How to Use Your Network to Leverage SEO

Emily Carter

Sometimes, a site needs a little bit more than your average page-title-meta-description-alt-tag ditty. There are certain instances where a site might need extra leverage in order to increase their organic search traffic. You might find yourself in this situation if:

• You’re launching a new site or blog and traffic hasn’t boomed yet.
  
• You’ve reached a plateau in your SEO efforts and need to ratchet it up a notch.
  
• You get a decent amount of traffic to your site, but it’s not your target audience so your leads are not marketing qualified.

If you already have completed an SEO project, your page titles, meta descriptions, image alt tags, URL structure, and website content will already be looking great. How can a business further increase their organic traffic if their site is already well optimized?

The answer lies within your company or personal network. So simple! Networking, obviously. Here are three ways to leverage your network to increase the organic traffic to your website or blog:

1. Create a Resources page on your website: Does your company frequently work with other businesses, either as a partnership or as a customer-merchant relationship? Maybe you are one step in a supply chain with many different pieces. Consider creating a Resources page and listing out the other companies that you work with. Include a link back to their websites and show them what you’ve made. Encourage them to make one as well, and include a link back to your site too! This way, you can benefit from their website traffic as well. Some examples of this could be:
   
   
   
   1. An agency creating a clients page,
      
   2. A stone manufacturer creating a page for the contractors they work with, or
      
   3. A Certified Senior Advisor listing the assisted living facilities that they refer people to.
   
   
2. Guest Blog: Similar to the suggestion above, you should look for opportunities to leverage other websites’ traffic. One great way of doing this and exposing yourself to a new pool of people is through guest blogging. Search for popular industry blogs and reach out to them. Send them a sample of your writing and let them know that you would be willing to write content for their site. If they post a guest blog from you, ask them to link back to your site. This method can be highly effective, but takes time. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t have any bites for the first few times you try this out. Diligence is key!
   
3. Use LinkedIn to your advantage: LinkedIn is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site via networking. Assuming that you’ve already done your due diligence, you are connected to people you know and do business with. You also have joined relevant industry-related groups. Whenever you post new content to your website, share it with those people! LinkedIn groups are the best way to drive interested prospects to your content, and some of those groups can have thousands of members. Also, I’m sure your business connections would be interested to read about and share the information you are spending your time working on.

What other ways have you seen success in driving traffic to your site? Let us know in the comments below!

For more SEO how-to’s and tips, click the button below to download “10 SEO Mistakes to Avoid.”

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