How Do I Increase My Organic Traffic?

With over 91% of the search engine market share going to Google there’s a good argument for you to push your organic search traffic as high as possible through Google.

All companies want their valuable content to be seen by users and their customers to help sell product, inform them of services and provide useful information. But if you are not seen on page one or two of Google then you’re probably not being seen to your full potential.

And if you’re not being seen what’s the point of it all?

If you follow these straightforward steps you will be on your way to improving your position to achieving a higher rank through Google search. Effort will be rewarded.

1. Increase your site speed

   Making sure that your site’s pages load quickly is of paramount importance. Google has indicated that site speed and therefore page speed is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. Page speed is also important as this impacts the users experience and if you have to wait longer for a page to load you will tend to have a higher bounce rate and lower average time on a page. At WTBI we use a range of tools along with Google Page Speed Insight to help analyse and provide data to give a better understanding of how fast or slow your website is loading and if this is too complicated for you we can help you work through the data.

   Take a look at the components of your site particularly the images you may be uploading, the size of which may be slowing the site down. Before uploading an image make sure you optimise it for web which will help significantly reduce the file size and if you have many images regularly being uploaded to your site you may want to consider a CDN (Content Delivery Network) a system of servers deployed in different geographical locations to handle increased traffic loads and reduce the time of content delivery for the user from servers.

    

2. Prioritise content quality, NOT quantity

   Content is king! If you don’t have anything to say then it’s better to say nothing. Rather a website with less content at a higher value over content that is just fluff.When producing content make sure it is in-depth, well researched and rich in keywords relevant to your business and around 600 words to get the best results. However it doesn’t hurt to go over 600 words because Google will rank your content higher if your content is long and detailed. But once again do not sacrifice quality for quantity when attempting to increase your organic search traffic.

   What is good quality content?
   Well think about the articles you read online and what attracts you most to those

   Is the information trusted?

   Is the article written by experts?

   How detailed is the topic?

   Does the article have spelling, stylistic or factual errors?

   Is the article too short?

   Ask yourself these and more questions as you are creating your content and you should at the end of it have created quality content that Google wants to see to help with your organic search traffic.

3. Optimise headers, sub headers and page content

   Optimising your content for keywords is important and this is an area that you should be able to do on your own without having to become bogged down with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) as a whole. One of these areas is optimising your headers, sub headers and subtitles or the H1 Tag; usually the largest text on a page and used a the title for the page content and H2 Tags; generally the title to direct you to a specific section of a page as these are some of the big indicators that Google take into consideration when looking at SEO keywords.

   Proper use of these Tags is fairly straight forward;

   1. Only use one H1 tag per page
   2. Use H2 tags sparingly
   3. Make sure your H1 & H2 Tags are descriptive with SEO rich keywords

    

4. Make your text readable

   Size matters so they say, and in this context we think it does. Improving your readability can impact SEO and gain you a better connection with your audience. Ranking is made up using many factors, some of which are directly attributed to readability. With good text and a ‘common sense’ approach to keyword inclusion your audience is more likely to take a look while searching. More importantly they are more likely to read the text, therefore spending more time on your website.

   So what does that mean? Well this indicates to Google that the content you have written is valuable and therefore increases your website’s ranking. The other benefit from good readability is potential conversion rate. If the content is easy to read, authoritative and interesting then you are more likely to convert visitors into potential customers or clients. increase customer loyalty. By offering well structured content in this way you are increasing customer loyalty and building better relationships in the process.

5. Make your site responsive

   Google has been working towards mobile first indexing, crawling the web using a Smartphone Googlebot, for a few years. According to Google 70% of all sites analysed have moved over to mobile-first indexing and Google will be switching to mobile-first indexing for ALL websites starting September 2020. With worldwide mobile market share at 52.03% it is even more important to make the shift to a mobile responsive design now.

   For those of you who have yet to make that leap here are some benefits:

   Improved site usability

   A site that is difficult to navigate is going to switch users off. Time on a page is a fundamental factor which indicates to Google a site’s value. A responsive website should give a user a better user experience and therefore they should spend longer on page.

   Faster Page Speed

   An established factor for Google ranking. As discussed earlier a properly optimized site for speed should help produce a better ranking in search engines results.

   Decreased bounce rate

   The longer you can keep a user on your site the better. User behaviour is used by Google to determine whether the content on your site was relevant or not. A mobile responsive design will enable you show relevant content in a way that is user friendly; a clean, crisp design for users to browse

   Less duplicate content

   Duplicate content can seriously harm your ranking especially if you run a separate mobile site to your desktop site. These sites predominantly will run a separate URL but with duplicate content which will cause the issue of duplicate content.A mobile responsive design resolves the duplicate content issue with a single URL to view the content on all devices.

Making some of the changes mentioned above in this article will not cost you thousands or take months to produce; site speed, content rich articles and pages, optimised headers and sub headers. These are all tasks you can do relatively easily to increase your ranking and improve your website’s organic search traffic. Admittedly the biggest most time-consuming step is making sure your website design is responsive but a vital step at that especially with Google’s mobile first approach for everything.