Are you looking for ways to increase your organic traffic this year? In this video, I’ll share three ways you can do just that.
Here’s what we will cover:
- SEO Split Testing
- Brand SEO
- Technical SEO
Mastering Structured Data Course
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Video Transcript:
2021 is finally here, and in this video, we’re going to be talking about three ways that we can increase our organic traffic. SEO is getting harder, there’s just no doubt about it, so we can’t think of it the way that we used to. It doesn’t work within a silo. It’s not something that you do to your site one time and you set it and forget it. It’s not something that you do every once in a while, or you only do in one area, or it’s really its own department. It touches many departments today. It has an impact on many channels. Users are leveraging search as well throughout their entire buying cycle. Whether they’re looking for information on a product, looking for information on ideas and concepts, all the way to making a buying decision directly from the search results.
Doing what you’ve always done is not going to get you where you want to go this year. The old things that you may have been doing in the past or may be doing because you think that you should be doing but you’re not seeing the kind of growth that you want to see from them, those are not going to just magically work again this year. You need to start thinking differently about how to approach SEO, so here are three areas that we can focus on.
Before we get into that, let’s get some background. Google’s John Mueller spoke at SMX Virtual last month, and he shared a number of things that SEOs and webmasters need to focus on this coming year, everything from the core web vitals, which we talked about in our last video and we talked about what to expect in 2021. He also talked about how technical sites, sites that are better technically will perform better, so they have an advantage. That technical SEO is generally harder to do, so if you don’t know much about it, you should get some help. Sites should aim to get users to pull the right user data. You want people to search your brand name and really identify your brand as somebody that drives value.
Rankings are going to continue this next year. There’s going to be SEO updates that help maybe less savvy SEO sites, so people who create really good content, but maybe aren’t the best at technical SEO or some of the other SEO factors. Then he also said people need to look for ways to be more visible. This is where things like structured data and some of the other aspects of search come into play. We’re using this as a background to set up where we should focus, as well as, a couple of intuitions that I’ve had and things that I’ve seen that have helped to increase our organic traffic over the last year and things that I know are going to continue to play a role in the year to come.
The first thing is split testing. Now, this is very different from CRO, or conversion rate optimization, which is something that’s pretty common in the web design space. This is doing A/B split testing in SEO. We can leverage this to know exactly what has a positive impact on our organic traffic. This allows us to stay in front of the curve instead of doing what a lot of SEO’s do, which is wait and see what Google does and then react to that. Instead of being reactionary, we are going to be proactive in our SEO approach by using split testing. If you want to see your site skyrocket, you really want to see your traffic grow, this is a powerful thing to do.
Now, there are tools out there that you can do this. Some of them are a little bit more expensive, require really, really large amounts of traffic. There are some other ways to do that. We shared a video with some templates that you can use to create split tests of your own. Then, I also know that there’s a lot of tools that are getting ready to come out next year that are really going to open up the use of A/B split testing to the SEO community as a whole. This is something that if you’re not doing now, you should definitely get on board and start leveraging.
One of the things that John Mueller mentioned was that sites should aim to get users to user pool. You need to be able to drive people to your site based on who you are and by your brand. This is all about brand SEO, and this is going to play a big role, but it can also really help increase your organic traffic by owning your brand’s identity and creating a good relationship between you and your content and how Google sees it and how it’s all connected together.
Now, a lot of brands do a very poor job of managing their brand’s SERPs. Maybe they haven’t claimed their knowledge panel, maybe they don’t have their brand information updated within the search results. They’re not really leveraging it to the full extent of its capability, they haven’t tied it all together. This directly impacts all areas of your site, specifically the knowledge panel, which are those really cool cards that you can get in the right-hand side of search on desktop or within mobile as well.
Jason Barnard is a genius when it comes to brand SEO and I highly recommend, if you want to grow your brand SEO and get more out of it, you should check out his site. It’s kalicube.pro. There’s tons of content on there, there’s tools that you can use. They are also doing a lot of experiments as well to really stay in the front of brand SEO so that they can help themselves, but also help other people, leverage brand SEO much more to get better results.
Now, the third thing we should focus on is technical SEO. You might’ve seen that four of those eight bullet points that we brought up earlier had to do with technical search. These are things like core web vitals, page experience, having a good technical foundation. John Mueller said technical SEO is harder than a lot of typical SEO tasks, like on-page optimization. These are areas that websites need to focus on. You need to have a site that’s technically sound, you need to have people working with you that know how to make a site technically sound and not just pretty. There’s a lot of people that focus along the way their site looks, but they don’t think about the performance of their site. This plays a big role when it comes to page experience, load times, indexing, crawlability. Are you doing all the technical things correctly to make sure that your site can be easily indexed within the search results, but then are you extending that further and looking for ways to make yourself more visible?
This is where you can add in things like structured data. That’s something we’ve talked a lot about on this channel. For a long time, structured data has been one of those nice to haves, right? It’s one of those things that you can do to maybe give a little bit more information to the search engines and extend the context of your site.
It still does those things, but it’s becoming more and more important, especially with the impact in the increase of rich features within the search results. This is where structured data is now a game changer, and sites that are leveraging it are going to generate more traffic.
This is one of those areas that it can seem extremely technical and like you need to hire somebody outside to do it. There are cases where that is absolutely true. There’s a number of things that we do with structured data that are very technical, very complex, and that are very, very powerful when it comes to SEO. But if you want to get started in implementing some structured data on your site, like the main areas of structured data that are tied specifically to the rich results, I created a course that’s for all levels. Anybody who’s wanting to get started, or has been doing it for a little bit but wants a few different ways to scale it. I’ve created a course that shows you step-by-step how to plan, how to create, and how to execute structured data on your site so that you can earn those FAQs, the how-to, the video features, and all those other really cool rich features that we have within the search results that can increase our site traffic.
If this is something you want to do and you want to take your SEO to another level, I want to give you 25% off by using the code YouTube. You can sign up at learn.simplifiedsearch.net. Again, this is designed for all levels. What’s cool is I’m also there to help you along the way. If you sign up for this course, you’re going to have me walking with you along your journey here and helping you make sure that you can implement it to the fullest extent.
Thanks for checking out this video. We talked about three areas that we can leverage this year to increase our organic traffic, we talked about the power of split testing with A/B split testing, we talked about the importance of brand search, and then we also talked about how we need to focus on technical SEO. If you have anything to comment, anything to add, please do so below. Until next time, Happy Marketing.