A Five Step Plan for Getting More Free Web Traffic from Google

More and more clients have been asking me how they can increase their organic web traffic from Google.  I always recommend creating an online Content Marketing strategy, which means regularly adding new and valuable web content to your website and sharing it with your target audience. But to make sure you get value for your business from this type of strategy, you also need to have a plan for tracking the results from your efforts.

Here’s some info on the steps for implementing an effective content marketing program.

1. Create a plan to regularly add new and valuable content to your website

Each new piece of content that you add to your website:

• Makes your website one page bigger (and for websites, the bigger the better!)
• Adds new keywords that can help you get organic traffic from search engines
• Attracts new links from other websites. Inbound links are a key part of helping your web content show up on page one of a search engine
• Gives returning visitors something new to read
• Sets you up as a thought leader in your industry.

What kind of content can you share?

The sky is the limit really but here are some suggestions:

• Articles, videos and podcasts that provide valuable information to your potential clients, and help solve their problems
• Case studies of how your product or service helped existing clients
• Photos that you’ve taken
• Videos from YouTube
• Ebooks and whitepapers
• Recorded webinars.

If your website is set up in WordPress it’s easy to create and share new content. Decide how often you can realistically create new content and stick to the plan. Or outsource it if you don’t feel that you have the time or skills to create the content yourself.

2. Share your content with your target audience

Email Marketing

Invite your readers to subscribe to your list so they don’t miss any new articles.

Offer an incentive such as a free ebook in order to encourage them to sign up.

Once you have a list of subscribers, you can either send out your new content in an email newsletter, or get it sent to your list automatically via RSS feed using a program like MailChimp or Feedburner.

If you’re already sending out an email newsletter regularly that’s full of content, make sure the articles are added to your website as part of your Content Marketing strategy.

Social Media like Facebook, Twitter and Google +

Build up a network on Facebook, Twitter, Google + or the platform works best for your business. The platform you choose will depend upon your products / services, who your target audience is and where they are most likely to be found.

Share your new articles on Google +, with your Facebook Page Likers (by attaching a link to a Status Update) and with your Twitter followers by tweeting them.

The Twitter feed moves fast so try tweeting your articles at different times of day to attract maximum retweets.

Make it easy for other people to share your content too by adding Tweet / Share / Like /+1 buttons that are easy to find.

3. Add keywords to help your website show up in Google search results

Adding keywords to each new article, in the right places, helps the article show up in Google search results when someone searches for your target keyword.

Select your target keyword and add it to:

• The Page Title
• The Headline
• The body text
• Link text
• URL

Remember to always use keywords naturally, and use a lot of other words as well.

For effective keyword research, I recommend using Market Samurai and watching the free videos that walk you through the info you need.

4. Review your Google Analytics regularly to find out if your efforts are paying off

Google Analytics can give you insights into which articles were the most / least popular. Here’s a video that I recently created for my other blog, Grassroots Internet Strategy on “How to find out which article rocked, and which ones bombed”.

You can also look under “Acquisition” on the Left Navigation, then “All Traffic” to find out what sources are generating your web traffic.

• “Organic traffic” is people that found your website in a search engine. You can also drill down to find out what keyword they were searching for when they found your website.
  • Keep a track of how much organic traffic you get each month.  Ideally this will increase as your Content Marketing efforts start to pay off.
• “Direct traffic” is people who know your website address and go straight there ie not via a search engine
• You can also see which other websites are referring traffic to your website, such as Facebook. This is also a good way to discover other websites that are linking to yours.

5. Review the value that your Content Marketing strategy is bringing to your business

It’s all well and good to increase your web traffic just because you can, but at the end of the day to make your efforts worth while you need to get value for your business.

If your aim is to generate income through advertising then the quality and quantity of traffic is instantly valuable.

However, if you’re aiming to generate leads or sales for your products or services, include a Call to Action at the end of your articles, or prominently in a side bar.

Make sure it’s easy for new visitors who are attracted to your content to find out what you do, who you do it for and what’s special about your products or services.

Now, jump back to step one and give it a go!

Until next time

Melinda

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net