How to get more visitors on my blog? How to get a better position in search results? These are all million-dollar questions that I get asked when people find out I’m pretty good okay with SEO.
And as I recently highlighted in the Marketing guide we did at Theme.Casa : there is not a single guide that will work for every website out there! And that’s okay, that’s why we have so many different SEO techniques and Schema’s.
Therefore instead of giving you a list of things to do to increase your visitors and search results position, I will talk about the things I did for this blog and how they affected the traffic and SEO.
I’d like to start by dividing all the steps in 2 categories:
On-site SEO includes all the things that you would do on your site. Think of it like trying to rent a house, if a website was a house. Then the on-site SEO would be everything that you can do on your house to make it look more attractive.
In terms of SEO, this includes:
By using a tools such as ahrefs or MOZ you can research keywords for organic traffic visitors to determine where they came from: country of origin, search terms used, referral website, etc.
Try to tailor the content to your users country rather than language. So for example, if your website language is English, you can add more keywords to attract visitors from the targeted country with English language (Australia, India, Canada..)
If more keywords contain how to something compared to best of something then focus on how-to articles and vice versa.
Schema is very important to search engines because it tells them what sort of content a page is ( a Person or a company? Article or Review? Product or Service? etc. )
In WordPress there are a lot of rich schema plugins that add star rating to your search results, images, prices, company name, etc. I personally prefer WP Schema because it’s quick to set and has conditions so that you can bulk create schemas for diferent post types, categories, products, etc.
ALT tags on images are very important and they basically say to the search engines what’s on the image. So for example, the image above has an alt tag “wordpress schema” so that Google knows it’s an image of WordPress Schema.
We use XML Sitemap to let Google know the hierarchy of all our pages. A lot of WordPress SEO plugins come with this included and I suggest Yoast SEO as the premium version has some pretty nice sitemap options.
UX stands for “User Experience” and it’s basically an overall mark on how much users like the functionality of your website. It includes everythig from triggered popups and promotions to site speed and fonts.
For example, I’ve noticed that a lot of users are searching for the blog page on our website, so I’ve moved it from footer to the header navigation. This increased the number of pages visited by the users, because they don’t spend time searching for the page and therefore have more time to check a few more articles..
Some other UX improvements for WordPress websites include the page title in header, share buttons, header login, sticky widget, etc.
Speed is an important factor for the overall UX. If a user waits 5 seconds for a page to load he is getting frustrated and getting away from your website.
When it comes to Speed optimization for WordPress, there are a lot of options to choose from and some big names like WP Rocket and AutoOptimize, but for the best results I prefer combining those plugins with some other tools like Brisk:
Now that we have improved our website performances and did all the on-site SEO, let’s get the word about our awesome site out there!
Off-site SEO refers to everything that we can do on other sites to improve the traffic and rating of our website.
This includes:
By creating social media profiles you increase your online presence and expand the number of potential users. For start, I suggest creating these 3 social media profiles: Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Invite your friends to them and set Jetpack on your WordPress site to share all your posts automatically to those social profiles.
TIP: Use hashtags for your niche on social media, e.g. for WordPress those are: #wordpress #wporg #codecanyon #themeforest
Comments are the easiest way to get free backlinks and fast! Browse other websites in your niche and simply comment on their posts leaving your website url. The more relevant your comment is to the topic, the more chances you have to get the comment published and a free backlink to your site!
I’ve used this method to jump-start our website by commenting on blogs with high DR.
PBN stands for “Private Blog Network” which is a fancy way of saying a bunch of websites linking to each other.
If you have a spare time and a little bit of money you can build yourself a couple of strong blogs to link to your main site. The great thing about PBN’s is that they don’t require a lot of money: domain name ($10), hosting ($5/mo) and you got yourself a backlink!
I’ve used the theme.casa and filmovic.com sites as PBN’s to link to this website.
Contact other websites from your niche and offer partnership (if its a coupon site offer them to give them a 30% off coupons, if it’s a blogger, offer them to write on your site, etc.).
Offer anything that comes on your mind:
GMB stands for “Google My Business” and it’s basically a way to add your business information to Google. GMB is very important in local SEO because it’s displayed next to the search results and can give your potentials users all your contact information..
This are all the SEO techniques that I’ve used for this website and they have worked great for me, I’ve increased daily visits, user engagement and sales.
Share your experience/results in the comments and let me know if you tried any of these methods and if they worked for you.