5 Tips to Quickly Increase Year-End Traffic

With the peak shopping season just around the corner, falling outside of those top few positions on the search engines could cost you a lot of Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.

SEO isn't the fastest means of promoting your site, especially if it is brand new, but there are a few things you can do to get a quick boost in organic visibility. Here are five of those fast-acting ways to boost traffic (and sales).

Publishing Content on Third-Party Sites
One of the fastest ways to get organic visibility is by guest posting or employing native advertising on authority sites. For this strategy to work, you need to find a site that is powerful enough for your content to rank very quickly (and complements your niche). Over the longer term, an in-content link from those sites will build your site's authority, but for the holidays, fast exposure is what you are after. As a bonus, those sites will often push your content out to their email lists and on social media, giving you more instant exposure. Find the top five sites in your niche and pitch them today.
Using Discount Sites to Build a Custom Audience
In terms of traditional SEO, getting links from coupon sites and directories is not high on the list of priorities. When it comes to generating sales though, you must step back from just focusing on SEO and look for organic methods to reach your end goal of increased sales. Sites like Groupon have spent a lot of time generating a very large organic audience. Tossing a few great deals on their site will let you siphon some of that traffic to your services or online store. Once those people hit your site for the first time, set up a re-marketing campaign on Facebook and Google AdWords to stay in front of them for the next few weeks. Replicate the process across other popular coupon sites, leverage free classified ad sites, Facebook groups, and even Reddit to send traffic to your site in a hurry. If you aren't a fan of paid ads, set up an email capture page so that you can follow up with them that way, or do both!
Remodel Your Existing Content
If you look at Google Analytics and Search Console, you can get a solid understanding of the best performing content on your site. In addition, you can see what content performs decently but seems to have room for improvement.
There are two ways you can get quick traffic from existing content. The first thing you should do is look for content that appears for numerous long tail keywords, but ranks just outside those coveted top three spots. Search Console will give you a good idea of which pages this applies to. Revisit those pages on your site and look for small tweaks that can be made. Researching the sites ranking above you and determining the average keyword density, title structure and on-page elements will help you find the weakness in your content.
The second way to maximize the performance of already popular content is to expand it with more long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are great because they rank quickly and cumulatively, and they can produce a lot of traffic. SEMrush makes it easy to find long tail keywords by plugging your competitors content into their organic research tool, but any tool you are comfortable with can be used to gather that information. Once you have a list of new potential terms, update your content to cover the new information. In either case, submit your site to Google right after your update is completed to get them crawling it ASAP.
Interlink Highly Visible Products to New Products
If your website has been online for a while, there is a good chance that you have certain pages that get a lot of traffic. If you have new products or special sales that you want to promote, make a list of the most visited pages on your site and place a banner, popup up or even an in-content ad pointing back to the page you want to promote. If you have a small site this may not work as well, but if you have one of those 50,000-page online stores, you can manage to redirect a lot of traffic to your newest offer in a hurry.
Tweak Titles and Meta Descriptions for better CTRs
This last tip is very simple but often overlooked. Just like paid ads, your site title and meta description can have a significant impact on your clickthrough rates. Typically, the site ranking #3 gets fewer clicks than the site in the #1 position. However, if your title and meta really stand out, you can steal some of those clicks that would otherwise go to the top site. Additionally, with Google looking at click-through rates (CTRs) to determine which site users like best, a natural boost in clicks can result in an accelerated climb from #3 to #1.

When used together, these five tips can be used to significantly increase the amount of traffic that will make it to your site this shopping season. Print this page, sign into your Analytics account and get started now, as your bottom line will thank you in a few weeks.