Jesus Alvarado-Flores, 27, was arrested after troopers discovered nearly 100 pounds of meth hidden in his pickup truck during a traffic stop on I-8 in Yuma County, Arizona.
It’s no secret that e-commerce is here to stay.
With more consumers shopping online than ever before, retailers must work hard to get noticed.
What if you don’t have the budget for ads? Are you doomed to fade into the online abyss?
Absolutely not.
Over half of consumers prefer to shop online. Great news for online retailers like you, right?
With the growth of online marketplaces and hoards of choices available to consumers, it’s tough to get the attention you need to drive traffic and revenue.
Today, I’ll share 25 e-commerce tips to get more visitors to your site—without spending a dime on paid ads.
Best of all, many of these tips are easier to implement than you might think.
Many marketers focus on paid e-commerce strategy because they think it’s the only way to outshine the big brands, but that isn’t always the case.
With 95 percent of website traffic hitting the first page of Google, all the traffic you could hope for is there, waiting.
One of the most obvious benefits of non-paid e-commerce strategies is you don’t need to invest money to drive traffic. You’re not trading dollar-for-dollar; instead, you’re trading time or resources for sales.
Another benefit is focusing on non-paid traffic means building a better, easier-to-use website. According to a study done by Amazon Web Services, 88 percent of online shoppers won’t return to a site they had a bad experience on.
With all the options for e-commerce shopping, why would they?
We’re completely inundated with options. The threshold for mistakes and user experience problems is getting lower and lower.
Finally, thinking outside the box helps build a real business with long-term potential.With paid ads, as soon as you turn off your budget, your traffic will plummet.
SEO, email marketing, and on-page experience are long-term strategies that pay off over time.
Overall e-commerce sales have grown steadily year after year and show no sign of slowing down. By 2025, e-commerce sales could hit nearly 7,400 billion dollars. If you’re having trouble getting the traffic you want, there are tons of opportunities to get a piece of the pie.
Here are some e-commerce tips you can implement today to get more traffic to your site.
Leads that come from referrals convert at a 30 percent higher rate than any other marketing method. If you don’t have a referral program for your e-commerce store, it’s never too late to get started.
Keep in mind, it doesn’t have to be elaborate.
Take GetResponse, for example. You get a $30 account credit for every person you refer to the software.
Offer something of value to existing customers for every customer they bring to you; it’s as simple as that!
To get started, find a referral program platform, then use these tips to drive sign-ups.
Google controls more than 92 percent of the search market, which means if you want traffic, you need to invest in SEO. Investing in a blog and delivering valuable content is one of the best e-commerce tips I can offer.
Start producing content regularly whether you have to hire someone or write everything yourself. I’m definitive proof that this strategy works.
If you don’t currently have a blog on your e-commerce website, starting one is easy. Most e-commerce platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify have built-in blogging templates to help you get started.
Google makes it crystal clear that the on-page experience is one of the most important factors they look at when determining whether a site should rank.
On-page experience refers to (but is not limited to):
To use these e-commerce tips, start by running the reports linked above. Google will offer you tips and strategies to improve your on-page experience.
Improving these factors helps increase your e-commerce traffic because your site looks better in Google’s eyes, and it’s easier for users to navigate, which keeps them coming back.
Repeat customers spend 67 percent more than new customers—and one of the best ways to bring them back is by building an email list.
Why?
You’ve already established trust with them, and they know what you have to offer.
Take a look at this example from Birchbox:
Offering a unique promo code encourages customers to return and makes the offer feel exclusive and like they’re getting something that isn’t available to everyone.
To build an email list, try these strategies:
Once you’ve built out an email list, you’ll want to retarget users based on onsite behavior. Retargeting, in this case, means sending an email to someone who has shown interest in your business but didn’t take the action you were hoping for. (It can also be used for paid ads, but in this case, we’re covering non-paid strategies.)
Abandoned cart emails are one of the most effective ways to leverage email retargeting. In fact, they’re responsible for recovering nearly 30 percent of abandoned carts.
You can also send current customers suggested products related to a previous purchase. As we already covered, it’s easier to go after customers you already have than find new ones.
Here’s a quick guide to retargeting your email subscribers:
Only around two percent of your web traffic will convert on the first visit, so capturing email addresses through your CTAs is crucial.
You need to experiment a bit to see what works. Even something as simple as the color of your CTA button can make a difference.
For example, Performable found that switching their CTA button from green to red boosted their conversion rate by 21 percent.
Try different CTA buttons and phrasing to see what works and test them side-by-side using A/B testing.
Don’t stop at colors, though. You can also test your CTA’s:
Nearly 70 percent of people abandon their cart. This can be due to hidden fees, shipping costs, too many steps, and a poor overall experience. The best e-commerce tips build on what you’re already doing, and the checkout process is a great place to start.
While people are more comfortable than ever shopping online, they also have high expectations for the process. How do you improve the process? Here are a few tips:
Scandiweb did a great case study of the steps to improve their checkout experience. You don’t need to go nearly this far, but it’s a smart e-commerce strategy to implement no matter how big or small you decide to make it.
A white paper by Altfeld shows that when selling to an existing customer, the probability of closing that sale is as high as 70 percent.
What’s the most effective way to bring customers back? Loyalty programs!
Rewarding customers for returning and doing business with you again is a brilliant and timeless strategy.
Take Sephora for example.
For every dollar spent, you earn one dollar in rewards. The more you spend, the more rewards you’re eligible for, including discounts and free shipping. It’s so simple when it’s broken down this way, but the hard part is coming up with a smart rewards program.
To set up an effective rewards program, you’ll want to:
I’ve mentioned SEO already, but this step focuses on internal linking within your e-commerce website. How can this improve e-commerce traffic?
Sites without proper internal linking don’t rank as high as those with a solid link-building strategy.
By creating a web of links on your site, you’re telling Google that you are an excellent resource for what people want to buy and you’re a wealth of knowledge in whatever niche it is you sell in. That will improve the user experience while also improving your worth to Google.
Here are a few tips for adding internal links:
Ninety-one percent of people read at least one review before making a purchase. Where is a great place to get a lot of customer reviews?
Social media, of course.
Are you using social media to drive traffic to your e-commerce store?
Are you using it as a place for customers to land if they have something positive or negative to say about your business?
You should be doing both things because it helps show customers that you’re a real business with real people and not just some brand.
Here’s how to build a social media strategy for your e-commerce business.
You need to be there for your customers. Sixty percent of people want to connect with someone during the sales process.
Remember that one time you were in a brick and mortar and wanted help finding something, but you walked around and couldn’t find anyone to help you?
How did that make you feel? Unimportant?
As people turn to e-commerce, they expect to have the same customer service experience they get in person. That means you need to be available to answer questions and assist throughout the sales process.
There are plenty of live chat software to make this process simple. Leveraging chatbot automation, which answers common questions before connecting users to a live person, can also make it more affordable.
Your e-commerce strategy cannot revolve around you asking your customers to do things without making them feel like they’re getting the most for their time and money.
A great example of this is email marketing. We all know we need a lead magnet if we expect anyone to give us their email, right?
We’re getting to a point where just offering a product isn’t enough to make a sale.
You need to offer free shipping, free trials, fast shipping, bonus offers, and handwritten letters to drive sales.
Whatever you decide to offer, make sure it’s clear what you’re offering upfront so people can see the value before they click to buy.
This also extends to other areas of your site, such as:
You could be losing a lot of money due to poor product descriptions.
Want to know an easy fix?
As you write about a feature, think about the benefit for customers and center that in your copy.
Look at this example from Gillette:
Every feature is tied to a benefit.
They don’t just explain what it does. It’s a razor, we know what it does, but they explain how it will make you feel.
Here are a few other ways to improve your product pages:
Eighty-seven percent of video marketers say that video helped increase e-commerce traffic to their website.
I could do an entire guide on video e-commerce tips because that’s how important it is right now.
If you’re not embedding videos into your product pages, you’ll want to start right now.
As much as 80 percent of people say user-generated content impacts their purchasing decision.
User-generated content can be as simple as taking an image of a product in use that a reviewer left and putting it on your website.
