Congratulations, you've set up your website and that's a big accomplishment.
The next step I want to do is I want to walk you through a few things that you
can do to increase traffic to your website. That's a really big challenge
that people who start their website have so let's walk through some things to get
you started on the right track. The items that we'll be covering in this video are
we'll do keyword research first and once we do that let's create a useful content
outline for all of your articles. We'll apply SEO basics to your website to make
sure that it's seen in the search engines. We'll share on different social
networks, this will provide the initial traffic that your site will need
and then we'll start an email list so to get started let's talk about keyword
research. It's absolutely one of my favorite things to do when starting up a
website because it allows me to go through and see what users are searching
for in Google and what you can do before you start keyword research using a tool,
go ahead and take pen and paper, I know it's old school, but go ahead and take a
pen and paper and do a brain dump of all the topic ideas that you have and that
you know about your business. This will really give you an idea of what all
you're going to talk about on your website and let you kind of organize all
of the ideas. So after you've done the brain dump I'm going to show you two
tools that you can use to get even more keyword ideas so let's get that going.
The first tool I'll show you is ahrefs, if you're familiar with other tools like
semrush then you can use that but I'm comfortable using ahrefs and I love it so
I'll show you this one and as I said before it is a paid tool but you can do
7-day trial for seven dollars and honestly with a new website that's going
to be plenty of time and energy to really gather up a whole bunch of
keywords that will take you years to write about. So the seven day trial will
probably work best for you but if not don't worry I'll show you a
free alternative in a minute. We're going to do the keyword Explorer tool and with
this you want to enter your seed keyword or the main keyword idea that your
business is about. For instance I'll put in plumbing as a seed keyword
and then what we'll do is we'll go out and it'll do a few things it's going to
check the volume, that means it's the search volume, how many people a month type in
plumbing. You'll also see the keyword difficulty, that's for how difficult
might it be for your website to rank. The other thing I like about this is I typed
in plumbing but it's going to bring back a ton of keywords related to this topic.
You'll see having the same terms it'll bring back it also ranks for, that means
a website that ranks for plumbing is also ranking for these other keywords
and you see the volume of the other keywords here. They will give you search
suggestions and then these are newly discovered, that means that these are new
keywords that have just come into their database. So one of the first things I'll
do when I'm doing my keyword research is I like to go down to the questions area.
Questions surrounding your keyword topic are super helpful. You could write the
answers to multiple questions on your industry and your, your site would become
immensely helpful to anyone who's searching for that and then these are
all of the questions. There are twenty over twenty five thousand keywords in a
question form the question form is who, when, how, why, what and they're all pulled
in. Since there are so many keywords we can drill down and start to filter on
some of these items a little bit more. What I like to do is if I'm a brand new
website then I want to make sure that my keyword difficulty is thirty or less and
again these are estimations that these tools use to identify how difficult it
might be for a website to rank. So to pare it down a little bit I've added in
the keyword difficulty of thirty would be the maximum and now it brought back
408 keywords that I can write about. So looking at some of these my main columns
that I worry about are the keyword. Can I write about this topic? There's a very
interesting parent topic if you want to start categorizing some of your topics
then this gives you a good idea of that. You have the keyword difficulty which
is their estimation of how difficult it might be
for a new website to rank for these keywords. The lower the better for you
and then I also like to look at the volume. The volume is the estimated
volume in a month that this keyword is being searched for. So it's estimated
that about 700 people type in, "When was indoor plumbing invented". you definitely
want to go through here and get rid of any that might not work for your website.
Don't feel like you need to write about these things. So for questions
we have 408. I'll go ahead and click export. You can do a quick export here where you
save it locally, name it something that has meaning for you, and now I have all
my questions that I can write articles about. Aside from the questions I like to
go to all keyword ideas and that will bring up just a ton of keyword ideas for
you again I'll go to 30 as my max and that's simply for the first round of
articles that I'm going to write. I want to write for the maybe easier ones to
rank for. You see that brought it down but we still have a lot and that's okay.
