How do you rank for organic search?
Google results page 1 starfish jewelry collection
Today I am going to give you a quick tutorial on how to increase your website traffic. Website traffic can come from a number of sources and you have to leverage each of these to grow your business. The first thing people think of when it comes to website traffic is how to come up in Google search. Being found by someone putting in a search term in the Google search box and coming up on the search engine results page (SERP) is known as organic traffic to your website. This kind of traffic is what most people hope for when they open a website and it is achievable, but most business owners do not understand how to create content in a way to create organic traffic. There are a number of search engines other than Google including Bing, AOL and Yahoo, but I am going to focus on Google because it is the most widely used.
The saying in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is that "Content is King". This statement means nothing to the average website owner but it is crucial they understand it to rank for organic search. First let me define search engine optimization also known as SEO. This is simply making sure your website structure and content is created in such a manner as to help search engines like Google read(also known as crawling the site like a spider hence the phase “crawling the web” ) the content on your site and rank that content in search engine result pages.
What is Content and Who made it King?
Content is simply the text, images, and video on your site. If your site is structured correctly it will have title tags inside each page that tell Google what type of content to expect to find on your page. These tags and the content should contain in a natural way the “Keywords” that you would expect people to enter to find the type of content on your site. Google tends to favor pages in the rankings that are relevant to the searches that people are making. They do this by looking at what is on your page including the text, the image names, and video names. They also look a people’s behavior when they go to your site. How long a visitor stays, tells google how relevant the site is for that search term. Another factor in ranking your content is what sites link to and from your site and how relevant they are to your content. The more trust worthy and relevant the site the more it enhances the trust and relevance of your site in the rankings. The other important factor in rankings is having fresh content. The more new relevant content you have on your site the more weight you will get in the rankings for that type of content. This is why it is a great idea to have a blog on your site and to blog on a regular basis about the products you sell. It keeps your content fresh and relevant and helps you create links and ultimately increasing your search rankings.
How to get more content on my site and increase my organic search
One of the simplest ways to add content to your site is to go into the descriptions on your products and make them very detailed. Within the detail you want to add color size and as many features as you can think of that a person might think of when entering a search query in google. For instance you may not show up in the search results for starfish bracelet because of the high competition, but because a detailed description you may show up for turquoise starfish charm bracelet. Your search will also be more relevant to the searcher and they will stay on your site longer.
Be Focused, Be Social and Syndicate
The important thing to remember is that you need to have a focused approach to creating content for your website to increase your rankings and you need to get your content out in a way that creates links to your site. Most e-commerce solutions have syndication tools built in to the site making it easy to send your product links to all the social media sites with the push of a button. You can pin to Pinterest, like on Facebook, and tweet the product in seconds. This is called syndication. If done properly, it not only creates traffic to your site independent of organic search, it creates the links that you need to help your sites search ranking.
Creating Meaningful relevant links
Two of the most powerful links for your site are links from Pinterest and YouTube. I am going to show you how to start creating relevant links on each of these powerful social networks.
First you will want to set up an account with Google and Pinterest. If you have a Gmail you already have a Google account. You can use this to sign into YouTube. You can create a video using most smartphones today. Both android and apple phones make it very easy to shoot and upload video. If you download the YouTube app call “capture’ you can use video you have shot or shoot video right in the app and upload it to YouTube via your google account. Once you sign into the capture app you will be able to upload video. You can edit on your phone in the app or you can log into the computer once it is uploaded and edit your video in Youtube.
The first thing you want to do is add a title. This should have the keywords you want to rank for in search. See the Following example” Starfish Charm Bracelets Collection”. You will see an example in red box 1.
Starfish Jewelry Video
The next thing you want to do is add a link to your website. This creates the link from YouTube to your website. This link should be the first item in the description box labeled as box 2 above. It allows people to click on the link and go to your site and buy the item. It’s also a good idea to tell people to click on the link in the description to see the item on your website at the end of the video. I also like to include embedded YouTube video descriptions of items on your webpage. In box 3 you will see tags. This helps categorize your video and make it easier to find.