People are more likely to trust you when they see other people enjoy your products. Here are a few other ways to leverage UGC:
If you don’t know what a customer persona is, you could miss out on one of the simplest e-commerce tips.
What is a buyer persona?
It’s essentially a representation of your customer. What do they do? How do they act? How do they think? What makes them click?
If you don’t have a specific avatar that you’re marketing to in your e-commerce business, you’re potentially leaving money on the table.
According to TrustedSite, lack of business legitimacy causes 50 percent of cart abandonments.
What are we talking about when we say legitimacy?
Trust.
As someone works through the purchase process, they might start to feel uneasy. Are you a real site, or a scam? Is the quality going to match their expectations?
How do you avoid mistrust?
Add trust signals to the process. These include:
Adding a video of yourself or someone in the business is another great way to show customers you’re a real business.
Here’s a stat that could drastically change your e-commerce revenue: 66 percent of consumers expect free shipping on every single online purchase.
These people expect you to pay the cost of shipping their products no matter how much they spend. You can thank Amazon for that.
That said, offering free shipping isn’t the revenue buster you think. As an added bonus, if you do everything else right on this list, you’ve likely secured yourself that customer.
There are a few ways to make free shipping work for you:
This e-commerce tip goes hand-in-hand with trust signals, but it’s important on its own.
E-commerce sites collect a lot of data about their customers, including onsite actions, banking or card information, addresses, and potentially even social security numbers on your website.
What are you doing to protect this information?
Here are a few ways to keep your customer’s information safe:
Make sure you let your customers know that you’re doing all of this. When asking them to input sensitive information, include all the steps you take to protect their data.
Influencer marketing is when you pair up with another brand or influencer to help them promote your products.
We see this frequently on platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram.
With the influencer marketing market growing to 16.4 billion in 2022, the potential is there.
Start reaching out to influencers in your niche and see if they sell endorsements. Send them free products to test out.
Dan-Os Seasoning is a great success story on TikTok, and now influencers all over the platform are using it in their cooking videos.
At this point, you’ve read through 20 e-commerce tips; all of which will help you drive more traffic to your site and convert at a higher rate.
If you want to succeed, you need to implement these strategies. However, not all strategies will work for every brand. Or they might work, but with a different approach.
For example, an e-commerce fashion website might get better results using influencers than a B2B manufacturing e-commerce company.
The only way to know is to research, test, and pivot. If something doesn’t work for your audience, try something new. It’s the only way to keep growing.
Visitors who leave your site without purchasing rarely complete the sale.
Urgency offers a compelling reason to complete the purchase now.
Maybe it’s “Act now! Quantities are low!” or “Buy now for free shipping!” or “This is a limited time offer!”
You can approach it from various angles, as long as the feeling of “don’t miss out on this” is created with your visitor.
Look at this example from American Apparel:
Right there in red font, they warn shoppers that they are about to run out of this item.
There are so many ways to create urgency through exclusivity and FOMO, including:
Many smaller e-commerce stores ignore one of their arsenal’s most accessible selling weapons: upselling.
There is a false impression that it isn’t worth the effort, but that’s not the case.
Upselling can increase average order value, which adds up over time.
The very first year that Amazon tested upselling on their platform, they increased sales by 35 percent.
Here are a few ways to increase upsells:
According to Nielsen, 63 percent of buyers like it when manufacturers offer new products. What does this mean for you as an e-commerce store owner?
You need to launch new products and make innovations in your industry regularly. The best e-commerce tip I can offer you is to focus on making a difference for people.
See what the competition is doing and figure out ways that you can take it to the next level.
If you don’t manufacture your products, there are still ways to innovate.
For example, if you’re selling home improvement products, perhaps you could find a way to bundle multiple items together? You could even create a bundle subscription box.
While this whole list of e-commerce tips focuses on how “not” to spend money, perhaps you could take whatever you would spend on paid ads and spend it somewhere else.
Spend it on outsourcing high-quality blog content, SEO strategy, or influencer marketing.
Every business should have a marketing budget regardless of how big or small it is. If you’re currently spending money on paid ads, think about what else you could do with that budget and experiment with other paid options.
Social media and influencer marketing are the two fastest ways to get more e-commerce traffic. Other methods like SEO are more of a long-term solution.
In years past, organic traffic had some of the highest rates of conversion simply because people are finding you naturally. This means you’re likely a solution to a problem the visitor has. It’s tough to put an exact number on this though because every business is different. However, you can succeed with nothing but paid traffic if your strategy allows for it.
There are many ways to track e-commerce traffic. You can use your site’s Google Search Console dashboard as well as tools like SimilarWeb and Ahrefs.
Organic traffic is website visitors that find your site without the use of paid advertisements, often by searching on sites like Google or Bing.
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As you read through these 25 e-commerce tips, which ones resonated with you the most? Do you feel more equipped to drive traffic to your store?
The most important thing to understand is that you don’t have to do all of these things perfectly, you just need to gradually implement them to see results.
Figure out what is currently wrong in your e-commerce store and identify the low-hanging fruit. Perhaps you simply need to ramp up blog content or update your checkout process. Most of those changes can be completed in a few days or weeks.
With all of these tips and tricks available to you, the possibilities are endless.
What are some of the ways you boost e-commerce sales without spending money on ads?
The number one search result on Google receives more than 39 percent of all clicks. This means if someone searches for your targeted keyword phrase, four out of ten people will click the first result and ignore everything else.
Imagine what an impact it would have on your business if you could rank first for a few of your desired phrases.
The goal of this guide is to help you understand the most important Google ranking factors so you can implement them on your website and get more traffic.
Google ranking factors are the elements of your website that the Google search algorithm takes into consideration when deciding what webpages to show in the search results for a given search query.
When someone searches for a phrase relevant to your business or service, you want them to find you and not your competition, right?
To truly understand how to get your website ranked in Google search results, you need to understand Google ranking SEO. There are hundreds of ranking factors, some of which can have a significant impact, while others matter less.
In this guide, we’ll cover the factors that matter most, so you know which SEO strategies to spend the most time and money on.
While the ROI on SEO can be a bit fuzzy, a study by Intergrowth gives it a little more clarity.
The first five organic results amount to 67.60 percent of all clicks. After that, the percentage of clicks drops to 3.73.
Let’s say you rank number one for a keyword with 1,000 searches per month at a 30 percent click-through rate. That would drive 300 new visitors to your site each month. If you convert only one percent of those visitors, it would still mean three new customers every month for a year.
Simply ranking number one on Google for a single keyword can bring 36 new customers per year to your business.
Implementing some of the steps in this guide to rank for a handful of keywords can have a significant impact.
Let’s take a look at some of the most important Google ranking factors so you can learn how to increase your SEO ranking on Google.
In the fourth quarter of 2021, mobile traffic accounted for 54.4 percent of global traffic. The majority of people surfing the web on their smartphone expect your site to work perfectly on their device, and if it doesn’t, they’ll likely bounce from your site.
This is why mobile friendliness is one of the most important Google ranking factors. If your site doesn’t function properly on mobile, Google is knocking you down a peg.
If you don’t believe me, you can read about it directly from Google. As of summer 2019, they began mobile-first indexing, which means your functionality on mobile is what determines your ranking. Desktop performance is second in importance.
To rank in the Google search results, you need to make sure your site functions the same on phones, tablets, and computers. Make sure the theme or template you select is mobile responsive. Next, ensure all your images are displayed clearly, check whether any words fall off the screen, and limit giant walls of text, which might look fine on desktop but on mobile can cover the entire screen.
Make sure the site loads properly by reducing the number of changing video URLs and limiting the amount of “lazy-load” content on your site.
Google introduced Core Web Vitals as yet another important ranking factor in May 2020. These refer to the overall health of your website in terms of the experience it provides for users.
The vitals are broken down into three categories:
A 2021 study revealed only four percent of websites scored well in all three Core Web Vitals categories.
Let’s break each of these down so you can understand how they impact your rankings.
Largest Contentful Paint: Google expects your site to completely load its first page within 2.5 seconds. This reduces the number of people who will click away, and it impacts Google ranking SEO.
