When growing your business online, managing paid campaigns can be simple: if you need more traffic or leads, turn up the spend to get more traffic or leads. That’s a simplified way of looking at it, but many people prefer the simplicity of paid campaigns to organic ones.
You can manage the SEO of a website for your business or organization without the complexity and still see success. The SEO health and performance of your website can be broken down into three different areas of focus:
- Content Strategy
- User Experience
- Audience Engagement
Whether you’re alone or have a full team and suite of SEO tools, these three focus areas make managing your organic search performance more manageable.
Use this guide below to increase organic traffic to your website.
Set Up Rhythms to Maintain SEO On Your Own
Think of managing your SEO like building a new habit for your health. Keeping your website healthy is the best way to keep it performing on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Content Strategy
The phrase “content strategy” can scare many business owners or marketers with little time. Simply put your website’s words, images, photos, and other forms of media all contribute to its success.
If you’re managing your SEO on your own, keep it simple. Create new content on a regular cadence, like weekly or bi-weekly. Depending on your audience, this can be a blog post, a video, an infographic, or something different. The important thing is to stay consistent so your audience can depend on your content.
User Experience
After you’ve created and published your new piece of content, ensure your user experience is also healthy. Use Google Search Console to measure your website’s Core Web Vitals. This is a test of the user experience on your website, and the report will provide tips or suggestions for you to improve. Check this on a bi-weekly or monthly basis.
Audience Engagement
Make sure you’re tracking your audience behavior using a tool like Google Analytics 4 (GA4). This will tell you the most popular content on your site. Be sure to also set up events and conversions in GA4 to more accurately measure what’s working and keep track of their actions, such as form submissions that could be vital to your revenue. Check your Analytics regularly, such as once a week or bi-weekly, as a larger team.
Leverage Internal Teams to Grow Organic Traffic
Your internal teams should use the same tactics for one person, but the extra resources mean you can also handle more time-consuming or complicated SEO tactics.
Content Strategy
Even with a team contributing towards your SEO, content is still the most critical step. With a team behind you, you can create different types of content to engage your audience even more. Besides blog posts, try creating infographics, ebooks, videos, webinars, and more.
User Experience
Once you start checking and improving the performance of your website, you can lean on your internal teams to improve the user experience by making decisions backed by data. With tools like HotJar, you can create heatmaps showing how a user interacts with your content, using your website features, and, most importantly, what they aren’t interacting with at all. Improving the user experience to make your website pages more engaging will help increase organic traffic to your site.
Audience Engagement
After setting up events, conversions, and other data tracking on your website, you can leverage other digital marketing tactics to work alongside your SEO. Use CRM or email marketing tools like HubSpot, MailChimp, and Constant Contact, to trigger automation flows or emails based on action. You can even use these other channels to test and find better messaging that can be turned back into new content for your organic search campaign down the road.
Professional SEO Help Can Kickstart (or Fix) Organic Traffic
Sometimes you find yourself over your head when trying to manage your SEO internally. If you come across a rat’s nest of content, uninformed information architecture, or find a manual action against you, it can be a good idea to reach out for external help.
Content Strategy
If you’ve been making content regularly without much success, or your content isn’t delivering the right kind of traffic, a content audit can help to make sense of what’s happening between your audience and your website. Then once you have an idea of the content that’s working, you can create more of that content and possibly recycle the content that’s not performing into something new.
User Experience
Sometimes technical issues can be a major roadblock to the SEO health of your website. If you have a pile of redirection loops, page errors, index or crawling issues, or your website is stuck with low site performance no matter what you do, it might be time to reach out to a team of experts for help.
Audience Engagement
Sometimes setting up tracking on your website can be confusing or frustrating. If you plan to use software integration tools and track behavior between them, setting up events and conversions on your site might require a helping hand. Digital marketing experts can also help to inform decisions about messaging, content, and other site features that might help to better connect with your target audience.
Learn how to manage the SEO health of your website with these tips from 3 Media Web.
Do I Even Need to Manage SEO?
If you do nothing to manage your SEO, nothing is likely to happen––as in, it’s unlikely anyone will see your website. Or, without SEO, you’ll need to rely heavily on paid channels for all your traffic and leads. If you create content but don’t have any of the focus of an SEO strategy, your organic traffic will likely be unfocused, ranking for keywords that aren’t contributing to your bottom line and not converting that traffic into qualified leads.
The power of organic search campaigns lies in the “organic” part of the phrase. This is highly qualified traffic searching for content on a topic or question. SEO allows you to reach this traffic, but crafting content around keywords can target this audience and connect them to your business. That content can deliver “free” traffic because although it took time and effort to create, that traffic is more qualified and likely to grow over time all on its own.
Maintain Your SEO to Organically Grow Your Business
It may be a simplified way of looking at SEO campaigns, but managing your website’s content, user experience, and audience engagement can take you further than other gimmicky SEO hacks or tactics.
At the end of the day, if your website delivers value to your target audience, search engines like Google and Bing will reward you by sending more traffic your way.
You can manage the SEO of a website all by yourself and with internal or external teams. All it takes is a little time and a little focus to find success.