In today's competitive market, it is very important for any performance marketer to have a site that can attract a considerable amount of qualified traffic. Online business efforts have been contributing to a large chunk of revenue for businesses lately. Many businesses rely on online marketing to cater to the buyers of niche products, and to provide them with a cheaper price or the best value option. And, if you want to succeed in this space, then it is not enough to rely on these glamorous aspects of the website, such as a nice interface. What really matters is the non-glamorous parts, or the technical aspects, such as
Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Till a few years back, SEO was a relatively new profession, and not many marketers were familiar with its concept and all the technical know-hows. However, now it has evolved and become a necessity for every online business. There are lot of marketers who use the wrong approach, and assume that traffic will start coming automatically as soon as they hit the publish button. But SEO, like any other profession, is highly technical, and a lot of efforts are needed by webmasters to keep up with the constant updates.
Here are 7 SEO growth hacking techniques which will help you make the most out of your SEO strategy:
1. Focus on Technical Aspects of SEO
You may have formulated a good SEO plan, but that plan will simply be incomplete if you do not focus on the technical aspects of SEO. If you don’t do so, then there can be many things that can go wrong with your business, and you won’t be able to implement your online marketing plan properly. Firstly, you need to focus on the status of your your
robot.txt files and
robots Meta Tags. Both of these are used to restrict Google to index certain pages. Occasionally, webmasters may add certain pages that shouldn’t be on that list. As a result, some of the pages may not be indexed.
2. Improve Your Website Architecture and XML Sitemap
You also need to focus on your
website’s architecture and
XML sitemap, and ensure there are no shortcomings in them. Either Google crawlers or bots of other search engines crawl these pages from time-to-time, and they look for a website’s architecture and XML sitemap to gain full information about the website in a short time. If these two elements are not in place, then they have difficulty in crawling the website, and hence, it will affect your SEO since it may push you down the search engine results page. Hence, this is where technical prowess in SEO comes into play. The lack of this prowess can seriously affect your SEO efforts, and can push your website down drastically in the results page. Therefore, it is very important for any marketer to have technical know-how of SEO. If your website’s design is in place, it will be beneficial for both customers and the bots, since it will be easily navigable as well as crawl able by the bots. Otherwise, both Google and your customers may not notice your site.
3. Focus on Customer journey optimization
A customer’s journey consists of 4 stages – awareness, consideration, decision and delight. A marketer must ensure that the customers are satisfied in each of these stages and must take steps to optimize the customer’s whole buying process. To achieve this goal, he must ensure that the content of his website is fully customer-oriented and enhances their overall journey with your company. Regardless of the device they are viewing in, whether mobile or tablet, users should be able to surf your landing pages easily and quickly.
4. Choose your domain wisely
Let’s consider your domain as a whole. Your website needs to be registered in the country from where you are conducting business from. To achieve better results, you must consider having local domains such as .in, or .uk. On the other hand, if you are a multinational company, or if your services are solely provided through the internet, then you can go for a .com domain, since it will make your page visible in international searches – especially in the US. What domain you choose does matter, since you will be featured more in the local search results by Google.
5. Invest in Keyword Research
The content of every single page on your site should be focused around one particular term or phrase, known as keywords. These keywords are exactly what users are typing to find you on Google. Your focus should be to create your content in such a manner that there is an optimal usage of keywords throughout the body of the page, so when a user searches using that exact keyword or uses some variation, he should be able to find you at the first page of the search results. Before creating content for a particular page of your site, you must do a proper research for what should be your focus keyword or keywords, and use that keyword or keywords optimally throughout the body of that content. You must choose your keywords wisely, and not go for keywords which have too low or too high competition. Instead, you should choose for keywords with medium competition. You can take help from tools such as Google Keyword Planner for such tasks, which gives you ideas for new keywords and also show its competitive level.
6. Focus on blogs as a way to promote content
In today’s content-driven age, it is not sufficient to just create great content. Every site has great content today, so there is a fierce competition to show up at the top position of the results page. Hence, you need something beyond great content, and need to implement
content marketing, content promotion strategies and other growth hack techniques. One of the greatest ways to publish and promote great content and increase your conversion rate is through a blog. Once you set up a blog and craft your content, you must focus on building relevant and high-quality links. In other words, your blog must be so visually attractive (through the usage videos or infographics, among other visual elements), that other sites with great authority would be compelled to pass on their link to your site. For instance, if your link comes from a source of high authority to your blog (like an eminent blogger), then it would be a high authority link for you. A high quality backlink is a sign of trust from other thought leaders and other professionals in your industry. Thus, it is regarded as a high-ranking signal from Google. It also helps to build the trust and confidence of the readers. Thus, you must focus on the quality, not quantity of your links
7. Improve your content marketing strategies
When it comes to content marketing strategies, there are certain rules which need to be followed. Needless to say, all your articles and videos should be connected to what you are offering. Your content needs to be informative, relevant and unique. Also, you should keep in mind to give references to popular websites and influencers which would add great value to your product. You may have created a great piece of content, but none of it will matter if you are not promoting it. You can promote it by optimizing the page for SEO, and focusing on longer content with lots of images, links and interesting formatting to create shareable buttons on social media. Another great way you can attract visitors to your website and increase conversion rates is through
email marketing. On the other hand, social media also provides one of the most effective ways to put your content in front of a wider audience, and also interact efficiently with them. The most important advantage of using this channel is that is also works as a strong ranking factor for Google.
Conclusion
If you are putting your efforts in an SEO strategy, then it would be a waste if you are not visible on Google and other search engines. Today, a majority of the customers already have knowledge about the product they want to buy, and prefer to do shopping online. So, if they are not able to find you on the first page of the search results, then you are losing out on a major chunk of your potential customers. Hence, you need to go beyond the basic SEO practices, and adopt the SEO growth hacking techniques mentioned above, in order to stay above your competitors in the search results and – eventually – increase your sales.
Know more about the Best SEO Techniques to Rank #1 in Search Engines. 
