Like how “location, location, location” is a popular mantra in the real estate industry, we can also say that “traffic, traffic, and traffic” are the three most important things in a website’s performance.

However, growing our website traffic is often easier said than done. After all, there are billions of websites today and there are millions of blog posts being published in a single day. How can we stand out among all those competitors?

Don’t be discouraged, though, as in this guide, we will discuss an effective tactic to grow you traffic in just six months with a step-by-step guide.

Let us begin.

Step 1: Know Your Audience Through Keyword Research

The first, and the most important step here is to do as much research as possible with two main goals: understanding your audience; and understanding how your competitors are approaching their marketing strategy. 

SEO strategy remains one of the most effective ways in building website traffic, so keyword research is very important. Find your target keywords according to these three principles:

• The keyword must be relevant to your business, product, and/or service—pretty self explanatory—. Sometimes there are keywords that aren’t so obvious but can be a good opportunity (i.e. ‘slam dunk’ if you are a basketball-focused site).
• The keywords must be relevant to your audience, signified by a high monthly search volume
• According to your budget and timeline, the competition for the keyword must be manageable. 

You can use various keyword research tools to help with this, and you can also use some of the tools to perform competitive research. Gain as many insights as possible about your audience and your competitors to develop your strategy.

Step 2: Competitive Research

In the first step, we have briefly discussed how we should perform a proper competitive research based on the target keywords. 

You can do this manually by doing a quick Google search for your target keywords. Check out the top ranking sites for these keywords (if possible, check out all that are ranking on the first page, but at least the top 3). 

Your goal is to create a (significantly) better content than these pages, so analyze various aspects from their content quality, style and tone, structure, how they use images, etc. It’s also possible to take a different approach and discuss the topic from a unique angle—you can even disagree with the content and deliver your argument—. 

Alternatively, you can also use keyword research tools to analyze these pages. This way, you can gain insights about various metrics from their monthly traffic to readability to backlinks profile. 

You can also check various other areas of these competitors’ marketing efforts from their social media presence and engagement to their advertising campaigns. There are plenty of tools that can help you with this.

The better you know your ‘enemy’, the better you can plan your strategy. 

Step 3: Develop Your Content

There are two different types of content in a website.

First, there’s the static content—the ‘fixed’ information that is always there— like your about us page, your product listing, and so on. The thing is, if you only have static information in your website, you don’t give enough reason for them to come back after they’ve checked out your site.

So, here comes the second type: dynamic content. These are the pieces of content that are updated time and time again (i.e. blog posts), so when a new content appears, a website visitor might visit your site again and probably share it to their friends—netting you more visitors—.

Both dynamic and static content have their purposes, so the idea is to develop content according to the target keywords we have discussed above.

One of the most important things to remember is although SEO is about optimizing your content for the search engine, Google, Bing, and other search engines are now getting smarter. Their goal is to provide the most relevant search results for human audience, so your content must also have the same goal: bring as much value and relevance to your ideal audience. 

So, include your keywords naturally, and focus on readability for human readers. 

Step 4: Build More Backlinks

Backlinks are the commodity of the internet. Think of backlinks—or inbound links—, as a ‘vote’. The more backlinks you have, Google and the other search engines will determine your site as relevant and you will climb the search engine rankings. 

The higher your search engine ranking, the more traffic you will have. This is the main goal of SEO.

It is, however, important to understand that today, quality is more important than quantity. If you get one backlink from a reputable site in your industry, you get more ‘vote’ than getting 5 backlinks from lower-quality sites. In fact, getting too many backlinks at one time might get you penalized by Google. 

Aim to get just 2 to 3 high-quality backlinks a month. Yet, this can be easier said than done. 

How to get backlinks? The most effective way is to actually have a high-quality content. If your content is good, interesting, and informative, you will get backlinks sooner or later.

Yet, how you promote the content is also important. Utilize all the available channels from social media to working with influencers to investing in paid ads to promote your contents.

Content promotion can lead to more organic traffic—our main goal—, and get more backlinks in the process, which in turn will produce more traffic through SEO. A win-win investment!

Step 5: Optimize Your Website

Again, there are two main goals in optimizing the technical aspects of your site: pleasing the search engines (making sure your site is easy to index properly), and bringing value to the human audience.

As this can be a very broad subject, you might want to check out this technical SEO checklist for this step. However, here are a few key areas to focus on:

• Optimize your website’s speed. More than half of mobile users will bounce from sites that load in more than 3 second. 
• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and preferably mobile-responsive
• Make sure your website is easy enough to navigate according to UX principles. 
• Make sure your site can be properly indexed by Google by optimizing robots.txt file and optimizing  redirects
• Regularly check for broken links, and fix them

Step 6: Invest in Paid Advertising

We can consider this as an optional step depending on the results generated by the previous steps.

The idea of using paid advertising is to cut downtime. Paid advertising—and other paid channels— can virtually generate traffic instantly, as long as you have the budget. 

Find the right balance between your paid advertising budget and time invested. Doing this correctly can maximize the generated website traffic in six months.

The key of online paid advertising is targeting: the more specific you can target the right audience, the more cost-efficient your campaigns will be, and the more conversions you’ll get. 

Conclusion

By doing the six steps we have discussed above, you can significantly increase your website traffic.

The key here is maintaining consistency and work with SEO expert if necessary. So, regularly monitor your progress, evaluate, and re-optimize your strategy accordingly.

The post How To Grow Your Website Traffic In Six Months appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

We will divide this guide into three big sections: keyword research, content development, and content promotion. All three are equally important for a successful SaaS content marketing campaign, and let us begin with the first one.

