You’ve just launched a killer website for your business—so why aren’t you seeing an increase in sales?
Businesses large and small depend on their website to connect with new customers, but the problem, with so many websites in the world, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get found.
The secret ingredient to success online is SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO is a series of tricks and best practice behaviors that you can do to help your website get noticed by Google.
With our SEO guide, even experienced website owners can improve their traffic with ease. If you’re ready to watch your traffic stats climb, keep reading to find our guide to improving website SEO. If you are unclear on how to set up, you can find our SEO services and have a chat with us!
Use a Keyword Research Tool
If you’re planning on using your blog to drive traffic to your site, great idea—but you need to be sure you’re writing for topics you can rank for.
Not everything is going to rank well on Google, so you want to use a keyword research tool to find long-tail keywords that your business has the best chance of ranking highly on.
For example, ‘best cakes’ is such a broad keyword that a local bakery is not going to get discovered on Google by that. But, something like ‘best eclairs in Alabama’ is much more specific and increases the chances of your business being found online.
Write Amazing Content
Once you have decent keywords, the next step is simple—write incredible content that matches user intent. You want readers to browse your website and feel satisfied that they’ve received answers to their questions, and hopefully they will stick around to learn more about your company.
Your blog posts and webpages should be clear, well-written, free of grammatical errors, and easy to navigate.
Ensure Your Website Is Fast
When it comes to your site, speed matters. Research has shown that as page load time slows from one second to three, your chance of traffic leaving increases by 32%.
Simply, users don’t want to wait for websites to load and will leave your site if it’s taking too long. To avoid this, one of our SEO tips is that your website needs to be as fast as possible.
Your website host and design can play a big role in speed, so you may want to switch to a faster loading site design if this is a problem. Image size matters too, so ensure your site images aren’t too large.
There’s a lot you can do on the backend to increase speed as well, so consider working with a web expert to get technical help.
Link, Link, Link
Wondering how to boost website traffic? Linking is your friend.
SEO can be improved by both internal and external linking. Internal linking is linking to other pages and posts within your own site—it’s a good idea to link related posts to one another.
This helps with both user experience and is also useful for search engines when they’re crawling your page.
External linking matters too. This is where you get links back to your sites from external websites.
The higher the authority of the other website, the more ‘link juice’ your website gets, so aim high! Over time, backlinks will naturally develop, but you can also build them using paid services or by writing guest posts for other companies.
Optimize Your Images
Images and video are a big part of the user experience on a site, so you need to make sure yours are optimized.
Make sure your images are sized correctly, but they also need captions and alt descriptions. This is useful for users who are using site readers for vision impairments and it also helps your images rank for certain keywords.
It goes without saying, but if you’re using stock images, make sure you are using them appropriately and with credit to the source.
Install Social Sharing Buttons
While social media may or may not directly impact SEO, you want to make it as easy as possible for readers to find you on Facebook—so include social sharing buttons for your content.
Always share your latest content and articles across social media as well, as it’s a great way to increase engagement—check out Decibel.com to learn more about why this matters.
Use Google Analytics to Your Advantage
How are users finding your site, and which pages do they visit most often? Knowing this information is essential to learning what your website is doing well and where it can improve.
To learn more about your website traffic and audiences, you should be using Google Analytics. It’s a free product from Google that web owners can use to monitor the performance of their site.
You can find lots of data here, especially if you’re trying to work out why some webpages are performing better than others. It can take some time to learn, but there are plenty of resources online to help you get it set up correctly.
Increase Traffic Today With This SEO Guide
If your web traffic just isn’t up to scratch, use this SEO guide to make some changes. Although SEO can be overwhelming, most of the tips above are simple to implement yourself, even if you’re not an IT expert.
Get started today by making a plan for your website, working out what you need to improve. Then, start making improvements.
While SEO can be a slow burn, be patient as you will see results over time! Higher web traffic means more sales and leads for your business, so it’s worth the effort.
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