3 Easy Changes You Can Make Today
If you’re looking for ways to increase the traffic your website is getting, organic can be a great method to do so. While there’s no shortage of other methods to increase traffic (such as paid, direct, social media, email, referral, etc.), organic traffic is beneficial for a few reasons.
First, in many cases, it will cost you nothing. People search for keywords or other content on search engines and as a result find your website. How you rank on search engines translates to just how many people find what you have to offer, so this ultimately boils down to a few things, like your content, SEO, and so forth.
When people don’t have enough organic traffic, it’s not necessarily a matter of value. The value can be there but the right people aren’t finding your website anyways. So let’s talk about three of the major ways you can bridge that space to help more people find your website through organic means.
Improve the Quality of Your Blog
Having a blog and maintaining a regular schedule of posts can be a huge boon in regularly bringing the right people to your website. With that said, many people take a lackadaisical approach when it comes to blogging, which is admittedly better than no blog at all; but it can end up in not reaching enough of your audience.
Writing content for the sake of writing content can end up making your blog feel cheap and spammy, which will reflect back to your business as a whole. It’s important to carefully curate your content and provide real value, which you can do in a few ways.
To do that, make sure your topics and posts are centered around information that your visitors would be searching for in the first place. Writing about questions they might have, giving away detailed information through topics such as how-to’s, and in-depth posts about your industry can help position your brand as a leader in its space, and consequently, draw more visitors to come check you out.
By taking a methodical approach to blogging and treating it like the rest of your business, you’ll attract more visitors to your website. After you optimize your approach to blogging and content, it’s time to look at data and how that can help you increase your organic traffic as well.
Make Changes Based on Data and Analytics
Using metrics to get feedback on your website can prove invaluable when you use it to make appropriate changes. We’ll tackle data-based changes with two popular sources of it, Google Analytics and Yoast. These are merely examples and whether or not you use them, the lessons are the same.
Ultimately, no tool or plugin can be the “be all and end all” for your data-driven analytics. But using them can help you draw new conclusions from the insights that they provide and help you pivot if necessary.
Google Analytics
When it comes to actionable changes you can make today with Google Analytics, there are a few easy ways to use it.
First, you can see how much traffic and conversions are coming from mobile and tablets as opposed to desktop. Considering how the majority of traffic is now from mobile, it can be worth looking if this is the case for you. If it is, ensure that your mobile website looks just as good as your desktop version.
Second, find out what pages are actually driving content to your website. Did you know that the homepage only accounts for 30% of a website’s traffic? The majority is from long-tail blog posts that answer questions or provide education on a topic someone is looking for.
Lastly, use Google Analytics to figure out how people are navigating your website from within; which internal links have the highest clickthrough rate and how that influences where people end up.
Yoast
Yoast is just one example of many tools people use to generally improve the quality of content on their website. It is great for setting basic guidelines to follow, but combining it with a greater in-depth understanding of SEO can leverage the sort of success you’re looking for.
Yoast can be useful in helping your website’s relationship with search engines in a few ways, such as optimizing the flow of your content or avoiding mistakes like long page titles or no meta descriptions. It is just one tool out of many available for those who are data-driven, and can help lead to making the right changes to bring more organic traffic to your website.
Cater Your Website for People… Not Search Engines!
When it comes to trying to drive more organic traffic to your website, it can be easy to go over the top in a superficial way. The result is many people start trying to shift their website and content to accommodate the search engine instead of the person.
This can end up making your website clunky to navigate and your content difficult to read. Worst of all, going down this path too far can result in search engines actively punishing you.
They can do so for a number of reasons:
- “Spun”, re-hashed content or just overall low-effort content in general
- Overstuffing of keywords that inhibits the natural flow of your content
- Unnatural links
- User-generated spam in your comments, guest book, or forum
Although you want to ultimately reach more people, ensure that you approach a balance between satisfying search engines and being what people are looking for. Content should always be made with a quality-first approach, which can then be revised later to meet certain standards that a search engine is looking for.
Between producing higher-quality blog posts, taking a data-driven approach to refining your website and content, and ultimately taking a people-first approach, you’ll start to see better results when it comes to driving organic traffic. A good web host will also help you with your performance. This is something I strive to get across.
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