You can improve your overall page loading speed by reducing the number of complex elements on your site, shortening pages, limiting redirects, and fixing any broken external or video links.
First Input Delay: Google expects your site to react quickly to users when they interact with something. You have 100 milliseconds or less for a button or window on your website to respond to a user when they click it.
The best way to improve FID is to use Page Speed Insights. To give you an example, I ran a test on neilpatel.com.
Cumulative Layout Shift: Google expects your site to load predictably and not change once it’s loaded. Have you ever clicked a link on a site as it’s loading, and then it jumps halfway down the page taking you to a different link? This factor plays into overall page experience, which is important for Google ranking SEO.
This occurs when items on the page load at different speeds resulting in layout changes. The best way to prevent this is by ensuring all images are the same size, new content isn’t inserted above old content, and animations load at the same speed.
According to SEMRush, 55 percent of brands experienced better results due to the improvements they made to their content.
There is no room on the internet for poor-quality content. I consider this one of the single most important Google ranking factors simply because it doesn’t require anything tricky or fancy. Write great, thorough, and value-rich content, and Google will work in your favor.
What do I mean by value-rich?
I mean write content people want to read, content that helps, and content that provides more than the competition. A great place to start is researching questions your customers have and creating content that provides the answers. To find common questions, use keyword research tools like Ubersuggest, question forums like Quora, and monitor chatter among your target audience on social media.
If you can create high-quality content that also incorporates the more technical elements we discuss in this guide, you have a great chance of improving your SEO and eventually, your bottom line.
Unfortunately, domain age is one of those Google ranking SEO factors you can’t necessarily control unless you’re purchasing seasoned domains.
Domain age refers to the amount of time your domain has been registered, and authority is essentially your reputation with Google.
Even though the “King of Search” John Mueller himself said domain age does nothing, I still have to believe it plays a role in your overall site authority.
If you want to improve your authority you need to focus on something called E-A-T, which stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
A few ways to improve your E-A-T score are involving subject matter experts and giving them bylines in your blog posts, including interviews and reviews by industry experts, leveraging social proof across your website, and increasing your website’s security.
Keep in mind that E-A-T isn’t a direct ranking factor, but it does impact SEO indirectly. In fact, after Google’s 2018 medic update, monthly traffic to YMYL sites with a lack of E-A-T dropped from 2 million to around 4,000 by 2020.
More than 90 percent of web pages receive no traffic, often because they don’t have any backlinks.
And yes, links are still important for Google ranking SEO. Inbound links, outbound links, and internal links are all important ranking factors because they increase the overall authority of your site and help your site prove itself as a valuable resource.
Inbound or “backlinks” are links that come from someone else’s site to your content. These increase authority by showing Google your content is so great that someone wants to link to it.
Outbound links show authority by providing additional relevant resources to visitors to your site. For example, you should be including outbound links to help readers learn more about something or back up any facts and stats you include in your content.
Internal links are links within your own website that tie ideas together. Having a web of internal links is crucial to Google ranking SEO because it shows Google you are a complete A to Z resource on a subject.
Bounce rate is one Google ranking factor that can significantly impact where Google ranks you in search results. One study found the average bounce rate is around 49 percent. Most believe a 50 to 60 percent bounce rate is acceptable. If your bounce rate drops much below that, it signals to Google that your page probably doesn’t give users what they’re looking for, meaning your page is less likely to appear in search results.
Click-through rate and dwell time are other important on-page experience Google ranking factors. They tell Google whether someone likes what they see when they click to your site from the search results for their search query.
You can improve your on-page experience metrics by ensuring your content aligns with your target keywords, metadata, and title tag. This ensures that when someone clicks through to your site, they get what they’re looking for.
Technical SEO is still an important Google ranking factor. Technical SEO includes things such as:
A study on technical SEO found the following:
Thankfully, technical SEO could be one of the easiest things to adjust on your website. Make sure you’re using relevant keywords in all headers and metadata. The key to doing this is having a quality keyword research tool that provides you with complex competitor data and keyword gaps. You can also run an SEO audit, and this guide explains how.
As for header tags, you want to ensure you’re using keywords in the headers of your articles whenever possible. When Google crawls your site, headers are a big indicator of what your article is about, and they’re important for overall Google ranking SEO.
Your meta description and title tag are what display in the SERPs when someone searches for a relevant keyword. You want to use keywords in both the meta and title tag—but make sure it’s natural and not forced.
While this study may be a bit dated, it still provides context to the importance of social media in SEO.
The graph and study performed by cognitiveSEO show how the number of social shares impact the overall ranking of a web page. As the shares go down, the ranking goes down. Of course, this factor alone won’t make a tremendous impact on your ranking, but in the heat of competition, this can set you apart.
Keep in mind that a social presence is also a significant trust factor. If visitors can find you on social media and see that you’re active and present, they may feel more inclined to purchase from you.
This Google ranking factor can be separated into three main categories:
These are three incredibly important factors going forward in Google ranking SEO. Google is paying much closer attention to the actual content that people are producing and putting a lot of weight on whether a website actually provides solutions to people or if they’re writing entirely for the search engine.
Surfer did an incredible case study and found that out of 37,000 keywords, about 12 percent of them changed intent, with many shopping-related keywords turning informational. This means that people who were once searching for something to buy are now searching for information to help them make a purchasing choice.
Think of content hubs as a destination where someone can come and find everything they need to know about a subject. If your site provides an exhaustive look into something, Google sees you as an authority. By creating these hubs on your website, you’re showing Google you can provide everything from A to Z.
This Google ranking factor is one I would consider somewhat new but falls into the category of trust signals. As more and more people turn to the internet for nearly everything, you need to translate the in-store experience to your website.
What does this mean? It means people are expecting to be able to pick up the phone and call you, they want to see where you’re based, and they expect you to be there to answer their questions in real-time.
Getting a Google Voice number, creating an “About Us” page with real pictures, and even adding an address to your website can help increase authority and show Google you’re a real business.
It’s been debated and tested time and time again, but it’s always proven that longer content performs better.
Longer content yields more social shares and more unique pageviews. Longer pieces of content also tend to hold their position longer.
Now, that doesn’t mean go and throw up a 15,000-word salad and expect it to rank. You still need to provide a ton of value, resources, and incredible information with those words. However, if you can put together a more comprehensive article that is longer than the competition, you have a better chance of ranking.
Where do we see Google ranking SEO going in the future? Based on experience and research, I see five main factors as most important in the coming years (Google also tells us these factors are important):
What do these five things tell us about what Google is looking for? Google wants you to provide users with a good experience when they land on your site.
This study performed by Content Science makes the importance of content relevancy clear as day. To sum it up, they state that while it’s great to have a lot of traffic on your site, and it looks good to Google, to actually generate goal completions, content relevance is key.
User experience and site functionality go hand-in-hand with content relevancy. No matter how great the content is on your site, you need to have a site that performs well and checks a lot of the technical boxes Google expects.
If you take a look at its mission statement page, it’s spelled out.
Our company mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. That’s why Search makes it easy to discover a broad range of information from a wide variety of sources.
I will always think that the key to Google ranking SEO is high-quality and valuable content.
While it’s not necessarily a list, it’s a solid explanation of what factors are most important. You can see the focus is primarily on user experience.
Improve your ranking by implementing all of the Google ranking factors in this guide.
There are likely hundreds if not thousands of factors ranging from small to large. Google has a rigorous process to determine what factors are most important.
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While there aren’t any foolproof ways to rank your content, adding these Google ranking factors can certainly increase your chances of ranking for your chosen keywords. Of course, hiring a qualified agency is another great way to rank higher.
If you’re going at it alone, you don’t have to do everything at once. Start with the most important factors and work your way down. It may take a while, but Google is a merciful and honest leader who rewards those who put in the work.
What factors do you think are most important for Google ranking SEO in the coming 5 to 10 years?
Pinterest is a great way to get your brand noticed online.
After all, the world’s 14th largest social network boasts around 454 million active monthly users.
Brands looking to boost performance on Pinterest should be keeping Pinterest image sizes in mind.
Certain image sizes are more likely to catch the eyes of Pinterest users, and it’s important to understand how size can impact Pinterest success.
