Want to improve your website’s rankings?
In this guide, we’re going to show you exactly how you can drive more traffic through SEO, something we’ve spent a lot of time doing here at ClickFunnels.
Let’s dive right in…
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Do This BEFORE Improving Your SEO
SEO is great — creating content that ranks, after all, is my primary gig — but let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment…
What is the point of SEO rankings?
To drive traffic, of course.
Sort of.
The goal is actually (as always) to make more sales and improve the business’s bottom line. That means driving high-quality traffic, generating leads, and converting those leads into customers.
It might start with SEO traffic, but that’s not the end goal.
In other words, driving SEO traffic just to drive traffic is a waste of both time and money.
Before you improve your website’s rankings, optimize your website for converting.
How do you do that?
We’ve got a whole guide dedicated to helping you improve your websites’ conversions (click that link).
Here’s the annotated version…
- Add a Sales Funnel
- Make it Load Faster
- Use Scarcity & Urgency
- Leverage Social Proof
- Simplify Your Forms
- Use Exit-Intent Pop-Ups
- Use Heatmaps & Clickmaps
- Use The Hook, Story, Offer Format
- Build Follow-Up Funnels
- Use Contrasting Colors For CTAs
Consider those ideas and give that article a glance before you dive into this article… otherwise, you might drive a lot of traffic without actually generating more leads or sales.
You can use ClickFunnels to build a website and optimize it for both conversions and SEO traffic.
1. Make it Faster
It’s sort of crazy to think about, but the majority of today’s websites don’t meet Google’s recommended speed standards (according to Blue Corona)…
Think about that.
If your website loads in five seconds or less, then you’re in the top 15% of all websites, and your chances of ranking increase exponentially.
Crazy, right?
It’s such a simple thing to optimize and it has so much impact on your rankings.
The fact is, Google is trying to provide the best possible experience for its users. If your website is slow, it doesn’t have any chance of ranking (no matter how good the content is).
That’s why Google is so upfront about this particular ranking factor.
Speed matters.
How can you improve your website’s speed?
First, test your website over here to see if it has a speed problem.
If you do, that tool will tell you exactly what to do to improve your speed…
The good news is that most website builders today — including ClickFunnels — are built automatically to optimize your website for speed.
Ideally, you want your website to load in three seconds or less.
2. Find Keyword Unicorns
Keyword research is a critical part of the process for getting rankings.
In fact, if you just create pages and content guessing at keywords rather than researching keywords, you’re going to only leverage a fraction of your website’s SEO potential.
Guaranteed.
I can prove it to you.
Here are the stats for a website I worked on with a friend for quite some time, but we never created content with the goal of ranking… we just created blog posts and content that sounded interesting to us. And we hoped that maybe it would rank.
Our DR is 53, we’ve got over 1,000 backlinks, and we’re “ranking” (i.e. somewhere in the first 10 pages) for 1,700 keywords… but we’re only driving 715 visits per month.
Now let’s look at another website I worked on.
On this project, we set out to create content for the exclusive purpose of driving traffic through SEO. That meant we researched keywords, created content around those keywords and provided as much value as possible along the way.
We have a lower DR than the other website, about the same number of backlinks and the same number of rankings, and fewer referring domains, and yet we’re driving wayyyy more traffic: 3,800 visits per month.
The only difference between these two sites (I was heavily involved in both projects) is that one had content created without critical keyword research… and the other’s content was created based on keyword research.
The results speak for themselves.
So… how do you do research keywords to rank for?
First, you’ll need a tool. I use Ahrefs, but other options would be Ubersuggest or SEMRush.
Once you’ve got some sort of Google keyword explorer software at your fingertips, you can start looking for what I call unicorn keywords: these are keywords in your niche with decently high volume and low competition.
I always start by just typing in phrases that I think people might be searching for.
(Pro Tip: The better you understand the jargon of a specific niche, the easier it is to find these unicorn keywords)
I recently, for instance, helped someone with keyword research for their snowboarding website. One of my favorite keywords we found was “best snowboard brands”…
That search has a whopping 4,500 searches per month and it’s “easy” to rank for. That’s a huge winner.
Another great one was “good mountains to snowboard”…
You get the idea, the higher the volume and the lower the keyword difficulty, the better.
I’ll usually settle for keywords with upwards of 100 searches per month and less than 30 difficulty.
