Expert SEO Tips To Boost Your Traffic
What’s the point in having a website without traffic? Traffic is beneficial for different reasons depending on your website. An increase in traffic can mean an increase in revenue if you have adverts on your website, an increase in leads if you are a service based company, or an increase in sales if you sell products online. No matter what your website is or the goals of your website, increasing your online traffic is an ever-lasting goal for webmasters.
In this blog, I will share some of my own expert SEO tips which will inevitably boost your website’s organic traffic – that’s traffic you don’t have to pay for!
User Experience
User Experience is a big part of website optimisation – whether that be for SEO or not. A page that is not very user-friendly will mean a user will find it hard to navigate the website, which in turn will mean a lower conversion rate and a higher bounce rate.
From an SEO perspective, a bad user experience can harm your rankings. Google RankBrain, which has been apart of the Google Search algorithm since 2015, is a machine learning algorithm which manipulates search results to test how it can improve user satisfaction with the top ranked pages. How does an algorithm do this? Well, that’s a blog for another time! Keeping it simple, RankBrain measures the user satisfaction by dwell time and “pogo-sticking.” Take this example of RankBrain in action:
A page ranks number one for a keyword, because it is highly relevant and has a lot of links. If users clicks on this page after searching the keyword and they are not instantly satisfied with the page so they go back to the search results page and clicks another result, this is known as pogo-sticking. If a lot of users are clicking through to this page and are then pogo-sticking to the second page, RankBrain takes notice of this and comes to the understanding that although the first page is more relevant and has more links, the second page is satisfying more users so it should be ranked higher. This isn’t a simple process of then swapping the two pages: RankBrain will then calculate different weights of things like content relevancy, backlinks, page speed etc in a way that will benefit the second page – RankBrain doesn’t punish the first page but simply adjusts its calculations to reward the first page.
So how do you optimise for RankBrain? By optimising for user experience! Are you displaying fluffy content at the top of your page for the sake of word-count? Cut the fluff or move it below the actual content that your visitors are trying to find. Are you displaying above-the-fold adverts? Not only is that bad for UX, but Google has its own separate algorithm dedicated to demoting websites that still use above-the-fold ads, so definitely stop doing that! In the end there is no single answers on “how to optimise for UX.” Have a professional company do an audit on your website so that they can make suggestions and take actions to improve your user experience.
Focus On Those “Almost” First Page Posts
Every website has those “almost” posts and pages – they’re ranking well, perhaps on the second page or even on the first page of search results, but aren’t capturing any traffic. These pages present an opportunity for big gains from small work. Take a look at these pages, see if the content can be updated or improved upon, check if you can increase your internal links etc. These pages are almost on their way to driving traffic to your website, they just need a little help!
Meaningful Content
You should focus on writing meaningful, engaging and insightful content. This type of content will increase dwell time which is a good signal that your page satisfies users, and it will drive natural backlinks to your content.
You should also keep your content up to date and evergreen – a user searching for the latest trends shouldn’t be presented with a page that has last year’s date as the title! Constantly refreshing and updating your content will also mean that your page will keep its backlinks overtime as well as drive new ones, showing that your website is a consistent great source for information.
Increase Authority
Google only wants to promote trusted websites and pages, and this can sometime come down to the authority of your business or website. There are plenty of ways to show that your website is real and trustworthy – setup social media accounts where you can syndicate your content, have legal documents on your website such as a privacy policy, include contact details on your website, setup a Google My Business profile, submit your business to directory listings etc. All these things will increase your website’s authority, trustworthiness and drive backlinks to your website.
Expert SEO Tips To Boost Your Traffic
What’s the point in having a website without traffic? Traffic is beneficial for different reasons depending on your website. An increase in traffic can mean an increase in revenue if you have adverts on your website, an increase in leads if you are a service based company, or an increase in sales if you sell products online. No matter what your website is or the goals of your website, increasing your online traffic is an ever-lasting goal for webmasters.
In this blog, I will share some of my own expert SEO tips which will inevitably boost your website’s organic traffic – that’s traffic you don’t have to pay for!
User Experience
User Experience is a big part of website optimisation – whether that be for SEO or not. A page that is not very user-friendly will mean a user will find it hard to navigate the website, which in turn will mean a lower conversion rate and a higher bounce rate.
From an SEO perspective, a bad user experience can harm your rankings. Google RankBrain, which has been apart of the Google Search algorithm since 2015, is a machine learning algorithm which manipulates search results to test how it can improve user satisfaction with the top ranked pages. How does an algorithm do this? Well, that’s a blog for another time! Keeping it simple, RankBrain measures the user satisfaction by dwell time and “pogo-sticking.” Take this example of RankBrain in action:
A page ranks number one for a keyword, because it is highly relevant and has a lot of links. If users clicks on this page after searching the keyword and they are not instantly satisfied with the page so they go back to the search results page and clicks another result, this is known as pogo-sticking. If a lot of users are clicking through to this page and are then pogo-sticking to the second page, RankBrain takes notice of this and comes to the understanding that although the first page is more relevant and has more links, the second page is satisfying more users so it should be ranked higher. This isn’t a simple process of then swapping the two pages: RankBrain will then calculate different weights of things like content relevancy, backlinks, page speed etc in a way that will benefit the second page – RankBrain doesn’t punish the first page but simply adjusts its calculations to reward the first page.
So how do you optimise for RankBrain? By optimising for user experience! Are you displaying fluffy content at the top of your page for the sake of word-count? Cut the fluff or move it below the actual content that your visitors are trying to find. Are you displaying above-the-fold adverts? Not only is that bad for UX, but Google has its own separate algorithm dedicated to demoting websites that still use above-the-fold ads, so definitely stop doing that! In the end there is no single answers on “how to optimise for UX.” Have a professional company do an audit on your website so that they can make suggestions and take actions to improve your user experience.
Focus On Those “Almost” First Page Posts
Every website has those “almost” posts and pages – they’re ranking well, perhaps on the second page or even on the first page of search results, but aren’t capturing any traffic. These pages present an opportunity for big gains from small work. Take a look at these pages, see if the content can be updated or improved upon, check if you can increase your internal links etc. These pages are almost on their way to driving traffic to your website, they just need a little help!
Meaningful Content
You should focus on writing meaningful, engaging and insightful content. This type of content will increase dwell time which is a good signal that your page satisfies users, and it will drive natural backlinks to your content.
You should also keep your content up to date and evergreen – a user searching for the latest trends shouldn’t be presented with a page that has last year’s date as the title! Constantly refreshing and updating your content will also mean that your page will keep its backlinks overtime as well as drive new ones, showing that your website is a consistent great source for information.
Increase Authority
Google only wants to promote trusted websites and pages, and this can sometime come down to the authority of your business or website. There are plenty of ways to show that your website is real and trustworthy – setup social media accounts where you can syndicate your content, have legal documents on your website such as a privacy policy, include contact details on your website, setup a Google My Business profile, submit your business to directory listings etc. All these things will increase your website’s authority, trustworthiness and drive backlinks to your website.