The next step is to create Boards on Pinterest. Use a descriptive name with key search words you would think people would use to find your product. I am using the example “Starfish jewelry Collection”. I have added a link to the starfish jewelry collection of this website in the description of this board. When I pin items to this board I will add a link to the item on the website. This creates relevant links to the website. The last thing I am going to do is pin the video from YouTube and the YouTube video on my site. I will add links to the items in the descriptions.
Finally, I recommend combining product video or doing a video of an entire collection to create a blog. This is easy to do and helps create a constant stream of fresh content for the search engines.
Box one shows the link address to copy into the description on Pinterest. Highlight and copy the link then click the pin button in box 2.
Social Buttons on Starfish Necklace
Next enter the price of the item and the link to the item in the description. See box 1 Below.
Starfish necklace Pinterest
So these are a few ways that can help you with organic traffic. By tweeting, pinning, blogging and sharing on Facebook and other social networking sites, you can create a steady stream of traffic to your site. This also helps your organic ranking. You will see these actions come up in search results. It is very important that you have an email signup form on your site and a contact manager or newsletter like MailChimp. This allows you to collect emails of customers you can continually market to on a regular basis and makes you less reliant on organic search. By building an email list and marketing on social networks you can create as much if not more traffic than you can from organic search. Ironically the more traffic you receive from these other two avenues the more you are likely to gain in organic search.
How to get the fastest results
The fastest way to get results is by syndicating your products through social media. This is the best way to increase your traffic quickly. Social shares and re-tweets are the way to see a spike in traffic. A personal email to your friends and family asking them to help spread the word through social media by sharing your post can give you a great boost. If you don’t ask you don’t get.
Creating Content quickly and easily
If you are selling product in your store, you should know your product and be passionate about it. That fact combined with a smartphone video is a way to create content quickly. Simply point your phone at your products start taking video and start talking. Your videos don’t have to be professional. They need to be descriptive and informative. If you have a brick and mortar store, give a video tour. Upload your video to YouTube and add them to your blog. An added benefit of video is it gives a life and dimension to your product that you don’t get from a jpeg picture. It allows you to use your voice to transfer your enthusiasm. In short, it helps you to sell your product as if you were right there with the customer. The best part of all is people love to watch videos and it increases the time they spend on your site. It brings your site to life.
Short Cuts
Don’t have time to write or don’t like to write, not a problem. Have your video transcribed. This is very cheap and has the benefit of adding lots of that descriptive text I talked about earlier. It’s perfect for a product video or a blog video. I like to use speech pad. You simply provide the YouTube URL address and upload the video. It only takes a minute. They can transcribe in 24 hours. When the transcription is ready you receive an email. You log into your account and download the text file. I like to write a short sentence after my video in the blog noting this is a video transcription and then paste the text in to the blog below the video. They also make it available as an mp3. You use the mp3 to create a podcast for your site so people can keep up with your new products.
I think this article gives you a lot of the basics that will help you to create great content on your website and easy to follow road map to create traffic using this content in a meaningful way. See an overview of Shopify's best features, including SEO,in this detailed article which includes a step by step video.
Successful business owners with retail stores often open a website and are surprised when nobody shows up to buy. It’s not rocket science. The only difference between being ordinary and extra ordinary is that little “extra”. I think that if you have the right knowledge you can succeed. If there is anything in this article that does not make sense to you. I can help you achieve the goals you have for your web business. It’s not as allusive as you may have previously imagined. You do have to be committed and involved. It will not happen by itself. You are the leader of your business and business on the web is only going to grow. That will happen at the expense of traditional business so you must be prepared to grow. You don’t have to know how everything in technology works to benefit from it. Most people have no idea how a computer works yet they benefit from using its technology. Learn what you need. Make sure you have a good e-commerce platform that is easy to use like Shopify. It allows you to easily do all the syndication I mentioned in this article. If you need more information on techniques in this article please contact me and I will be happy to help you. Thank you for taking the time to read this article I hope you find it helpful in building yourself a successful web business.
by Kevin King
2 comments
Thanks, Kevin. This has been the most thorough and simplest to read and follow-thru article I’ve read on the subject.
Thanks Kevin, great article and very helpful!