Of all the marketing strategies to increase your customer base, there’s no doubt that inbound marketing has a major impact on the number of clients you receive from your website. Maximize the traffic your site receives by continually improving your website’s performance and adding additional sources of traffic.
Optimize for performance
There are hundreds of things to consider when you’re trying to rank your website. Running a site audit will uncover errors and performance issues that you can correct to make your site rank higher in the search results.
The ranking algorithm accounts for hundreds of factors in the overall placement of your website. It’s not just the large and blatant errors that will drag your websites ranking down. If your site errors only account for a small percentage of the performance of your site, correcting a large number of them can move the needle in your site’s ranking.
Improve site speed
The significance of the time it takes to load your pages can vary across industries. The retail industry is an example where site speed can play a direct role in the ranking of your website. A faster load time results in a reduced bounce rate, which on the first page of results is a metric that Rankbrain measures as a ranking factor.
The recommended time to load a page is around three seconds to get the first meaningful content on your screen. Many industry averages are still nowhere near the three-second mark. This presents an opportunity for a competitive advantage that results in an improvement in ranking.
Duplicate content
Search engines absolutely hate duplicate content. There are penalties dedicated to reducing ranking for any type of content that is copied or repeated on your site.
The main concern is plagiarism but because the penalty is algorithmic, any canonical errors will trigger a Panda penalty. If one of your articles is being displayed on more than one of your pages without a canonical tag it will count adversely against your website.
Thin content
The Panda update was initiated to address poor quality content. It targeted sites that had duplicate content, spun content and thin content. If your pages fall under any of those three possibilities, Google has penalized your site through an algorithmic filter and you’re suffering a demotion in the ranking.
It would benefit your site to update poor performing pages with more content to boost traffic. If the pages are not salvageable it would make your website more streamlined to delete them altogether.
Make video a regular part of your content
Over 87% of marketers would agree that using video is one of the marketing strategies to increase your customer base. The use of video increases the length of time visitors spend on your site. Increasing the average time on site is considered a ranking factor because it shows the level of engagement between visitors and your content.
Using video allows you to build a channel, subscribers and generate another stream of traffic from YouTube. Since 2017 video has experienced exponential growth in the number of shares, and the number of YouTube users creating a massive traffic opportunity from the number of searches performed daily.
YouTube is officially the second most popular website in the world, recently surpassing Facebook who formerly held the #2 position. People will search YouTube for product reviews and find out how to learn a skill or accomplish a task. By optimizing your videos on YouTube you drive traffic from a completely separate search engine to supplement your overall monthly traffic.
Capitalize on features being displayed on the first page of results
The emergence of SERP features (search engine results page) has been a controversial occurrence that Google has implemented over the years.
These Google products (ads, local listings, featured snippets, etc.) have steadily chipped away at the available traffic to organic search results by absorbing the available clicks. Your company can increase its customer base by optimizing the appropriate feature.
The features that appear in the SERP entirely depend on the search intent behind the keyword being typed. If a user searches for a product, the SERP feature that appears could be a product carousel of ads, a list of Google Ads, local listings and in most cases a People Also Ask Box. If a user types in an informational query it could trigger a featured snippet, knowledge panel and PAA box.
Companies can benefit from the different streams of traffic from each of these Google features, however, each requires a separate method of SEO to be featured in the top positions.
The featured snippet is a Google product in which your website can compete if it currently ranks within the top 10 results on the first page. By optimizing the HTML for the snippet that exists you can win the snippet position as well as be listed in the organic results. The snippet represents approximately an 8% gain in the volume of traffic your site receives.
The Local Finder is an additional source of traffic that can provide high converting visitors to your site. The finder will list the companies that operate within your city and display the company information you provide in your Google My Business profile.
By optimizing your website for localized search results you can not only place your business in the organic results but in the local pack as well. The additional position on the first page of results can make a significant difference in the quality of leads your company receives.
The PAA boxes are also a good source of additional traffic. To appear in the PAA boxes your content should be optimized to answer questions that are currently being displayed in your keyword search.
Increase your client base
A top position on the first page of organic search results is definitely the goal for your company. Improve the performance of your site to continue your upward climb to the top of the first page. No matter how small the improvements, nothing is too insignificant when every jump in ranking will increase the traffic your website receives.
Take advantage of every opportunity to implement effective marketing strategies to increase your customer base and provide more revenue for your company.
