Long-term growth comes from attracting organic clicks, but how can this be done?
- Identify your niche but don't reinvent the wheel - There are few niches that haven't already been done but that is OK as you should be concerned about adding value to a niche rather than looking to create the next big niche that no one else has done before.
- Create quality content that targets intent - Intent can be broken down in to four basic principles which are: Informational, Navigational, Commercial and Transactional. For context, if you are writing something that targets a question such as "What is SEO?", you would be writing a piece that targets the informational intent. So now you know a little about intent, the question is, how can you find keywords to match that intent? (Pun absolutely intended).
- Research for keywords can and does help drive a blog and any other website. Keywords can be divided in to short and long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are generally intent driven phrases. Where can I buy X or How does X compare to Z etc. So how could you start? Use the wonderful free tool that is Google Autocomplete. With a small spot of basic programming and tapping in to the unofficial Autocomplete API, you can turn one keyword in to hundreds, if not thousands of short and long-tail keywords. This does have the drawback in that you have to do some further tinkering in order to generate estimated CTR (Click Through Rates) and trend scores. Alternatively, just use Ahref or Semrush and focus on keywords that have low competition but high CTR scores. Do not attempt to fight your way in to the high competition keywords and phrases.
Ensuring you have the "right" keywords and/or phrases for your site will help but are not the all powerful item that people make it out to be.
- Technical SEO...Google and MOZ both offer lots of information on how to optimise a website from a technical perspective, which includes things like having your h1 and h2 headers, having good page load speeds, making sure your site is crawlable and indexable, having a sitemap, ensuring your pages have good internal links and many more. Lots of information about Technical SEO is already widely available.
- Link Building is another solid technique that also yields authority. Guest blogging for another site is a good and reliable way of building links in a given niche or alternatively crawl a website that is also in your niche and search for broken links, you could then reach out to the other party, show them one of their links is broken which is hurting their site and then suggest they should link to content on your site which would replace the content that was offered by the broken link. The garden blog wins because a broken link is fixed and content/value is added back to their site without them having to do anything other than point to your website and you win because a site that has topical authority has linked to you which is telling Google "Hey this website is trustworthy and knowledgeable about this subject".
When all is said and done, the name of the game is to offer quality, not quantity. Again, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You see a topic that can be improved upon, do it, Build it out. People are all too caught up with being "unique". You don't have to be "unique" to succeed, you just have to build it better than those that have already built that "something".
