Your bottom line is revenue. If you’re not bringing it in, there’s a problem. While paid marketing can be a valuable tool for achieving this, organic traffic is often overlooked. Because it requires a long-term strategy, it’s often hard to justify time spent on the SEO efforts needed to drive organic traffic.
However, when done over a period of time—say, as a 6-month initiative—while you use paid marketing to maintain traffic and lead flow, you can get a jump on this important strategy.
The benefit is that organic SEO provides long-term value. Paid ads drive traffic for as long as you pay for them. SEO-optimized pages will drive organic traffic for years to come. If you spend time generating organic traffic for your revenue-driving pages, then this long-term value will pay back for your time and effort in dividends.
For inspiration, take a look at how Content Marketing Institute started its website and slowly built pages to monetize their products, or how Airbnb uses landing pages to drive revenue.
Keep those success stories in mind as you build a marketing strategy to drive organic traffic to revenue-driving pages. Here’s what you need to do to.
Identify the Pages That You’ll Optimize for Revenue or Leads
Start with a simple process of identifying the pages on your site where you want to direct organic traffic. These pages may include:
- Download pages for gated content, like case studies
- Landing pages with a buy button
- Product or service pages with a contact page or purchase button
For a small business, this may only include one or two pages, which is all the better. You’ll have less work to do. Nevertheless, make the list and be sure to include all download pages as well—if you’re building a subscriber base, those are still important to your overall goal of driving revenue.
Optimize Those Pages for Organic Traffic
This is where the work starts. Now’s the time to update and build links for those revenue-generating pages. This is all about updating them for search engines so they can start being ranked and indexed.
There are six steps, all of which should be completed. This is why it’s helpful to set this up as a 6-month project, so you can tackle each step one at a time and do it right the first time.
1. Add Educational Content to Each Page
Consumers are 131 percent more likely to buy from a brand immediately after they consume early-stage, educational content, according to recent research. Ensure that the copy on your pages is not just there to sell, but to provide value your target audience. While you don’t need to write a whole blog post, you can use content to make these pages value-driven.
This benefits your revenue-generating pages in two ways:
- Content keeps users on the page longer because they have more to read—they’re not just being pushed to buy.
- Content gives Google more context for your page, allowing you to rank for more keywords.
Make sure you not only have a main keyword for the page, but 1 to 2 sub keywords that you sprinkle throughout the page. Use H2s and H3s the break-up the page and give search engines a better picture of what the content is all about.
2. Include Data to Support Your Products or Services
Data is used in blog posts to support statements and provide legitimacy and authority. The same can be said for adding proprietary data to the content on your revenue-driving pages. The right data supports your product or service, helping you achieve two important goals:
- Unique, proprietary data is beneficial to publishers and writers, which increases the chance of them linking to your content organically.
- The right data can show the value of your product or service—similar to social proof from testimonials.
Here a few examples of proprietary data that you can bring into this content:
- Existing customer or product data: Can you mine data from your business operations to analyze interesting trends? How can this data show that your product or service provides value to customers?
- Surveys: Survey customers or clients and turn their responses into interesting statistics about their use of your product or their need for a product or service like yours.
- Use survey services to elicit responses from your ideal customer: For example, a CRM platform might use use SurveyMonkey or Google Survey to ask 500 small business owners, “How often do you use your CRM software each week?” Perhaps the response would lend itself to a statistic like, “97 percent of small businesses use their CRM every single day of the week”—think of how powerful that is on a revenue-driving page, where someone is making a decision about whether or not to buy your CRM software.
- Case Studies: Look back at previous successful projects, outline your strategy and subsequent results in a case study. Use this data on revenue-generating landing pages and then get more from it by developing the insights into blog content.
3. Address Potential Fundamental SEO Issues
Perform an audit of the revenue-driving pages where you want to increase organic traffic to find for any possible SEO issues that can be fixed. Use this quick checklist to identify and address common issues:
✔Check and Update Your Page Speed
Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to check your page loading time. If it takes a long time to load, users will bounce off the page and find another site—this is a bad signal to Google, and also means people aren’t clicking around your site and ultimately making a purchase. Optimize your speed, especially for mobile, so you don’t lose that organic traffic.
✔Use the Right Keywords
Using the right keywords means that when your target audience searches for you, using a search like, “computer repair shop San Diego” that they’ll find you. If you need help with keyword optimization, download my keyword research guide.
✔Update Your Metadata With Keywords
Metadata is what shows up in search engines, and includes your title tag (the page’s title) and meta description (the two line blurb explaining the page). Use a tool like Yoast to make sure you have the proper metadata. Learn more about the importance of metadata and how write a great meta description in this metadata guide.
✔Add a Single H1 and a Few H2s and H3s Throughout the Page
Headers allow users to easily scan a page to find the information they’re looking for. They also act as a signal to search engines when your page is being indexed—the text used here is a key factor in determining what the page is about, and therefore, how it should be ranked. “I recommend that clients try to have a single H1 that uses their core keyword and at least one H2 [as well],” Jenny Halasz, SEO expert, explains to Search Engine Journal. “It helps to structure your page visually and provides important clues about the topicality of the page.”
This comes back to your keywords, and ensuring that you’re choosing the right ones for each revenue-driving page.
4. Improve the Mobile-Friendliness of Your Pages (and Site)
Recent stats show that nearly half of all web traffic is mobile. Load your page on a mobile device and make sure it displays correctly. You can also use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test to see what needs to be improved.
If you want more detailed information on SEO that you can apply to revenue-generating pages, check out my Blog SEO Guide.
5. Use Rich Snippets to Stand Out in Search
A rich snippet shows up in search engines, providing the searcher with more data about your site. Look at the screenshot below at page one results for a lasagna recipe search. A standard snippet usually has the title tag in blue, URL in green, with meta description below. The rich snippet, on the other hand, can include a picture, ratings underneath the URL, and the time it takes to prepare, author’s name, and more.
Rich snippets will make your pages stand out in search results, driving more organic traffic to your revenue-driving pages. You can install plugins to get these rich snippets for your site’s pages. Check out WP Buff’s suggestions for the four best, free options.
6. Start Building Backlinks
Now that you’ve identified, updated, and optimized revenue-generating pages, you may be able to use them to build backlinks with guest posting. This is one of the best ways to increase organic traffic. If you’ve never done any backlinking work before, check out my deep-dive guide on the importance of backlinks and how to build them.
Increase Organic Traffic to Your Optimized Pages
Your revenue-driving pages need to be optimized with value-driven content, a clear CTA, and the right keywords. If you don’t know how to increase organic traffic, use this blog post as your guide, or work with a content marketing agency to get the ball rolling. Do the work now and you’ll reap the benefits for years to come.