Once we click export it'll export the first thousand rows and that is still a
lot to write about and like I said if you don't have a ahrefs or if you're not
interested, there is another great tool called AnswerthePublic and it's, it's a
free tool you can go pro but it's a free tool. All you want to do is go in here,
select your region or your language, type in the keyword and get questions and
what answer the public is doing, say I'm gonna open up Google and I'm going to
show you. When you go in and you type in plumbing you see that Google is doing an
auto suggest. These are like the top keywords, if I hit a spacebar and start
going through the alphabet then those words change and I could do this
all day long and I'll see all the different topics related to plumbing. I can also do
this where I do how plumbing and start going through the list as well. But that
can be kind of tedious and I might not want to spend all my day doing that. The
other thing it'll do is when you do a search, Google has a tendency to say, bring that
people also ask for, so AnswerthePublic is doing all of that for you. In, on their
website and what it does is it will bring back all these questions,
prepositions, comparisons, and it will bring back the whole alphabet and what
you get is this great visual of plumbing and the questions related to plumbing
that then you can go in and write these topics. Now if you don't want to keep
moving your head around you can go up here and click data and it'll show all
of that in a data format. So you can see all of the questions that are being
asked in Google so then you know exactly what people are searching for and you
can answer those questions. So think about how powerful that keyword research
is in doing that. What you can do is go ahead and click download the CSV file so
you can have it locally and you can start going through this whole list and
just answering all those questions and writing articles about that. So that is
the power of keyword research and it's probably one of the reasons why I love
it the most it's like a puzzle that you're putting together. Now as much fun
as keyword research is there comes a time when you have to stop doing the
keyword research, you've gotten all the keywords you can pull together and it's
time to start creating the useful content for your visitors and this will
be the bulk of your website. So in creating useful content let's talk about
a few of the things that you'll want to make sure that you do. First you want to
be thorough, it used to be that you could throw together 500 word article and it
would rank okay in Google's eyes. That's not really the case anymore A) how much
information are you really gathering to answer the question or to give the
information to your user. Five hundred's really not going to be it
your minimum is probably going to be a thousand and really in many reports that
people have done the top results on Google are actually closer to two
thousand words or more. Now that doesn't mean to just fluff and add content in
there even if it's not needed. Just be thorough however long or short that is
to answer the user intent. The next thing you want to do is make sure that your
content is readable. Let me show you really quickly
what this means. Both of these articles on the left and the right are the same
article, but which one would you rather read? When I look at the one on the right
I just want to run away because this is just a wall of text and I just can't see
where I'm starting where I'm ending. On the left you have the content, you have a
lot of whitespace. We break up the information with things
like images, sub headers, numbered lists, bullet points, and all of this helps me
to scan or read the content as I'm scrolling through it. So make sure that
the content is readable. The next thing you want to do is once you've created
the content, you've made it readable, you also want to create great headlines and
let me walk you through what I mean by this. Headlines are one of the most
important parts of your whole article, in fact there are people who will actually
take the same amount of time that it takes to create the article to write
their headline and so let's look at this in detail. So if you're an expert in
plumbing you probably know exactly what your site is about and exactly what
you're about to talk about. You want to say something like you're doing it wrong
and then you're going to go into the article and discuss how to fix a leaky
faucet or whatever the article is about. Well that's okay, you know what the
article is about but the problem is Google doesn't know
what the article is about, they see the content in your article, but it's not
tying up with the headline and so they're more likely to not rank you very
high because they're just not sure what it's about. What you really want to do
with the headline is you want to make sure that you have the keywords that you
saw people are using when they're searching in Google. Make sure you have
those keywords in the headline themselves. So let's try it again, how to
fix a leaky faucet. Well that's actually really good, it has all the keywords that
the user will probably search for and so it's going to satisfy Google they're
gonna say oh the headline is about leaky faucet, it's scanning through your
article itself it notices keywords that are associated with fixing a leaky
faucet it says okay this is probably a really good one.
I'm going to rank this and let people see it in the search results when they
search for this. So you think you're probably done, well not exactly because
you're answering the question for Google and Google's going to show you in the
results but the problem is when a reader goes through and they're scanning
through all of the available articles in the Google search results so they're
probably going to skip it because yeah it's serving the purpose but it's not
really exciting them on how it's going to fix their leaky faucet problem and
how it's going to fix their issue and what you can do to fix that is you'll
want to add power words. OptinMonster has a great resource on their website and it
showcases 700 different power words that you can use for your headline and I'll
link in the description below so you can have it. So let's go back to our example
and let's try it one more time. Okay, so let's try eight easy ways on how to fix
a leaky faucet today and notice we put that in parentheses. Parentheses or
brackets seem to give a little extra umph for people when they see it. We're
giving them different ways that they can do it, are they going to be easy? Yeah,
they're going to be easy and that they can do that today they don't have to
wait for the weekend or some other time to fix their leaky faucet.