Dive into your SEO tool and try to find at least 10 great keywords you can rank for. An important side note is that no two keywords on your list should be too similar. If you Google for multiple phrases and the same top 10 results pop up in Google, then throw away the more granular keyword and keep the most general keyword.
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3. Create Optimized Content
If you have a website with all of the basic pages — a homepage, about page, features page, product pages, etc. — and it’s already ranking pretty well… then how are you going to improve your rankings?
The answer is more content.
You shouldn’t try to rank one page for lots of dissimilar keywords — for instance, I wouldn’t try to rank the same page for “best snowboarding mountains” and “best snowboarding brands.”
This means if you want to rank for more keywords, then you need to create more content targeting those keywords.
In most cases, that means building a blog and posting consistently.
It just so happens that this is exactly what I do for my clients as a freelance writer.
Here’s my process.
Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, & URLs
I’m assuming that you’ve gone through the keyword research process I outlined above and you’ve got a list of keywords that you want to rank for.
Choose one of those keywords that you want to write content for.
Then, the next step is to craft a title, meta description, and URL that include an exact match of the keyword you’re gunning for.
Here’s what that looks like.
One company I’ve worked for — Call Porter — is a call center for real estate investors. And we wanted to rank for “wholesale cold calling script” (which gets 300 searches per month). “Wholesaling” is a real estate term.
So we wrote this article.
Notice how the URL and the title include the exact keyword that we’re trying to rank for? That’s intentional.
And look at how it did!
You’ll also notice that the keyword is in our meta description.
Including your exact keyword in the title, the meta description, and the URL is ground zero for creating content that ranks.
The Content
This part of the SEO content creation process is likely going to give you the biggest headache.
But not to worry.
I’ll give you a little hack.
To create content that ranks on the first page, search your keyword in Google and pull up all of the top ten results and read/skim all of them.
These are the current winners.
If you want to beat them, you need to know what you’re up against. Take notes on the topics each post covers, the angle, and the headings.
Your goal is to create something better.
“Better”, though, doesn’t necessarily mean “longer” (sometimes it does). More importantly, it means…
- More Valuable — Your goal when creating the content should be to create a resource more valuable than what’s currently out there. That might mean offering additional resources or linking to other great tools.
- More Thorough — Google likes content that is thorough and addresses all of the reader’s questions. Try to be more thorough than the other top 10 results.
- More Accurate — When I say “accurate”, I’m referring to the searcher’s intent. Think about what someone searching for your keywords actually want (i.e. why are they searching for that?) and then give it to them better than any of the other results.
SEO is by nature a competitive game. If you’re going to get in the top 10 results, then you have to knock someone else off their pedestal.
Internal Linking
If you’ve done any amount of research into SEO, then you’ve probably already learned a ton about the importance of backlinking.
And we’ll talk about that here shortly.
But in my opinion, having a good internal linking strategy is even more important.
Why?
Because internal links cost you nothing to build and many websites overlook the importance of internal links (even though they have quite a large impact on rankings).
An internal link is just a link going from one page of your website to another…
The key is to make sure the link and the anchor text itself are relevant and make sense. You don’t just want to spam internal links on your website.
I recommend writing your content without thinking about internal links… and then going back through it to see if there are any natural opportunities to include more links.
If you want a tool to make this process super easy, check out Link Whisper (that’s what I use).
Give it Time
A good friend of mine who’s very experienced with SEO once told me “The biggest ranking factor that no one talks about is time.”
He’s right.
Old pages rank higher. Check it out…
The lesson, then, is to get started right away. And start by knocking out the most difficult keywords you want to rank for (because those will have to bake longer).
Give it time. Stay consistent. And you’ll get results.
4. Build Backlinks
Backlinks are the backbone of a good SEO strategy… they’re also the Achilles heel.
Why?
Because while backlinks have a huge impact on SEO rankings, they can also be quite difficult to build.
For SEO newcomers, a backlink is just a link that goes from an external website to your website.
These are powerful because — assuming “Website A” itself is trustworthy — Google counts them as indications that your website is trustworthy and authoritative.
And the more other websites that link to your website, the higher Google is going to want to rank you.
Now I know what you’re thinking.
“I’m going to go pay a ton of people to link to my website! Problem solved!”
It’s okay to pay for backlinks, but you have to do so carefully.
A good rule of thumb is that if you’re just trying to trick the system and get links from sites (regardless of quality), then you should probably stop. Google very well might find out and punish your site.
If you’re paying for links, however, that are a little more expensive and thus higher quality, you’re probably okay… but just keep an eye on the sites you’re getting links from and make sure they’re legit.
