Having your website appear on the first page of search results on Google is the best way to increase traffic to your site.
At MozCon 2019, Rand Fishkin said that 66% of visitors to a website used the world’s most popular search engine.
Many businesses today have turned their marketing efforts towards social networks, especially Instagram, instead of search engine optimization (which is the positioning of their website pages).
Therefore, their sites do not receive the expected traffic.
When businesses don’t get the number of visits or sales they want, they often blame their digital marketing strategy. This is especially true if the strategy was created by an outside agency.
How to know the traffic of a website?
There are various ways to ascertain the amount of traffic a website gets. These range from browser extensions (e.g. Similar Web) to accounts on free platforms like Google Search Console or Google Analytics.
What advantages does each tool offer us? Let’s look at the numbers.
Google Search Console
This free service helps you keep track of your website’s performance, fix any problems, and plan for future maintenance.
In addition, it allows you to consult the traffic data that your portal receives from the Google results page:
- Frequency (impressions) with which your site appears in the search engine.
- With what queries your pages are shown ( keywords with which they are finding you).
- Number of times users click on your website.
- Average position of your portal in Google results.
Here are some key performance metrics that the tool provides.
The tool provides information about the number of pages indexed in the search engine, the most important errors, mobile loading speed, and much more.
All this information allows website owners, or those who manage optimization strategies, to make better business decisions , since they are able to answer questions such as:
- What content should be updated?
- Which articles are attracting more traffic and better converting?
- Which texts should shift their focus to the way ( search intent ) users are searching for that topic on Google?
- In which countries is the portal best positioned?
- What type of device are people using when they come to the website?
Google is 8.9 times more effective than Facebook (Backlinko)
Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko, shared the following numbers in a Linkedin post to promote his article on techniques to improve your SEO in 2019.
About 58% of the traffic that websites get is from Google.
Although Facebook is the social network that gets the most visits, it only accumulates 6.5%.
What does this mean?
Google is much more effective than Facebook when it comes to generating traffic to your website.
According to Bright Edge :
About half of the traffic to websites comes from organic results on Google.
Approximately 10% of the Google results page is dedicated to paid ads.
-5% comes from social networks.
People worldwide are completing an average of 40,000 Google searches each second.
That is, 3.5 billion daily queries.
In other words, ranking highly for a specific search can result in a lot of traffic, new leads, and potentially sales.
Organic positioning describes placing your website in the first positions of a search engine like Google. Meanwhile, attract visits from social networks would be more accurately described as using social media to bring traffic to your website. The main difference between the two is that organic positioning requires more time and effort to achieve, while utilizing social media can be a more immediate way to bring visitors to your site.
How to attract and increase web traffic
We cannot promote SEO as a set of codes that will magically increase our web traffic.
The most successful SEO is the one that is paired with the best content production to answer any questions and solve any problems that users may have.
The strategy may appear to be simple, but it is actually quite complex.
1. Keep User Intent At The Top
If your content fails to give readers the information they want, it will result in a poor user experience. Google uses multiple algorithms to identify a poor user experience, and if it detects one, it will lower your page’s ranking.
When creating or updating content, your top priority should be understanding the user’s intent.
Tips to Satisfy User Intent
- There are 3 types of intent, 1) Navigational, 2) Informational, 3) Transactional. Make sure to understand the intent of the content you’re generating before you write.
- Before generating or updating a content piece, think about what kind of audience will read it. Get into those readers’ shoes and write content they’d love to read.
- Create a content marketing strategy based on your audience and niche to produce relevant content.
- Stick to the topic or link that drives users toward your page. For example, if they searched “upselling tips”, explain what it is. Do not start selling your upselling app there.
The goal of this technique is to keep the customer happy. If you give them the information they want, they will keep coming back to your site.
Google will increase the ranking of pages that users have a good experience on.
2. Focus On Improving Page Speed
“It’s essential to note that web pages must load quickly.” Speed is important in delivering a better user experience. Pages must load quickly to be effective.
- 40% of the users abandon the website that takes over 3 seconds to load, and 80% of visitors won’t return.
- Slow-loading websites cost retailers a loss of $2.6 billion every year in sales.
Google will lower your website’s rank if it finds that users are spending less time on your site. The lower your website ranks, the less visibility it will have. This ultimately affects your organic traffic, making it more difficult for users to find your site.
Tips to Improve Page Speed
- Enable browser caching for faster website loading on returning visits.
- Reduce server response time up to 200ms.
- Remove any unnecessary script you’re using on the page. Compress images under 100KB to use on your page.
- Reduce the size of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to under 150KB. You can use Textfixer, Gzip for this.
- Check and improve your page loading speed and server response time for both mobile and desktop to make sure no visitor leaves your site because of sluggish speed.
- Gtmetrix and Pingdom are some of the best tools you can use to test your page load-time and site speed and improve it with these steps.
3. Do Not Overlook Mobile Devices
This means that more than half of all website traffic came from mobile devices in 2018 and the percentage is higher today.
If you don’t give mobile users a good experience, you could lose a lot of traffic.