The more attention you attract, the more potential web visitors you can convert.
To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of the best Pinterest image sizes for driving website traffic.
We’ll explore how different pins and sizing can impact traffic and how to use this information to boost your own Pinterest marketing.
You can leverage many different kinds of pins on Pinterest, from static pins to video ads. Each type of pin has a recommended aspect ratio from Pinterest itself.
Generally, vertical pins should be 1000 x 1500 pixels, or a 2:3 aspect ratio. Pinterest does not recommend images smaller than 600 x 900 pixels.
Pinterest also has specific recommended sizes from their ads manager, so be sure to check those before running any Pinterest ads.
You’ll want to use the correct image sizing so your images fit well without getting cut off.
The image below represents pins that meet the 2:3 aspect ratio Pinterest recommends.
The best Pinterest image size for your business depends on several factors, including the type and messaging in your pin images.
That means you should always test and measure pin traffic and conversions to figure out what works best.
There are plenty of tools to help with this, including the Pinterest Business Analytics Dashboard, which has a custom pin size tool within it.
There are currently eight sizes to choose from when creating pins:
Let’s explore how and why these Pinterest image sizes are used and how they work to drive traffic to your site.
Static pins are the most basic type of Pinterest image. They feature only one image and a few sentences that link your pin to your website.
While they may be simple, static pins are very SEO-friendly because they offer concise, relevant keywords that search engines pick up on.
They also provide clear calls to action and direct users to your website with a clickable link in the pin description.
While you might think using multiple images in one pin would be more engaging for users, if the pinner doesn’t have time to read all of your content, they might keep scrolling.
For this reason, static pins can be a great way to get instant traffic from Pinterest directly to your site.
The best Pinterest image size for static pins is 2:3 or 1000 x 1500 pixels. Anything larger than this risks being cut off in user feeds. Static pins work best with PNG or JPEG files at a maximum of 10 MB.
To create a high-performing static pin, be sure to keep your image and text short.
Pinterest users are often scrolling through their feeds quickly, so it’s important to have a clear image with relevant text.
Infographic pins are vertical Pinterest images that are uniquely visual and encourage users to click through on your content.
Vertical pins perform best on Pinterest, which makes infographics a strong contender for driving traffic.
Infographic pins are also easy to share across social media platforms, bringing in new audiences for your business.
That said, some users argue infographic pins can negatively impact your search rankings, as they become truncated in search.
How they perform for you will depend on individual factors, so there’s no harm in testing them to see how they perform for you.
The best size for a Pinterest image infographic is 1000 x 3000 with a Pinterest Pin ratio of 1:3. Infographic pins should be no larger than 600 x 2400 pixels.
Let’s look at the different types of infographic pins, and how to use them effectively.
First up are standard infographics which often feature text overlaid on top of a graphic or image. Although they may seem like an obvious choice, not all businesses have strong visual content that works well in this format. Business coaches, influencers, and wellness brands tend to see the most traffic with these pins.
Another option is to use a more complex and detailed image, such as one that features different colors or shapes alongside the text. For example, a retail store could create a gift guide as a long form infographic.
Finally, if you want the most pin-worthy content possible for infographics, try making them interactive. Interactive content is more eye-catching and can encourage users to share your pin, driving more traffic to your site.
Square pins are great for sharing images from your Instagram feed.
The best Pinterest image size for square pins is a 1:1 aspect ratio or 1000 x 1000 pixels. The maximum image file size of a square pin should be 20 MB.
Square pins allow you to share compact images that are relevant to your brand aesthetic and easy to share.
Although some people claim square pins get less engagement, other users say their likes, impressions, and clicks have improved with square pins.
Studies have shown the average user spends less than five seconds on a Pinterest page, so it’s critical your images and pin descriptions are concise and effective.
A clear title makes it easier for users to understand what they’re clicking into or scrolling past.
Square pins are easy to view on most devices, which is why they’re a great fit for social media platforms like Pinterest.
Plus, square Pinterest images work well when you need users to click through or check out your website or blog content.
To see if square pins work for you, run some tests and judge the results for yourself!
Long pins are typically used for blog content or articles, where users can scroll to read the entire text.
Long pins are great when you need people to click through and engage with your website content.
Long pins should use a Pinterest Pin ratio of 1:2.1 or 1000 x 2100 pixels.
If your long pin exceeds this recommended size limit, it may be cut off in user feeds.
If your long pin cannot meet this length, don’t worry! You can help users stay engaged by centering any text before the truncated portion. Once they click the image, they’ll be able to see the rest of your content.
Long pins work best for businesses that have articles or blog posts to share. For example, if you own a hairdressing or beauty salon, you could pin an article about how to take care of your hair type.
Another great use for long pins is if you’re selling products online. You could share a link with several different images that sends users through to the product page.
This allows users to see different views or angles of the product, so they can make an informed decision about what to purchase.
Carousel pins are a great way to show a lot of information in one pin.
For example, if you’re selling jewellery online and have several rings for sale from the same collection, carousel pins allow you to include up to five images per pin/item that users can scroll through.
The best Pinterest image size for carousel pins is 1000 x 2000 pixels and should be no more than three images in length. As well, carousel pins can be shown in either standard Pin Size (2:3) or Square Pins (1:1).
Carousel pins allow you to showcase multiple images with a short text description below each image. These are perfect for businesses that showcase events, recipes, tutorials or other content people want to scroll through.
These Pinterest image pins can help drive people directly to your online store, as they can see exactly what you’re selling and buying right from the pin. This is a great way to generate sales!
Outerwear brand REI found that carousel ads using Pinterest carousel pins increased their click-through-rate by 32 percent.
There are a few things to keep in mind when creating your Pinterest images so you can drive as much traffic back to your site as possible.
Include descriptive text on the image itself, including hashtags and relevant keywords. This is one of the most powerful ways you can increase website traffic from each pin’s click-through rate, as it helps your Pinterest page connect to search results across the internet.
This will also ensure your pins are easy to find when people search on Pinterest.
Next, include a link in the pin’s image description so when someone clicks it they can be taken back to your site with ease. You can also use copy to encourage them to click through again by including more text about what they will see if they do.
If you’re linking to your store, be sure to use product pins with clear, high quality images. Link the pin to a specific product with an easy-to-understand description that encourages viewers to purchase there or visit your website for more information.
Ensure your logo is displayed on every pin you create, but make sure it’s visible. Pinterest recommends avoiding the lower right corner as that area gets covered up by product icons.
Be sure to add alt text to all your images. This will help improve the SEO of your website and let Pinterest know what each image is about.
You can also pin images directly from your website or blog by adding a “Pin it” button on the page. By doing this, you won’t have to upload and crop each image as they will be sized automatically for Pinterest image requirements. (This also allows users to pin your images, which expands your reach.)
Lastly, monitor all of your pin impressions to see how you can improve your content. Different pins may bring in different results, so pay attention to what you pin to track how Pinterest impacts site traffic and conversions.
Different kinds of Pinterest images use different sizing, but Pinterest generally recommends a 2:3 aspect ratio, or 1000 x 1500 pixels limit.
The most popular pinned content on Pinterest is DIY and craft pins, entertainment, weddings, and holidays and events.
There are many ways to drive traffic to your website from Pinterest which can include keyword targeting, proper Pinterest image sizing, applying for Rich Pins, and creating strong visual content.
Pinterest is one of the leading sources of traffic for bloggers, sometimes even beating out SEO.
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When well optimized, Pinterest images can grow your audience and increase web traffic to your site.
By using the right Pinterest image sizes, optimizing your content, and tracking performance with Pinterest Analytics, you can transform your Pinterest page into a high-performing marketing tool.
Don’t forget to strengthen your Pinterest image strategy with strong SEO and impressive web design, to encourage new visitors to convert.
What Pinterest images work best for your brand?
As an entrepreneur, the move towards e-commerce and digital transformation shouldn’t pass you by. The good news is that as a brick-and-mortar business owner, you can promote your website to the foot traffic in and around your store to aid your online visibility and increase digital sales.
Perhaps your biggest advantage is you don’t need to spend quite so long building the relationships that turn people into buyers: you’ve already done that.
