Overview
The competition for getting traffic on Google and other search engines has never been fiercer. That is why it is essential to examine the often-overlooked SEO opportunities we sometimes forget in our business.
This article examines these opportunities as well as how you can take advantage of them for your own business.
5 Overlooked SEO Opportunities
1. The Aboutness of Keywords
Every SEO Agency knows they must find keywords. What most neglect to do, is look at keywords the way searchers look at those keywords.
For example, if you want to drive traffic to your website you not only need to know what keywords to strategically place on your website. You also need to know how customers view these keywords.
Understanding the aboutness of keywords helps you not only identify easy traffic keywords. They are also the keywords that provide a higher level of conversion, since the keywords relate more to your target audience.
This is because user intent is a large part of SEO today. Google wants to know you are not just looking for dirty, little tricks that drive traffic to your website.
Instead, you can use tools like Schema mark-up to match customer intent with content available on your website.
This means you can no longer have thin content pages with very little practical content. Whether this content is video, photos, or text, you need to have a sufficient amount of content to generate interest in your business from Google.
2. Use your current traffic to generate more traffic
Google Analytics can be the greatest weapon you have in the search for more search traffic. From your Google Analytics account you see what pages already generate traffic.
Here you can also evaluate the bounce rate, time on site, and other factors that affect traffic to your website.
When you keep current visitors on your website longer, Google assumes your content is relevant. Google then gives you more traffic as a reward for helping customers.
Keep away from creating thin and duplicate content pages that do not help your customers. Otherwise, you lose potential customers and Google search traffic.
3. Google AMP
Google AMP has been around for a year now, but not all website publishers use the software. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It is a stripped down web page that Google favors to drive search traffic for mobile users.
While they increased the usability for publishers over the past year, a lot of websites have resisted the change. By exploring this overlooked SEO opportunity you get in before the crowd joins the fray.
It also improves your site speed. The average site loads in about 5-8 seconds. Many users bounce off a website in 3 seconds. Google AMP usually loads a website in half a second because of the caching they use and lower demands on the server.
Google strongly emphasized faster website load speeds through their algorithm over the past year. Google AMP is the strongest component of this strategy.
If you are not sure how to install Google AMP or have other questions about improving the speed of your website give us a Shout.
4. Check your links
Often websites collect a large number of links as they continue to grow. The challenge is many of these links break over time. Some are on their website and others are from inbound links.
It is important to keep on top of your linking strategy if you want to improve your search ranking.
Use a free tool like Screaming Frog to check all the links on your website. This ensures your internal and external links work. Removing bad links from your website improves the user experience, and improves your search experience.
If you updated your website permalink structure, you need to forward the old links to the new links. Two helpful plugins are: 301 Redirects and WordPress SEO.
They help you locate and forward the links, so users can navigate your website without challenges.
5. Improve your Local Search
Google search is crowded. With hundreds of millions of websites around the world, it is challenging to get found.
Local businesses have a better chance, because the competition is much lower. You go from ranking against websites around the world to ranking against websites in your neck of the woods.
If you want to improve the odds, look into ranking your website in local searches on Google.
Start by adding every location of your business to the Google My Business dashboard. This dashboard helps local businesses list themselves on Google search, map, and Google+.
It is vital that your Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) information is correct. Google uses this information to track citations of your business across the web.
Make sure the information matches what you use online and offline to ensure your website receives local traffic.
Final Thoughts
The competition for search traffic is intense today. However, when running an international or national SEO campaign, by looking for the unused strategies of your competitors you can find a profitable niche with significant amounts of traffic to your website.
If you are interested in determining which overlooked SEO opportunities work best for your business contact us at Shout for a free consultation session.
