SERPS and Other Traffic Attractors

Moving to the top in search engine results pages (SERPS) is a way to attract more traffic and potential customers to your website. It all starts with the basic strategy of optimizing keywords and keyword phrases to attract the search engines.  But don’t mistake a high page rank according to SERPS as the best or only way to increase traffic.

SERPS are just one way to bring in traffic, but search engines themselves are more focused in evaluating your content to ensure relevancy, depth, and continual refreshment of content than just directing traffic to you. That’s what they are really starved for and websites that offer all of this will rise quicker in the SERPS. And that’s why you need to have a multi-faceted strategy to really succeed. Search engines will reward you for attracting traffic in a variety of ways.

Capitalizing on content is a great way to optimize your search results and gain those relevant clicks that are most likely to convert to paying customers. But how do you get them?

1. Think like your customer! If you were a customer, what would interest you that is relevant to your products or services. Which ads would attract your attention and what would make you click on them? What content makes you want to read more? That’s what you need to consider to have visitors coming back again and again - increasing your website traffic and making your site ’sticky’.
2. Make sure that you maximize your keywords and phrases without over-doing it. Over-stuffing your titles and content with keywords isn’t the greatest strategy. But there are some strategies that will help. Including your keywords as the first words in your title is one of the smartest and easiest things you can do. Putting words in bold or underlining them can also make a difference to search engines and draw attention for visitors too.
3. Write about things that have significant appeal at a particular point in time. As an example, the recent political battles were one of the biggest and most frequently searched topics going on around the world. If there is a way to tie your products or services to an extremely popular topic, then do it. But make sure you can make the transition from the popular topic to your website content smoothly and seamlessly.
4. Leverage pay-per-click such as Adsense to provide additional depth for your site visitors. Including ads with relevancy to your niche market will make them want to click on the ads (check out our PPC section of this website for more information on this strategy). This will also make them visit more frequently when they find valuable products in addition to what your specific online business has to offer. More traffic means happier search engines.
5. Write compelling content that draws a crowd. Copywriting is the way you sell an idea and once the idea is sold, the product or service sale will likely follow! Offer a unique and powerful selling proposition. If you have trouble doing this, don’t hesitate to hire a copywriter or someone with experience in SEO and content development. Connect the pages and silos within your website so that readers stay on your site and find value in your rich, deep content. The search engines love this too and you’ll be rewarded in multiple ways. ‘Stickiness’ is an attribute that makes search engines ’sing’!

 

Don’t forget the importance of getting traffic in multiple ways. Relying solely on search engines is not the best business strategy. It takes a combination of attracting traffic, drawing search engine spiders in for a closer look, and retaining visitors for a longer time to really help you move up on the SERPS and ultimately convert more visitors to paying customers.