5 SEO Tactics to Increase Traffic to Your Website: Part 1

5 SEO Tactics to Increase Traffic to Your Website: Part 1

Search Engine Optimization tactics to improve your digital footprint in the financial technology industry.

Every company wants to be on page one of Google, and some want it so bad they will pay for ad space to be at the top. However, you do not have to spend tons of money to be number one. Instead, just spend a little time and a little effort.

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is a term used to describe the process involved in elevating a company’s position, or page rank, on a search engine’s results page for a specific keyword. SEO is crucial for companies in the financial technology industry because it helps generate leads by being on page one of Google when consumers are searching for your products or services.

Five of the most important strategies for optimizing your website for SEO: identify the keywords most important to your company, optimize your website technically, create targeted content in blogs and white papers, promote content via social media and use public relations and inbound links. For part one, we will focus on identifying keywords most important to your company and optimizing your website technically.

1. Identify keywords most important to your company

Keywords are what your potential customers are using to search for the solution to their problem. They are the words that you want to identify and create your content around. These words can be highly competitive and used by hundreds of other companies. To step out of the highly competitive arena centered around keywords like “mobile,” develop “long-tail keywords” like “mobile banking software.” “Long-tail keywords” are phrases designed to make your keyword more specific to your target audience.

There are two types of keywords, product keywords and problem keywords. Product keywords are words associated with a product your company provides such as “loan origination development software” or “mobile banking software.” Problem keywords are phrases designed to solve a problem. Examples of problem keywords include “how to streamline loan approval process” or “how to improve online banking customer experience.” Whichever keywords and phrases you choose, you want them to be relevant to what your company offers and the problems they can solve.

Once you have developed a list of keywords that are relevant to your company, research how often these keywords are actually searched within Google, Bing and Yahoo. This will help prioritize your list so you can focus on the top 10 or 20 keywords that will drive traffic, and start making your way to the top.

2. Optimize your website technically

There are three steps to technically optimize your websites.

Meta Data

Meta data consists of meta titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords. This information communicates to search engines the content of your website.
A meta description is what describes the page’s content in a few words. It can be no more then 150 characters, but no less then 11 words. A meta title is usually taken from the headline or title you enter on your page. This must contain no more than 65 characters and the priority keywords should be towards the beginning. Meta keywords today are still important. It always helps to include one meta keyword per page. This is the one priority keyword that describes what your webpage is talking about.

Remember, keywords should be included in page headlines and body copy as well as the meta title and descriptions of your website, blogs and premium landing pages for special content offers.

HTTPS

HTTPS stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. This is the secure version of HTTP. Having HTTPS in your URL means that your website is secure and any communication between your browsers and the website is encrypted.

This is important for SEO because Google favors more secure websites. Having a HTTPS site increases your chances for increased rankings and increased security.

Mobile Friendly

Research suggests that 64% of today’s online buyers use a smartphone and 54% use a tablet. If your website is not mobile friendly, you are missing out on over half of the market.

Today’s websites need to use responsive design on mobile devices so visitors can easily find and read content. Having a mobile friendly site is also something Google, Bing and Yahoo look for when determining the rank of your site.

Identifying keywords most important to your company and technically optimizing your website are the two most important steps when beginning your SEO strategies. These two strategies are what will set the base for the rest of your SEO plan. Stay tuned for next weeks blog to learn how creating targeted content in blogs and white papers, distributing via social media and using public relations to create inbound links will help increase traffic to your website.

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