Another option is to look for high-ranking sites and ask them to link back to you.
Here’s an example of what that looks like…
The gold standard, of course, for building backlinks is creating content so good that people link to it organically without you even asking them to.
How do you do that?
Here are a few ideas…
Curated Data & Statistics
Whenever a writer or content marketer uses a piece of data that they got from another website — as online writers love to do — they will often link back to where they got it.
Curating data and statistics can be a great way to build backlinks organically.
Go into your keyword research tool and see what the volume looks like for “[NICHE] statistics” or “[NICHE] stats”.
If you can create an article to rank on the first page for that term, then you’ll get a ton of backlinks from other writers creating content and using your stats.
The best part is that creating these articles is pretty easy.
You’re just curating other people’s stats in a way that’s helpful to your readers.
Graphics & Images
Another time when online writers or content marketers are obligated to link back to your site is when they use your original images or graphics.
Creating compelling cartoons, infographics, or images to include inside of your content can be a great way to garner backlinks.
Original Research
Finally, you can do your own original research.
This is great because if you are the one who did the research… then you are going to get the vast majority of the backlinks whenever people want to reference your data or use your graphs.
CXL is great at this.
They are constantly running tests to see how best to increase conversions and report their results on their blog.
Here’s an example of a blog post where they did some original research to determine how people read short online content.
And guess what?
That one article has got them over 216 backlinks.
Why?
Because it’s full of interesting information that online writers want to reference… and whenever they reference it, they’re obligated to link back to the source.
Another example of this comes from EmailMastery, a content site that helps people become better email marketers.
They compile these uber-detailed teardowns of big brand’s email marketing strategies…
These posts are long, and thorough, and have tons of examples of the brand’s email marketing strategy. This content is curated… but in a way that feels original.
Unsurprisingly, those articles garner backlinks for Email Mastery… the Grammarly one above has got 19…
5. Consider Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are also sometimes referred to as “position 0” by SEO peeps who want to sound cool.
A featured snippet is just a block of text that answers the searcher’s question right at the top of the SERP.
For example, if I search for “wholetailing” (a real estate term), this comes up…
That’s an article I wrote for REISift, and snagging that snippet was very intentional.
How do you do it?
Well, whenever you’re writing within your blog posts to define a term or answer a question, I write to get write to the point and deliver a sort of “dictionary definition” that Google will like.
Inside the ranking article above, here’s what that looks like…
Notice how I start with my dictionary definition (which is gunning for the featured snippet) and then go into more detail?
That’s how you get to position 0.
I recommend doing this with all of the content you create whenever you think there might be an opportunity to get the featured snippet.
But of course, you’re never going to get the featured snippet if your page itself doesn’t rank in the top 10.
So one great strategy is to go back to the content you’ve already created that is ranking on the first page for your target keyword and try to add in some content in order to snag the featured snippet.
Most featured snippets are focused around a definition (as I showed you above) or a list of items…
Sometimes you’ll be able to snag the featured snippet and other times you won’t. But it’s always worth at least structuring your article to give it a chance.
6. Improve Time-On-Page
One of the most powerful SEO factors that very few people talk about is time-on-page.
The longer that people spend on your page, the more that Google will assume your page is giving people what they want… and the higher they’ll rank it.
The opposite is also true.
If people arrive at your page and bounce within a few seconds, that’s going to hurt your rankings unlike pretty much anything else.
The question is… how do you get people to actually spend more time on your blog posts or website?
Here are some ideas…
- Make sure your articles are scannable by using headlines and sub-headlines to break up the text.
- Use images, infographics, videos, and other multimedia throughout your content to keep people engaged.
- Write longer articles. Google has been favoring longer content for years now.
- Pay attention to your typography. Use fonts that are easy to read and provide plenty of whitespace around your text.
- Use social proof like testimonials, customer logos, and trust indicators (like SSL certificates) to show people that you’re a credible source.
- Give people what they want. If your headline promised something, make sure to give it to them. Avoid clickbait that doesn’t deliver on its promises.
Final Thoughts
There you have it.
Those are the best ways I know of to improve your website’s SEO rankings — improve the load speed, find great keywords, create optimized content, build backlinks, gun for the featured snippet, and improve the time-on-page.
Do those things and you’ll be surprised at how much better your website ranks than it did before.
Heck — I’m willing to bet your competitors will be jealous.
Because chances are… they aren’t even doing half of the things listed above.
Go get ‘em!