Best SEO method to gain traffic?

[Artofeden]

Hi everyone! I’m wondering what website SEO methods you you and how I can gain website traffic? 

[dieterslicke]

Hi @Artofeden,

Personally we just put solid effort into monitoring our site performance using a tool called Semrush. It's pricey, but it shows how your site is performing, things that need to be fixed, how your competitors rank on keywords etc, what external sites you should be using to get your business listed (for backlinks / increased domain authority score) and then how Google is ranking you etc. And fixing things will increase your organic ranking (which is much cheaper and better than running ads in our experience).

We were spending ~$1K per month on Google / Facebook / Instagram ads, but nothing compared to the organic efforts of making sure your site has enough text, alt tags on all images, no repeating excerpts / page titles etc etc. The cost of Semrush ($149 per month) seems expensive, but it works out much cheaper than ads if we just do what it tell us to to maintain our site properly (which then means we don't need ads!).

Another good service we use in Australia is a company who increases our ranking in local Google business listings (organically too). So when people search 'barber near me', we're always in the top 3 results within 20km of our shop. Costs around $150 per month.

This also comes with regular maintenance of our Google My Business listing - posting photos regularly, responding to every single review, keeping business hours etc up to date, this all tells Google's algorithm that we're active and open, which also helps rank us up organically.