Keyword Research for SaaS Business

1. User Intent

Your target keywords should be relevant to your business, or else it won’t bring value. Although there can be many different factors, arguably the most important one is whether the keyword can meet your audience’s specific search intent.

Here are some common user intents in the SaaS space, and some examples of the keyword implementations. For these examples, let’s assume we are selling a cloud computing SaaS product:

• Informational intent: the user is not specifically looking for a SaaS product, but looking for information/answers related to their needs or problems. For example, they might be looking for information about automating their database, and so you can target keywords like “database automation” here.

• Product research: here, the user is interested in purchase and is currently researching their options. You can target keywords like “your brand name vs your competitor’s name”, “cloud computing tools comparisons”, etc.

• Navigational intent: the user probably has heard about your product from a colleague, and so is currently searching for your website specifically. Here, you can target branded keywords

Remember that the user’s intent will evolve according to their stages in the buyer’s journey. The key here is truly understanding your audience, figure out all possible intents, and target the proper keywords.

2. Search Volume

Search volume here refers to how many times a target keyword is actually being searched over a time period, usually in a monthly basis. Tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs can effectively analyze search volume, and generally you should target keywords with above 500 searches/month.

3. Keyword Difficulty

Keyword difficulty is, in a nutshell, how difficult it will be to compete for a certain keyword. The more popular the keyword is, obviously the more competitors you will face. Keyword research tools like, again, Ahrefs and SEMRush usually display Keyword Difficulty (KD) in percentage. The higher the percentage, the more difficult to rank for the keyword.

4. Finding The Balance

Here is the thing: we all want to target relevant keywords with high search volumes. However, the more search volume a keyword has, generally the higher its keyword difficulty.

There are only limited spots on that first page of Google search result, and so, the key here is finding that delicate balance between the high search volume and manageable keyword difficulty.

The more you understand your niche and your audience, the better you can find these keyword opportunities.

SaaS Content Development Checklist

Now that we’ve compiled our list of keywords, here are some key areas to focus on during the content development process:

1. Length

The longer your content, the better. However, maintaining engagement will be more difficult, the longer the content goes. Again, the key here is finding the right balance.

According to a study by Backlinko, the average length for top-ranking textual content is 1,890 words. That can be a good benchmark to start. For other content forms like podcasts and videos, this guide by MiniMatters can give you a clearer picture.

2. Uniqueness

When talking about content uniqueness, we are not only talking about passing CopyScape or other plagiarism checker tools. Instead, your content should also be unique in the eye of human readers.

Especially since the SaaS niche is a pretty “small” one, your audience can notice when you are rewriting another site’s content, even after you’ve polished it. Instead, you need to provide a well-researched content with original idea and information.

3. Optimizing headlines and descriptions

Most of us find and consume content through a Google search. After we searched for something, we will glance upon the different results and then click on one that gets our attention.

What usually made us clicked that specific content? Generally, it was the headline and/or the snippet. This is why it’s very important to optimize these two aspects.

Your title should include the target keyword naturally. Putting your keyword up-front generally produces better results, SEO-wise. However, your main focus here is to write an interesting and engaging title for your human readers.

We should also do the same with the META description: make sure it is engaging for human readers, and include your keywords naturally. You might want to check out this guide this guide to learn more about this aspect.

Content Promotion

No matter how good your content quality is, it won’t bring any value to your business unless you have an audience consuming it.

With that being said, content development is just half the job done, and content promotion is arguably even more important than the development process.

Here are four key areas to consider when promoting your content:

1. On-site Technical SEO

Google and other search engines are still the primary way of how people are finding their content. So, SEO is obviously very effective in promoting your content.

Although SEO for SaaS is a very broad subject, there are three main areas to focus on:

• Optimizing your content for the target keyword(s)
• Getting more backlinks, which we will discuss again further below
• Optimizing technical, on-site SEO aspects

For technical, on-site SEO, here are a few key areas to consider:

• Mobile-friendly, responsive design
• Fast loading speed
• Headline, META description, images and videos optimizations
• XML sitemap
• internal linking

You might also want to check with SEO experts if you need help with on-site SEO.

2. Backlink Building

One of the most important aspects of SaaS SEO (and inbound marketing) is building backlinks.

However, while in the past the quantity of backlinks is the most important factor, that’s no longer the case nowadays. Nowadays, having backlinks from high-quality sites is more important, even when you only have 4 or 5 of them. You might want to check out this guide by SEO Mark on determining backlinks quality.

Aim to build 5 to 10 high-quality backlinks consistently.

3. Using off-site promotion to gain traffic and build backlinks

When promoting your content off-site, there are two benefits to aim for: getting more traffic through these promotions, and build more backlinks as we have discussed above.

Here are some effective channels to promote your content, and how you can use these channels to get more backlinks:

• Influencer marketing: influencer often has their own sites

• Social media marketing: the more people who engaged with your content through paid and organic social media marketing, the higher the chance of getting more backlinks

• Advertising: similar benefits as social media marketing

• Guest posting: an effective way to get more backlinks while promoting your brand on high-quality sites

Conclusion

SaaS content marketing is not solely about pushing the sale of your product, but nurturing your audience through every step of the buyer’s journey. So, the key to a successful content marketing in the SaaS space (and any industry) is a thorough understanding of your audience: their needs, behaviors, and problems.

A proper content marketing strategy can effectively generate and nurture leads, as well as encouraging purchases in a SaaS business.

The post How to Effectively Implement Content Marketing For SaaS Businesses appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.