So really take some time to go through and craft the perfect headline for your
articles. Okay, once you've created your content and you've done a great job of
your new headline you want to apply some SEO basics to your articles. All that
means is you just want to make sure that the search engines have a better chance
of finding your articles. We already did that by making sure that the keyword is
in our title, making sure that some of the keywords are all throughout our
article, the next thing you want to do is if you have any images in the article
you want to make sure that the title as well as the alt text are filled out. This
is great for SEO but it's also important for accessibility. That's for people who
can't see, they rely on readers to tell them what the images say with the alt
text. You'll also want to make sure that you do internal linking. You're going to have
more than one article and do you want to tell Google what all of
your articles about. I'll give you an example. This is a guide on our website
on how to get more traffic to your website and throughout the article we
have links here and you see when I hover over this down at the bottom it says
where it's going. So these are internal links on the website and they do a
little help to tell Google what this article is about so this is the anchor
text. It's also the keywords that I want this article that I'm pointing to, to
rank for and you'll want to do a lot of that for your website as well. It helps
Google know more and more what your website is about. It also helps people if
they're reading through the article if they're interested in what you're
talking about that it's an easy way for them to click on that to go to that next
article and read that as well. One of the ways that you can help with your SEO
basics is install a, an SEO plugin like the Yoast SEO plugin and it just gives
you green and yellow lights to let you know if you're on track for doing some
of these things. If you want to go further than that we have the WordPress
SEO guide on our site that I'll link in the description so that you can see some
of the other ways to improve your SEO as well. Great, now that you've started
creating articles and you have some on your website the next thing you want to
do is go ahead and start doing some online networking. This is kind of the
same thing as if you're building a store in your town and you go to the local
Chamber of Commerce to get your name out you go to local conferences or local
meetups and you hand out your business card it's kind of the same thing that
you want to start doing online as well. SEO takes a while and it will take a
little while for your articles to start coming up in Google search so you want
to help that out by creating social networks and really getting involved
online if you can to help with this process. So like I said you can create
your social profile and the different social networks. If you're a local
business create a Facebook page, create a profile in Google my business, let me
show you what Google my business is. If I'm searching for a plumber near me, these
results are because they are in Google my business. So you'll want to set up
Google my business especially if you're a local business setting up shop. The
next thing you want to do is go ahead and get into some online communities.
There are several Facebook groups, I would say Facebook pages you'll want to
have for local business but I wouldn't spend a whole lot of time on your
Facebook page because Facebook's algorithm has just changed that they
really aren't wanting anybody to go off of Facebook. But, Facebook groups are
still really important and that's for any industry related thing if there is a
town group for instance my town has a word-of-mouth group on Facebook that
anyone can go to to ask people's opinions on a local business and then
the local business owners can chime in there too. So see if there's a Facebook
group for your community. Other search engines, what I mean by other search
engines are Pinterest kind of considered a social network but it and YouTube are
actually also their own search engines YouTube is the number two search engine
so if you're creating a craft related or a visually appealing service or if you
have a visually appealing service or product then Pinterest can drive a lot
of traffic to your site. The same thing with YouTube, if you have a service that
you can do a lot of videos for. Also go to a lot of Q&A websites, you have things
like Reddit, Quora where you can find what people are asking for and you can share
your response and your experience with them and then if it's related go ahead
and drop a link in there. Now you'll also want to make sure that you're sharing
useful information and you're not just going to these groups spamming them with
your links just provide value. I'll give you an example of something happened
this morning, someone shared in a blogging group the results that happened
for him. He's part of a biking group and he asked for other people's opinions on
the best tire pressure that they should have for fat tires and everybody helped
and gave them their idea. He went off and created an article that should be
helpful for people looking for that information. He went back to his group
and just shared the information said thanks for giving me your input by the
way here's the link to the article that I wrote based on what you
all said and from just sharing that information and asking for feedback and
help he got 300 visitors that day and it's a very new website so it was pretty
surprising for him to get that many visitors in one day just by being part
of these groups and being helpful. And finally, let's talk about building an
email list. You'll want to give your users a way to get on your email list by
doing just a simple optin form that just has a name and email and you tell
them that what they'll be receiving once they get on your email list and at a later
date even add a lead magnet and I'll share with you a resource of several
lead magnet ideas that you can choose from. But, I would say to begin with just
go with the optin form and get it on your website, you can have it to where
you put the optin form on at the end of every article and I would even do this
before you get going on the online networking. With an email list you can
continue to drive repeat visitors back to your website by continuing to send
them emails when say you update your blog post and that's really helpful to
grow your traffic. In this video we've covered five different ways to get more
traffic to your website and in the next video I'll walk you through the six ways
that you can generate more leads to your website. Did you learn today's video? If
so subscribe to our YouTube channel and we'll send more helpful tips to help you
manage your WordPress website and thanks for watching.