Shoppers coming into your store know you, trust you, and are more likely to purchase from you. Also, the surrounding foot traffic is at least familiar with your business, even if they haven’t bought anything from you yet.
Now comes the question: How do you turn your foot traffic into more digital sales?
Whether your website is fresh up or you’ve been running your website for some time, the techniques featured in this article are open to everyone.
First, let’s look at the two main different types of retail traffic along with their advantages and disadvantages.
When we talk about foot traffic, we mean the number of people coming into your store and those who walk nearby. It has always been an important measure of retail success, and naturally, the more foot traffic an area has, the more chances there are to make sales.
Each type of traffic has its pros and cons.
With regular foot traffic, the advantages are it:
However, there are also disadvantages to foot traffic. The most significant disadvantage is the decline. According to RetailNext, recent Black Friday figures were down 48 percent, and this is a trend that’s likely to continue as more consumers turn to e-commerce.
There are other disadvantages too, such as:
Consumers who use e-commerce benefit from the convenience and special offers available online. However, the growth in online sales is good for website owners too.
The main advantages of online traffic include:
Disadvantages of online traffic include:
No store owner can afford to ignore the potential of digital sales. E-commerce has dominated the retail sector for years now, and that’s not going to change, according to forecasts.
According to statistics, e-commerce sales are likely to reach 563.4 billion dollars by 2025, and your online business can benefit from this surge.
You’ve got customers coming into your store every day. Make sure they know about your website and social media presence by advertising your digital channels around the store.
Don’t go too crazy, though.
There’s no need for giant banners with “find us online @” written on them. Instead, be a little more discreet. For instance, you could:
Also, if you have any special internet offers, promote them through in-store advertising and handing out promotional materials. Add an incentive to spur interest.
Many people have two things in common: they love a bargain and have a fear of missing out (FOMO). According to the stats:
FOMO is a proven psychological tactic for driving sales. That’s why offering online-only items or special discounts can be an effective profit booster for your business, especially when you include a time limit on the offers.
E-commerce companies like Sleeknote use this approach, creating a sense of urgency to get consumers to sign up.
Another benefit of this approach is that buyers are only too keen to tell their friends and families about the great deal they got. This could mean even more visitors to your digital platforms.
When doing this kind of promotion, be sure to spread the word among your offline customers with leaflets or small cards and a promotion code so you can track your campaign’s success.
One deal-breaker for consumers is shipping costs. Eighty-two percent of shoppers hate them and prefer free shipping overpaid expedited options.
To overcome this obstacle, why not offer a free shipping discount code?
Once customers get to your website, sign up and register, it’s easier to engage them and build relationships by sending targeted offers. They also get to realize the benefits of online shopping.
If it makes sense, you could also offer free shipping on orders of a minimum value for future orders to further engage and encourage your customers to purchase.
Sometimes customers just need a nudge. They might have meant to check out your business on social media but just haven’t got around to it yet.
What can you do to get buyers to visit your social media platforms? You create incentives. They can be in the form of coupons, freebies, contests, and prizes.
You could also offer points or a percentage off if your customer shares your social media pages with others or gets a friend to sign up to your digital channels.
Let’s go back to FOMO just for a moment.
Arguably, FOMO has done a lot to keep the retail industry alive, especially on major shopping occasions, like Black Friday.
E-commerce store owners often use FOMO to secure more sales, and there are multiple other ways you can use it in your marketing campaigns.
By offering exclusive online-only products, you’re giving shoppers the reason they need to head to your website and sign up.
However, FOMO has a downside, too.
It can lead to impulsive buying by consumers. That’s not what you or your business needs: you want customers that keep coming back for more.
Also, it could be damaging to the overall customer experience, so use this strategy with care.
If another local store has a product that complements yours, then you may find cross-promoting each other’s products/services is mutually beneficial.
For example, an organic store selling nutritious foods and natural skincare products could pair with a local beauty salon or a gym.
You promote their online offerings and digital platforms in your store, and they do the same in their premises.
Perhaps take this a step further and collaborate with other local store owners to create a co-branded coupon with local businesses’ online details.
This approach can reach a broader scope of foot traffic, potentially leading to more visitors to your website and increased digital sales.
In-store promotions have been around for years, and they’re a staple of retail marketing. The goal of in-store promotion is to:
By creating a buzz, an in-store promotion attracts foot traffic from regular customers and possibly from passersby.
These events give consumers the chance to visit a store, check out products, and get to know you. They also give you the opportunity to promote your online channels and give out promotional materials directing people to your website.
Additionally, in-store promotions help with word of mouth, build customer loyalty, and you also have some flexibility regarding the style of the event.
Depending on what you want to achieve, your promotion could be:
Alternatively, you could take the Ikea approach and create a bring a friend event. Ikea asked people to “like” their Facebook page if they wanted to access the special offers only available to attendees who brought a friend along.
You can use such events to promote your store in other ways too. For example, you could invite visitors to take pictures or videos and share them on your digital channels to promote your brand further online.
Go wider and make the most of the foot traffic outside of your door. Flyers are one of the oldest forms of advertising, and they still work.
Hand out flyers to passersby highlighting your special deals and internet-only products to passersby. However, be sure to check if it’s permissible locally before you do.
You can then use this as an opportunity to introduce yourself to potential customers and tell them about your business and the advantages of buying from you online.
You can also:
Finally, offer discounts to anyone that signs up and include a code for people to use so you can track success.
You can use your website to attract extra foot traffic for a further business boost. Consider inviting people to buy online and pick up in-store, providing in-store redeemable coupons, and offering in-store exchanges and returns.
You can add codes to any flyers, cards, or other promotional materials that you put out or ask customers how they found you when they registered online.
By using signage, introducing a loyalty program, marketing, and social media. However, remember that these tactics take time, so they may not increase your foot traffic immediately.
The more foot traffic you have, the greater the opportunity for engagement and sales, helping boost your revenues.
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As a store owner, you’re in the unique position to start sending customers directly to your website to increase your digital sales.
You don’t need to rely on them finding you by chance, and you don’t have to take so much time building trust because these buyers already know you.
That gives you a perfect chance to start actively promoting your website to the foot traffic in and around your store.
There are plenty of strategies you can use to do this. For example, offering incentives to get consumers to sign up to your social channels, holding in-store promotions to highlight online-only products and give demonstrations, and advertising your store on your packaging materials and receipts.
Are you a store owner? How do you get your foot traffic to find you online?
SEO can be a brilliant strategy to increase your website traffic but it isn’t always enough.
Imagine you rely on SEO for all your traffic. What happens when the Google algorithm changes? You risk losing potential customers!
That’s why diversifying your methods of increasing web traffic can offer better results. If you have multiple traffic sources, changing algorithms won’t completely halt your business. You will have a toolkit full of optimization strategies to keep your business running. Diversifying your web traffic can also be helpful in cases where there’s little scope for search engine optimization (for example, podcasts).
In this post, we’re going to look at effective strategies to grow your website traffic without SEO so you’re never left stranded by algorithm changes again. We’ll also look at practical tips you can start using right now, so you can get back in the game if your traffic has been low for a while.
You can generate substantial traffic from SEO alone, but not all traffic is equal. High-quality traffic (that includes users more likely to convert) offers better ROI, so you need to prioritize it.
Plus, if you aren’t an SEO expert, you may want to focus on other strategies to grow your website traffic efficiently.
This doesn’t mean you completely ignore SEO. All websites, irrespective of their niche, must follow the best SEO practices to avoid being penalized by Google and to ensure the site gets indexed.
The strategies we’ll discuss below can be a helpful addition to a pre-existing SEO plan.
If you have been reading about digital marketing for a while, you must have heard the term “content marketing.” In simple words, it’s a way to organically advertise your brand through high-quality content.
Content marketing strategies often include blog posts, podcast episodes, infographics, YouTube videos, downloadable PDFs, etc.
For instance, Toggl, a time tracking software company frequently uploads informative blog posts and research data about productivity, work-life, and career.