Conversely, this means that if you make your website easy to use on a mobile device, you will get more traffic from people searching the internet.
Tips To Optimize Your Site For Mobile
- Code your mobile site on HTML5. Avoid flash, since many devices like iPhones don’t allow them to load.
- If your website has categories, define them clearly for easy navigation.
- Try to avoid pop-ups. They look good on the desktop but can bother users when displayed on mobile devices.
- Make your website responsive so it can have a flexible and adjustable design according to the screen size.
- Provide easy navigation on your site since the user doesn’t have a keyboard or shortcuts to navigate on your site.
4. Don’t Target Keywords Just For The Sake Of It
If you want to bring traffic to your site, keyword targeting is crucial. Using different keywords can help you get more organic traffic.
However, targeting keywords just because they have high search volume or CPC will jeopardize your traffic and conversions.
If you target a keyword that gets good traffic but is not related to your niche, you will not get the result of traffic you desired.
Before choosing target keywords, it is important to do thorough and high-quality research.
Tips To Target Relevant Keywords
- Understand the intent of the keywords before writing content on them.
- Find out keyword gaps, i.e, what keywords you can rank on which your competitors aren’t targeting.
- Make use of semantic or related keywords, since they have a huge potential of driving organic traffic to your pages.
- If you want to increase sales or conversions through your content, target keywords with high CPC.
- Target keywords that are related to your niche.
- Use SEO tools like SEMrush to find the most relevant keywords.
- Use long-tail keywords to increase the chances of ranking on more specific searches.
5. Start Blogging. The Most Obvious Tip
If your blogs are not engaging to users, you need to remember that there is always someone who can replace you. So be creative while writing blogs.
Tips To Write Amazing Blogs That Generate Traffic
- Do not try to exceed or curtail the word count of a blog unnecessarily. If you can explain the topic in 1500 words, don’t increase the length. If your topic needs 5000 words, don’t try to finish it early.
- Write at least 8-10 headlines for every blog post and select the best one among them.
- A little clickbait title is fine. But do not promise something in the title you’re not offering in the content.
- Create a content cluster. This means creating a pillar page that covers a topic completely and linking child pages that cover its subtopics.
- Always proofread your blog thrice after completing it.
- Create a buyer persona to understand what type of readers will read a specific blog.
- Optimize your content, title, and URL for better readability, SEO, and CTR.
- Create shareable blogs like stat-related blogs, expert roundups, etc.
6. Listen To Your Current Metrics
You will need to analyze your current data if you want to grow your organic traffic.
You can get many insights from your existing data by examining it closely. This will help you understand the data and come up with new ideas that would normally take a lot of brainstorming.
Analyzing your data can give you an insight into how users behave on your website. This allows you to make changes that could potentially drive organic traffic. Data analysis, however, requires several methods. Let me tell you about some of those.
Tips To Analyze Your Data for Better Insights
- Start with the ABC of data. Acquisition, Behavior, Conversion of your website.
- Check how much organic, referral, and social traffic you are getting.
- Examine the bounce rate of your overall website and find out the reason behind it.
- Watch visitor videos, heatmaps, scroll maps, and funnel performance through tools like Hotjar. This will give you a better understanding of your visitor’s behavior.
- Use Google Analytics to understand the behavior of visitors on your pages. Check pages/sessions, returning visitors, dwell time, etc. to find out how engaging your pages are.
7. Analyze Your Competitors, But Don’t Copy Them
If you’re in business, you have competitors. Although they can be detrimental to your business, they can also provide you with helpful insights.
If you want to increase the amount of organic traffic coming to your website, you can look at what your competitors are doing for inspiration. BigCommerce has written a great article on how to carry out this kind of analysis, but if you don’t have time to read it, here are some key points.
Tips To Analyze Your Competitors
- First, identify who your actual competitors are.
- Check out their website and their top-performing content.
- Look for their best-selling products.
- Analyze their cost structure, unique selling propositions, and where you and they lack.
- Look for the improvements you can make on your website, products, content, SEO, or anything else.
- You can also use tools like LinkedIn, Awario, Owler, and Mention, to get more knowledge about your competitors, revenue, reputation, etc.
8. Embrace Videos in Your Content Marketing
Videos are much more engaging than other forms of content, which is why they generate more traffic, engagement, and conversions.
If you create a perfect video marketing strategy, you can not only boost organic traffic, but also conversions to your website.
Tips To Create Awesome Videos
- Just like an article, specify your buyer persona before you record the video.
- Make a world-class introduction. If your intro is not engaging, viewers will leave your video in under 10 seconds.
- Try to keep your videos short. If it’s not possible, you can divide a single video into different episodes.
- Transcribe your video content to convert.
- Do not compromise with the audio. Any smartphone these days can record in 1080p but they don’t have a decent mic. So you have to use good audio equipment for perfect audio quality since users will not watch your videos if they don’t have a good sound.
- Editing is where the magic happens.
Conclusion
The primary suggestion is that any company, freelancer, or agency with a website should make Google and SEO their main priority when it comes to attracting web traffic.
There is a clear difference in the marketing goals, budgets, brands, and working methods of everyone.
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