5-Step Approach to increasing Organic Traffic using SEO

Outbound marketing has its limitations. While a push approach works in the short term to earn the first few customers in a market, a long-term pipeline is gradually built by inbound content strategy and executing the SEO(search engine optimization) playbook. The average B2B buyer consumes at least 13 pieces of content before they purchase an enterprise product. In the US market, 70% of B2B buyers start with generic searches and spend a lot of time educating themselves, before being ready to see a demo. Hence, the right content strategy is crucial for the long-term success of a business in a global market.

When the consumer journey is digital, the product is the hero. Even to sell a star product, it is essential that consumers can find you easily. Here is where SEO plays an important role. However, ranking for the right keywords on search engines is tough. Google algorithm is ever adapting and changing to ensure that the content which comes in search results matches as closely as possible to the intent of the user matching it. 

There are multiple aspects of SEO to look after to build your search traffic. Let’s have a quick look at the essential basic hygiene first. To begin with, the technical SEO and on-page SEO should be executed well. For technical SEO, the basic must-dos are:

• keeping schemas, mark-ups, canonical tags, sitemaps, etc updated.
• In case the HQ of the business is outside its key market, keeping HREFlang across the website updated
• Having clear keyword-based blog categories and complete author profiles

If you want to deep-dive into technical SEO, read this.

Also for international business, it is a good practice to ensure that the company is listed locally on Google Maps so that it appears in local search, as part of the off-page SEO activity.

For the on-page SEO, the basic hygiene is to:

• optimizing heading tags, meta tags, internal linking of content
• Ensuring product pages are optimized for the right keywords

After executing the essential, these are the 7 essential next steps to increase online organic traffic:

Step 1: Start Search Ads for relevant product keywords for which the company is not ranking

For a newer business or website, it takes time to build domain authority and reputation. So, it is a long cycle of quality content creation till the brand starts to rank for the keywords relevant to its business. Till then, to divert relevant search traffic to websites, companies can run Search Ads on relevant product generic keywords which have medium to high search volume. If the ad is relevant to the search and gets a lot of clicks, that also helps google identify the relevant content for the keyword searched and helps improve organic ranking gradually. Instead of having different landing pages for each ad, it is better to take the traffic to the website page in this type of campaign.

As Capterra is ranking first for bottom of the funnel search for product keyword, prime players in the field are running ads to influence the search results. However, it makes most sense of Squirro, which is not currently ranking on page 1 like Zendesk and Freshdesk for the search.

Step 2: Choose the right Content mix for the SEO plan

To start off your content plan, broadly as a marketer, there are three buckets of content: content that generates traffic, content that generates opinions, content that generates leads. The mistake most brands do is focus on only one type of content. While content that generates leads converts visitors to content leads or fresh users and eventually generates revenue, ignoring content that generates traffic leads to brands capturing a very low percentage of online demand for the product. 

Detailed Content Bucket Definitions

Step 3: Choose the right Keyword mix for SEO Content Plan

The content that generates traffic is intended to rank for medium to high-volume keywords. Value-adding content eventually helps companies to build domain authority so that the buyer can find content while they are researching solutions to problems. To build great content which ranks, 90% of the top-performing marketer designs a content strategy which puts the audience’s informational needs first. But which keyword to target? The high-volume keywords are competitive. So, the best strategy is to write a large volume of content of long-tail keywords with low volume. The step further is to find medium volume keywords for which the competition is yet not ranking and target them. 

This chosen mid to low-volume keyword mix has to seamlessly integrate with the cluster-pillar content plan to get increased traffic over a period of time. The high volume keyword should be targeted with a pillar content page, which is broad and high level in its scope of information. The mix of low-volume long-tail keywords can be targeted for the cluster blog content which is a deep dive into specific topics. 

Example of Pillar topic: Workout Routines and complimentary cluster topics. The cluster topics here is a perfect example of cluster blog content for long tail keywords to rank for the keyword workout routines.

This article is a very interesting read to understand the fundamentals of topic cluster and pillar plan.

Step 4: Promote blogs with relevant keywords, reports, and integration pages

Now that the keyword list is made and the content plan is set, frequent high-value content is produced from the engine. However, it takes time and many factors for the blog to reach the first page of the search. Till then, running display ads or search ads to promote pillar content pages will help increase its organic ranking if these ads get higher Click-through-ratio(CTR). The same approach works for thought-leadership reports, analyst reports on the website, and integration pages without using the brand name. The objective is to help the user reach the content he was searching for, while content strategy builds momentum on your blog, it’s a good idea to lean on paid search.

Backlinko dominates most SEO based searches. So SemRush is promoting its high quality content to gain traction, till its content gains the rank.

Step 5: Build a robust referral plan and back-linking exchange program

Backlinking is an essential component of an end-to-end SEO strategy. However, Google has updated its algorithm in such a way that numerous backlinks for low-quality websites do not help. What you need is genuine sources linking to your content. The first and most basic step is to ensure that the company is covered on all business listings and product/services review websites. The next step is to re-publish content on websites like medium, youtube, Pinterest, producthunt and Flipboard, etc so that it is easier for their subscribers to find you. If you have a genuine high authority subdomain, subsidiary website, and if you are not diverting traffic to your company website, then you are missing an opportunity. Cross-promoting reports and decks as infographics and short videos in forums in a meaningful way is another way to get in front of a diverse audience. These are however just the basics. The ultimate step is using the 3-pillar referral link framework. It consists of these three core components:

1. Guest blogs by corporate executives on other high-quality websites
2. Influencers talking about your content, sharing it, and linking it back from their website or social media properties
3. Local media picking up your content for their product/technical coverage.

Each of these is a separate individual initiative which if executed well will help build a robust backlinking exchange program.

At this point, it is essential to say that all SEO efforts will work slower than usual if the marketing team is not working in parallel to create brand awareness in the market, especially if it is a new market entry. 

Needless to say, SEO and inbound content strategy need patience, time, the right approach, and support from the management to develop and give fruits. It is however an essential, reliable, consistent, long-term back-up plan to keep the sales pipeline growing in the future when outbound reach has plateaued.