This attracts users interested in time management, productivity, and wellbeing in the workplace. When they read Toggl’s blog, they eventually discover Toggl’s time tracking app, among its other productivity tools. Some of these users convert, helping Toggl increase their website traffic and ROI.
Content marketing isn’t limited to blog posts. If you connect better through audio, you can try launching a podcast or host a webinar.
Nowadays, most social media apps let you post a variety of content formats including photos, audio clips, long-form text, and videos. You can experiment with one or more of these formats to see what works best for your audience.
Content marketing is beneficial but it can take a lot of money, especially if you’re paying established writers to create original, well-researched posts for you.
Most of these projects also take weeks or months to show results, which isn’t a practical timeline for many businesses.
If you want quicker results with a budget you can control, why not try paid ads?
Seven in ten Americans use social media today. That’s more than two-thirds of the population. Think about the possibilities!
Paid ads can instantly generate hundreds, if not thousands, of clicks to your website. Plus, with new advertising and social media platforms appearing and innovating regularly, getting your ads in front of the right people is becoming easier than ever.
For example, Facebook offers detailed customer personas and multiple targeting options so you can put your business in front of your target customers without wasting a lot of money on mass advertising.
However, you don’t have to stick to the largest platforms for effective advertising. In fact, advertising on lesser-known platforms whose audience aligns with your products can be more effective in the long run.
For example, if your ideal customer includes teens who enjoy memes and weird stories, you’d have much better results by advertising on Reddit, rather than Facebook or YouTube.
Another option is dating apps. If your brand is focused on relationships or if you’re targeting young singles, advertising on dating apps like Tinder can help you find your target customers faster.
If you’re worried paid ads will take a lot of money, remember, you don’t need to spend $1,000 on your first day.
Test the waters with $5-$10 a day and see what happens. Do that for a week, just to learn how different media platforms work.
One of the best ways to increase your website traffic is to meet your customers where they like to hang out. Like we discussed earlier, almost everyone is using social media today. Ramping up your social media marketing efforts can help you reach new users, develop brand awareness and increase website traffic.
How to gain website traffic through social media?
When it comes to social media, you can’t just barge into “conversations” and ask people to buy something from you or to visit your website.
Think about how you’d present your brand in real life when you meet an individual for the first time. Would you immediately talk sales in their face? How about providing details about your product/service without introducing yourself first?
Remember, users visit their preferred social media platforms for entertainment, not for being sold to.
To make sure your efforts are well-received, you need to provide value first and develop positive relationships with your potential “followers.”
You can do this by sharing informative posts like How-Tos, or posting fun photos of your employees, like this post from Casper.
I wrote a detailed guide to increasing social media followers and boosting engagement. Here’s a summary of the top options to help you grow your website traffic.
When marketing teams talk about SEO, link building frequently comes to mind. When reputable websites link to your content, the algorithm favors your website and increases its rank on the search page.
Sounds helpful, but that’s not all.
Did you know link building can help you increase web traffic without relying on SEO?
Link building for brand awareness is a process where you focus your strategies on expanding your reach, putting your content in front of new users, and generating conversations around your brand.
This is more than just a casual backlink in a blog post. Link building for brand awareness takes more planning and resources, but the investment is worth the high-quality leads you’ll get.
Here are some tips for developing effective link building strategies to increase website traffic:
Guest blogging is an effective traffic-driving strategy aimed at leveraging somebody else’s audience to widen your brand’s reach.
Think about it: Somebody in your niche has a large, engaged following. Imagine if you could put your content in front of them. How much traffic could you drive to your website!
Why would someone publish your work?
Probably because you’re good at what you do.
Everyone is looking for high-quality content. If you can provide a well-researched, helpful post for free, people are often open to publishing it on their website. After all, it’s benefiting their audience at zero cost.
Why would you give precious content away for free?
It’ll help you gain access to hundreds, if not thousands of new users, many of whom could become long-term customers.
It’s a win-win situation, but you have to be careful how you approach it.
Start by searching for blogs and media publications that publish content relevant to your business. For example, if you run a recruiting company, publish content on business blogs read by people interested in the latest recruiting practices.
If you want to find blogs in your industry that are accepting guest posts, use the following search queries to see more specific results:
Solvid provides a comprehensive list of places accepting guest blogs:
In addition, research online biographies of specific companies and bloggers. More often than not, their web profiles contain a handy list of sites where they’ve been invited to guest post. That’s a plethora of most fitting guest blog opportunities presented to you on a silver platter.
Then, send a request. Most websites will have publication guidelines you can follow. Follow these instructions carefully to increase your chances of publication.
There’s also the option of using blog comments as a way to generate traffic to your site.
In the past, I have managed to generate $25,000 as a result of 249 comments.
How exactly do you go about using comments to generate traffic?
When leaving a comment, make sure you are adding something worthwhile to the discussion.
There is no use in leaving comments like “Awesome post!” or “Nice website!”
If someone posts a question, make sure you take the time to answer thoughtfully.
This showcases your expertise in the given niche and will encourage someone reading to click on your name and be taken through to your site.
If you read an article on a subject you don’t know very well, it would be imprudent to voice your own thoughts as fact. In this situation, you should simply ask questions. Then the website owner would be able to elaborate more on complex topics or complicated sections.
If you’re knowledgeable about a subject, feel free to contribute (e.g., suggest something, recommend a solution, answer a question). If you’re a novice, it’s best to ask questions. Powerful questions can bring you website traffic by encouraging blog readers to check you out.
Avoid embedding links in your comments. It comes off as a wretched attempt to plant your flag on someone’s lawn.
It’s okay to use your website’s link in the URL field when entering your name and email address, but your comment needs to add to the conversation or challenge an idea without lazy attempts at driving traffic to your blog.
Refrain from using the name of your business as your “commenting name.” Use your actual full name instead.
Using a random or fake name is a missed opportunity to build strong branding because your brand actually starts with your name. In fact, failing to use your full name will reduce your chances of the website owner approving your comment.
If you read a few posts on digital marketing, email marketing would be mentioned in most of them. That’s because it’s still one of the most efficient ways to increase website traffic.
One study suggests email generates $36 for every $1 spent, offering a shocking 3,600 percent ROI. What more could you ask for?
Email marketing lets you reach potential customers directly. It’s an ideal platform for building long-term relationships for improved customer loyalty. You can post questions, ask for feedback, introduce soft sales, and persuade customers for the “big buy.”
Here are some tips for effective email marketing to increase website traffic:
Ramping up your social media marketing efforts to increase website traffic is useless if you offer poor customer service.
According to a survey, 42 percent of customers said they bought more after pleasant customer service experiences.
Think about it: Users complain on social media, you offer a prompt and polite response. What happens? The person starts respecting your brand.
Even when users complain privately via email, it’s important to offer the best possible service so they come back for more.
How can you offer great customer service?
If you consistently provide great customer service, you can request users to review your brand.
Platforms like Trustpilot and Yelp can be great for building positive reviews. Many users consult these websites before making a purchase decision, so having a solid profile can help improve your reputation.
Yes. You can use a combination of social media marketing strategies and content marketing techniques to increase website traffic without SEO.
Guest blogging, posting on social media, and requesting user-generated content are some of the most effective ways to increase website traffic for free.
You can use techniques like guest blogging and content marketing to engage audiences without relying on any agency.
Working on improving your social media strategies can help you connect with new users, develop brand awareness and drive organic traffic relatively fast.
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You shouldn’t only rely on search engines to increase website traffic. Algorithm changes and SEO techniques become outdated quickly.
The strategies we discussed today can help you create a comprehensive digital marketing plan to increase website traffic effectively.
Whether you use one of these tactics in isolation, or you use all of them together, they can transform the way you attract customers.
Which traffic-driving strategy will you try today?
Ultimate guides are everywhere. You’ve probably read your fair share, and maybe you’ve even written a couple.
They can be a great way to get traffic, build links, and increase your authority, but they’re far from easy to create. The issue most people run into is the sheer amount of content out there nowadays. How do you create an ultimate guide if there are already tons of posts on your chosen subject?
In this post, we’ll look at the steps to creating the ultimate guide on just about anything.
