How to Generate Online Traffic Despite SEO Challenges

SEO is a real part of business for the 21st century, and company owners face many SEO challenges as digital technology becomes more sophisticated. How can you keep up with these challenges and continue to drive traffic to your company’s website? Check out these four specific SEO challenges and how YOU can overcome them in your own office.

SEO Challenge 1. The Far-Reaching Effects of SEO

SEO isn’t composed of a single department. For SEO to be successful, you need every marketing department to be committed to a keyword strategy:

• The web developers need to build a stunning website that’s focused on strategic keyword placement
• The content team need to produce unique, interesting, high-quality content with well-spaced keywords, including variations
• The lead generation team need to follow up with potential customers/clients and nurture their interest in the company
• The social media management team need to build out the company’s profile on all social channels.

Some companies choose to hire an outsourced digital marketing agency to unite all marketing goals into one overarching keyword-optimized plan. A professional agency understands how to apply SEO in specific ways to increase online traffic to your website.

SEO Challenge 2. Google Algorithm Changes

If you’ve had any experience at all in the digital world, you know Google is constantly changing, improving, and expanding as technology is refined and sophisticated. How can the in-house marketing team keep up with the times and stay on top of the game? For example:

• In 2011, the Google Panda Update is a search filter that prevents low-quality sites from ranking higher than better quality sites with rich content.
• In 2012, Google rolled out the Penguin update to catch low-quality sites that tried to cheat the rankings with unnatural bought backlinks.   
• In 2013, Google Hummingbird launched to help Google better understand the intent behind search queries, what people meant instead of exact words they typed.  

If you want a more in-depth, comprehensive study on these 3 major algorithm changes, check out this really detailed explanation from Moz.com.

Technically, Google’s algorithm changes shouldn’t dramatically affect the way you conduct your online marketing for your business. Google was designed to deliver interesting, unique, and helpful information to those searching for it online. Problems arose when internet marketers tried to cut corners by finding the loopholes in Google’s system. That’s when link buying, plagiarism, and paid reviews became popular. Now that Google continually finds and patches up weak spots in the system, lazy marketers can’t get away with these cheap outs.

A professional digital marketing agency spends significant time researching these upgrades to keep a pulse on the changes in technology. Each time Google launches a new algorithm change, agencies take the opportunity to analyze their marketing strategy and refine their procedure to better suit their clients’ needs.

SEO Challenge 3. High-Quality Backlinks

Despite the Penguin Update, backlinks are by no means dead. They just are harder to get – high quality ones, anyway. But there are still multiple ways to obtain high-quality backlinks:

Create Awesome Content that other websites will want to link to. Theoretically, good content organically generates backlinks. As mentioned above, Google is crawling the internet for high quality content. Make yours stand out and other sites will be drawn to yours, seeing you as an industry leader.  

If your website is new or your service is niche, your likelihood of gaining organic backlinks is slim, so maybe you should focus on guest blogging to get your content on other sites. Many publications, digital magazines, and blogs are looking for free content and are sometimes willing to include a link to your site.

To get even more backlinks, you can also try what Brian Dean (founder of backlinko.com) calls “The Moving Man Method.”

You have further backlink opportunities by setting up a Google Plus Profile, Google places, directory listings (paid and unpaid), LinkedIn, and Youtube. Some social channels like Facebook and Twitter have a rel=”no follow” attribute, which instructs search engines not to follow these links back to your site (it’s to prevent thousands of spammy sites from overtaking social networks). But in many cases, a link in the profile cannot be assigned a no-follow.

Once your marketing team sets up a successful backlink strategy, your company will have a new surge of incoming web traffic to your site.

SEO Challenge 4. The Mobile Age

By 2015, almost 53% of web traffic was coming from mobile devices, and that percentage will continue to increase. In order to continue generating online traffic, you have to make sure your website will function correctly on mobile devices. First, your website must include responsive design – the ability to size itself according to the screen size of any device.

If you have a local company or business, be sure your website is optimized for local searches. According to Search Engine Land, 88% of local searches are done on mobile device, mostly to look for a business’s address and when they’re open.

Slow page load speeds on mobile devices can also negatively affect search rankings. Most people won’t wait longer than 10 seconds for a page to load on their phone, and according to Kissmetrics, “47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.” If the page doesn’t load quickly enough, you’ll lose valuable traffic to your site. Google can look at bounce rate to determine the status of your website’s rank, so you’ll be losing not only your current ranking, but also online traffic.

Don’t let these SEO challenges stop you from generating more traffic to your website. If you feel overwhelmed by these SEO hurdles, maybe it’s time to consider if outsourcing your digital marketing is the right option for you.