something up there. Updating your blog once a week with a piece of quality writing will yield better results than blogging nonsense lists or unrelated cat photos three times a day, every day. Nothing against cat photos, of course! If you’re in the kitten blogging business, it makes total sense. If you’re recruiting for software sales? Maybe keep it to a minimum. Having fewer pieces of high quality content means you’re more likely to create and retain a loyal user base by only providing worthwhile material for them to consume.