What turns a lengthy blog post into an ultimate guide? Well, there are a few things that almost every in-depth guide has in common:
Apart from that, what you put in your ultimate guide and how you design it is up to you.
If you didn’t know how powerful ultimate guides are already, here’s why you should start creating them right now.
The length, depth, and authority that go into ultimate guides make them a fantastic weapon in your SEO arsenal. The fact that they are so detailed means they should rank for a huge number of keywords. Including internal links to your other blog posts boosts their rankings, too.
A big, in-depth resource like an ultimate guide can be a fantastic source of links. Not only can you use it to go out there and request a backlink as part of your link-building process, but other sites naturally start linking to an authoritative resource, too. So much so that your ultimate guide can continue to attract links for years to come.
There are few pieces of marketing collateral better at positioning your brand as an authority in your industry than an ultimate guide. This is your opportunity to showcase how much you know about your subject to the world and go above and beyond what has previously been written about your topic.
Picking a topic can be a huge stumbling block for many aspiring writers. Don’t get bogged down overthinking it, though. Here’s how you can find the perfect topic quickly.
This first point is obvious, but it needs to be said. You need to know your topic inside and out if you want to write an excellent guide. That doesn’t mean you can’t use a freelance writer to help you out, but you should give them a thorough brief and create the outline of the guide yourself.
Not every guide needs to be written with the express purpose of ranking in Google, but it can seriously help drive traffic and generate customers. That’s why I recommend you enter your topic ideas into a tool like Ubersuggest to see the keyword volumes of the main topic and the volumes of every other related keyword.
Don’t just pick the topic that has the main keyword with the highest search volume, however. You may find another topic has so many more related keywords that it could actually generate more traffic overall.
Ultimate guides are successful when they’re written about trending topics. When people are excited about a topic, they want to consume all the information they can find about it. Your guide should be a part of that, too.
That’s not the only reason you want to focus on what’s trending, though. The newer your post is, the better it might do in search results if someone is searching by posts made within the last week, month, and so on.
With your topic picked, it’s time to get to work creating your guide. Here’s how I recommend you go about it.
Even if you’re an expert in your field, you’ll still want to read blog posts on your topic before you start writing. Doing so will help you understand the level of content currently out there, the common threads writers pull, and the things you need to mention.
Pay attention to the results that Google serves up, too. You’ll find that specific formats are more popular than others, and you’ll want to try to mirror these when it comes to writing your content.
While you’re reading other people’s content, make a note of everything that’s missing from the posts. If you’re writing a how-to post, be sure to go through the steps yourself after reading posts by others.
Then, jot down things you notice during the process that others might have missed or not explained thoroughly. It also might help to sit down with someone who is unfamiliar with your topic and see what questions they come up with.
You can write an ultimate guide off the back of your expertise alone—but you can make it stand head and shoulders above everyone else’s content if you conduct your research.
For some, this is a case of canvassing their colleagues and contacts for their opinion on a certain topic. Others might want to commit to more detailed research and partner with a market research company that’ll carry out a study on their behalf.
The more effort you put into the research, the more valuable and link-worthy your ultimate guide will become.
To create your ultimate guide, simply combine the basics plus the additional details you found were missing from other posts and your research. This way, people coming across your guide as the first piece of content they have read about a topic will get all of the basic information, and people who have read many other guides will be wowed by all of the missing pieces that you included.
An ultimate guide is no good if no one reads it. Considering the amount of time and energy you have spent on your ultimate guide, you owe it to yourself and your readers to promote it well. Do so by:
If you want to take your ultimate guide to the next level, bear in mind these four tips when writing.
You don’t have to be Hemingway to write a great ultimate guide, but take a lesson from Ernest regarding clarity. Short, clear, punchy sentences win out here, especially when writing thousands of words on your topic. Long, convoluted paragraphs may help you get your message across, but they’ll only cause the reader’s mind to wander.
Formatting will also help in this regard. Clearly labeled titles and subheadings will make your guide much more digestible. Short paragraphs will, too. Don’t forget that most of your audience will be reading your advice on a screen, so consider how they might skim it for the information they’re looking for.
One thing I sometimes find missing from other ultimate guides is good screenshots. Take yours using your account of the topic as opposed to generic stock photos. This will make it easier for others to follow along and visualize the process.
Once you have the basics and missing pieces down for your ultimate guide, look for some good examples of your tips in action. If you’re talking about creating great timeline cover photos, then include some examples from pages in different industries.
If you’re talking about using Pinterest to drive traffic, then link to top Pinterest users who are doing things right. Think about your target audience and find examples that they can easily relate to so they feel they must follow your advice to be successful.
There is a lot of advice out there suggesting you should take long posts and break them up into a series, so you can get people to come back to your website over and over again. However, I find that if someone hits a piece of content that says 101 Tips on ___, and the post only includes steps 1–20 with the promise of more to come, they move on to find everything they’re looking for elsewhere.
People want to consume information now, not wait for it. When they read the words ultimate guide, they’re going to expect to get everything in one chunk, so unless you are planning to write 5,000+ words on a topic, keep it in one piece.
There are a lot of great ultimate guides out there, but here are some of my all-time favorites.
If you’re looking to grow your startup, I’m pretty sure you’ll get a huge amount of value out of my ultimate guide on the topic.
With 12 chapters and virtually every angle covered, there’s no reason to read another guide before creating your logo.
If you’ve ever wondered why shoppers are leaving your website at checkout, this mammoth guide by VWO will answer all your questions.
Ultimate guides don’t have to be about marketing, as this guide by Eevi Jones proves.
While Tim Urban hasn’t called this an ultimate guide, you’re unlikely to find a more thoughtful or detailed blog post on picking a career anywhere online.
This blog post isn’t exhaustive by any means. If you want to dive deep into creating high-quality long-form content, then check out these five resources:
You don’t have to write your ultimate guide yourself. If you’re hiring a freelance writer to write your guide for you, here’s how you can create a spec they can follow with ease.
A top-level overview can help a writer quickly get to grips with the topic and goals of the ultimate guide.
Take the initiative and write an outline that includes all of the major points you want the writer to talk about. This makes sure all of the gaps you identified in other pieces of content get covered.
If improved rankings are one of your main goals, then highlight the keywords you’re aiming to rank for.
Where appropriate, make notes for the writer to help guide them. Alternatively, you can record yourself talking about the topic.
Highlight a handful of top-quality resources your writer can turn to for inspiration.
Expect an ultimate guide to take a fair bit longer to write than a standard blog post.
There isn’t a defined length for an ultimate guide, but most are at least 3,000 words in length.
You can use social media and email to get your ultimate guide in front of your target audience.
Absolutely. Ultimate guides offer a lot of value in terms of SEO and building your authority, so you should write as many as you can.
Ultimate guides can be used at any part of your funnel, but they’ll be most useful towards the top. They are great at attracting users into your funnel and converting them to email subscribers.
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Ultimate guides are an incredibly valuable marketing resource. I’ve used them to generate huge levels of traffic, build my reputation as an authority in the industry, and improve my site’s SEO.
Follow the advice I’ve given above, and you’ll be on your way to achieving your content goals while sharing valuable insights about your chosen topic.
Have you created an ultimate guide on your website or blog? What other tips would you add to making your ultimate guide a success?
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There are a lot of tools out there and a ton of SEO reports.
But when you use them, what happens?
You get lost, right?
Don’t worry, that’s normal (sadly). And maybe one day I will
be able to fix that.
But for now, the next best thing I can do is teach you how to grow your SEO traffic using Ubersuggest. This way, you know exactly what to do, even if you have never done any SEO.
Here we go…
Head over to the Ubersuggest dashboard and
register for a free account.
Once you do that, I want you to click on “Add Your First Project.”
Next, add your URL and the name of your website.
Then pick the main country or city that you do business in. If you are a national business, then type in the country you are in. If you are a local business, type in your city and click “Next.”
If you do business in multiple countries or cities, you can type them in one at a time and select each country or city.
Assuming you have your site connected to Google Search Console, you’ll see a list of keywords that you can automatically track on the left-hand side. Aside from tracking any of those, you can track others as well. Just type in the keywords you want to track in the box and hit the “Enter” key.
After hitting the “Next” button, you will be taken to your dashboard. It may take a minute but your dashboard will look something like this:
Click on the “Tracked Keywords” box and load your website profile.
What’s cool about this report is that you can see your rankings
over time both on mobile and desktop devices. This is important because Google
has a mobile index, which means your rankings are probably slightly different
on mobile devices than desktop.
If you want to see how you are ranking on Google’s mobile index, you just have to click the “Mobile” icon.
The report is self-explanatory. It shows your rankings over time for any keyword you are tracking. You can always add more keywords and even switch between locations.
For example, as of writing this blog post, I rank number 4 on desktop devices for the term “SEO” in the United States. In the United Kingdom, though, I rank number 16. Looks like I need to work on that. 😉
What’s cool about this report is you can drill down on any
keyword and track your rankings over time. For example, here’s what my site
looks like now…
The purpose of this report is to track your SEO progress. If you are heading in the right direction, your rankings should be going up over time.
Sure, some weeks your rankings will be up and other weeks it
will be down, but over time you should see them climb.
Once you have created your first project, it’s time to improve your rankings.
Let’s first start off by going to the “Site Audit” report. In the navigation, click on the “Site Audit” button.
Once you are there, type in your URL and click the “Search” button.
It can take a few minutes to run the report, but once it is
done it will look something like this.
Your goal is to optimize your site for as high as an SEO score as possible. Ideally, you want to be reaching for 90 or higher.
Keep in mind that as you add more pages to your site and it gets bigger, it will be increasingly harder to achieve a 90+ score. So, for sites that have more than a few hundred pages, shoot for a score that is at least 80.
As you can see above, I’m getting close to the 80 mark, so I’ll have to get my team to go in and fix some of my errors and warnings.
When looking at this report, you’ll want to fix your critical errors first, then your warnings if you have time. Eventually, you want to consider fixing the recommendations as well.
Click on “Critical Errors” if you have any. If not, click on the Warnings” option. You’ll see a report that looks something like this:
Your errors are probably going to be different than mine, but your report will look similar.
Click through on the first issue on the report and work your way down. The report sorts the results based on impact. The ones at the top should be fixed first as they will have the highest chance of making an impact on your traffic.
If you aren’t sure of what to do or how to fix the issue, just click on the “What Is This” and “How Do I Fix It” prompts.
Again, you will want to do this for all of your critical
errors and warnings.
Once you do that, go back to the “Site Audit” report and scroll down to where you see your site speed results.
Your goal should be to get an “Excellent” ranking for both mobile and desktop devices. If you are struggling to do this, check out Pagespeed Insights by Google as it will give you a detailed explanation of what to fix.
If you are like me, you probably will need someone to help
you out with this. You can always find a developer from Upwork and pay them 50 to 100 dollars to fix
your issues.
After you fix your errors, you’ll want to double-check to make sure you did them right. Click on the “Recrawl Website” button to have Ubersuggest recrawl your site and double-check that the errors were fixed correctly.
It will take a bit for Ubersuggest to recrawl your website
as it is going through all of your code again.
By now you have probably heard the saying that “content is king.”
In theory, the more content you have, the more keywords you will have on your site and the higher the chance that you’ll rank on Google for more terms.
Of course, the content needs to be of high quality and people have to be interested in that topic. If you write about stuff that no one wants to read about, then you won’t get any traffic.
Now, I want you to go to the “Traffic Analyzer Overview” report.
Put in a competitor’s URL and you will see a report that
looks something like this.
This report shows the estimated monthly visitors your competition is receiving from search engines, how many keywords they are ranking for on page 1 of Google, their top pages, every major keyword they rank for, and the estimated traffic each keyword drives to their site.
I want you to go to the “Top Pages” section and click the button that says “View The Pages That Drive Traffic To This Domain.”
You’ll be taken to the “Top Pages” report.
Here, you will see a list of pages that your competition has on their site. The ones at top are their most popular pages and as you go down the list you’ll find pages that get less and less traffic.
Now I want you to click “View All” under “Estimated Visits” for the top page on your competition’s site.
These are the keywords that the page ranks for.
And you’ll also want to click “View All” under links to see who links to your competition.
Save that list by exporting the results (just click the export button) or by copying them.
I want you to repeat this process for the top 10 to 20 pages for each of your main competitors. It will give you an idea of the keywords that they are going after that drive them traffic.
Next, I want you to click on the “Keywords” navigation link under the “Traffic Analyzer” heading.
You’ll see a list of all of the keywords your competitor ranks for and how much traffic they are getting for those keywords.
This list will give you an idea of the keywords that your
competition is targeting.
Now, by combining the data you saw from the “Top Pages” report and the data you got from the “Keywords” report, you’ll now have a good understanding of the type of keywords that are driving your competition traffic.
I want you to take some of those keywords and come up with
your own blog post ideas.
You can come up with ideas to blog on using a few simple
reports in Ubersuggest.
The first is the “Content Ideas” report. In the navigation bar, click on the “Content Ideas” button.
I want you to type in one of the keywords your competition
is ranking for that you also want to rank for.
For example, I rank for “SEO tips.” If you want to rank for that term, you would type that into the content ideas report and hit the “Search” button.
You’ll then see a list of blog posts that have done well on that topic based on social shares, backlinks, and estimated visits.
It takes some digging to find good topics because ideally, a post should have all 3: social shares, backlinks, and estimated visits.
When you find a good one, click “View All” under “Estimated Visits” to see the keywords that the post ranks for.
If you write a similar post, you’ll want to make sure you include these keywords.
And you’ll want to click “View All” under links to see who links to your competition. Keep track of this as you will use it later. You can do this by copying the list or by clicking on the export button.
You can also get more ideas by going to the keyword ideas report. So, in the navigation bar, click on the “Keyword Ideas” button.
From there, type in keywords related to what your competition ranks for and you will see a list of long-tail suggestions that are similar.
You can also click on the “Related” link in that report to see a bigger list of related keywords.
And you can click on “Questions,” “Prepositions,” and “Comparisons” to see even more keyword and blog post ideas.
Typically, the more search volume a keyword has the more
traffic you’ll get when you write about it.
Now that you have a list of keywords and topic ideas, it’s time for you to write and publish your content.
If you are new to writing blog posts, watch the video below. It breaks down my writing process.
I wish SEO was as simple as fixing errors and writing content based on popular keywords but it isn’t.
Remember how I had you create a list of sites that link to your competition?
You know, the ones you got from the “Top Pages” and “Content Ideas” reports.
I want you to start emailing each of the sites linking to your competition and ask them to link to you. See if someone else is linking to your competition. If they are, it shows you that they don’t mind linking to sites in your space. This means that there is a good chance you can convince them to link to you as well.
You’ll have to browse around their site to find their email. But once you do, send off a personal message explaining why your content will provide value to their readers and how it is different/better than what they are currently linking to.
In addition to that, I want you to go to the “Backlinks” report. In the navigation bar, click on the “Backlinks” option.
In this report, I want you to type in your competitor’s domain. You’ll see a report that looks like this:
You’ll be able to see their total link count, link growth over time, and, most importantly, a list of sites linking to your competition.
Now type in a URL of a blog post that your competition has written and that you know is popular (do this in the search bar). Next to it, in the search bar, change the drop-down to “URL” and click the “Search” button.
Once the report is done loading, you’ll see a new list of links pointing to that specific URL on your competition’s site.
I want you to do the same thing. Reach out to all of those
URLs and ask for a link as well.
When doing this, you’ll find that a lot of people will ignore you but you need to think of it as sales. You need to follow up and try to convince people. The more links you get, the higher your rankings will climb in the long run.
Even if you only convince 5 people out of 100 that you
email, it is still not bad as something is better than nothing.
My goal with Ubersuggest wasn’t to create too many reports, but instead, make the tool easy to use so you can generate more search traffic.
And as your rankings and traffic climb, you’ll see within your Ubersuggest dashboard how things are going.
What’s beautiful about this is that it will crawl your site automatically once you create a project. This way, when new SEO errors appear, Ubersuggest will notify you.
So, are you ready to improve your SEO traffic? Go to Ubersuggest and create a project.
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