10 SEO Tips To Drive More Traffic To Your Website From Google
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a digital marketing technique designed to drive more organic traffic to your website from popular search engines, such as Google. It can be a very profitable channel that drives traffic to your website all year round. It’s popular as it allows you to drive quality traffic to your website from people who are already looking for your products or services, who may not have already been aware of your brand.
Here are my top 10 tips to drive more traffic to your website from Google:
1. Create high quality content
Creating high quality content should be your primary concern when attempting to gain more traffic from Google. Without high quality content, the rest of the tips in this blog become much more difficult to achieve. So, why is high quality content so important? At the end of the day, Google aims to serve its users with the best search result for any given keyword. In practice, this means their algorithm is attempting to match the user’s intent with the best piece of content available on the internet. If your content isn’t the best, why should it rise to the top?
Quality content, which meets the needs of your audience, is also more likely to be shared on social media and will also naturally attract quality links from other websites. More on the importance of links below.
2. Include the keywords that you’re targeting in relevant places on your website
Having high quality content is a fantastic starting point. However, you’ve also got to have a firm understanding of the keywords that are important to your business and ensure they are included in relevant places on your website. As an example, a small car dealer may wish to rank well in Google for the search term “cars for sale in Cheltenham”. Ideally, they should ensure these words appear:
- In the title tag of the webpage
- Within the heading of the web page
- Within the opening paragraph of the text on the webpage
- In the URL of the webpage
- As the anchor text for internal links within the website
Without the keyword in these places, the business would be unlikely to rank for the chosen keyword, even if they had content of very high quality. It’s always worth keeping this very basic checklist in mind when creating any new content on your website.
3. Increase your domain authority by building more links from external websites
So, you’ve got high quality content and you’ve included the keywords relevant to your business, but what now? The third piece to this puzzle is building links from other high quality websites. Without external links, your content is still unlikely to rank well even with the best content and keyword placement. Links are important as they build the authority of your website. The more high quality links you can build, the more authoritative your site will appear to Google and the better chance you’ve got for ranking higher for your chosen keywords. It’s worth noting that the links must be of high quality. Low quality links can actually do more harm than good. The best ways to attract high quality links include:
- Creating high quality content that naturally attracts links from other websites
- Asking other website owners in your network to link to you
- Developing real world relationships in your local community (charities, good causes)
- Getting listed in high quality local directories
- Posting your content on social media to amplify its reach. if your content is good, people who see it may naturally link to you.
A couple of tactics to avoid are exchanging links with websites unrelated to your businesses and paying for low quality links.
4. Improve the user experience of your website
Google’s ranking factors share common goals with user experience as the search engine aims to provide its users with the best experience possible. As a result, they favour websites with better bounce rates, time on site, and those who attract more clicks from the search results page naturally. Websites should also be fast loading, secure, and responsive. The best way to achieve these goals is to design your website with SEO principles and the user in mind and have an intuitive navigation structure.
5. Create relevant internal links on your website
In a similar way that external links help with SEO, internal links can also be used to your advantage. Internal links help to inform Google which pages on your website should carry the most authority. The more links, the more important the page is seen to be and the more likely it is to rank well. As a result, it’s important to have a solid site structure with your most important pages included in your main navigation. It’s also useful to cross link pages within the body of the text to encourage flow between pages.
6. Ensure your website is accessible and secure
Your website simply must be accessible to Google’s bots to get indexed. The best approach is to speak to your website developer to check that they aren’t using anything that might block bot access. It is also worth registering your site with Google’s search console, where you can monitor if your site is being indexed correctly. It is also beneficial to make your website secure by installing an SSL certificate. Google has stated that this is a ranking factor and it also gives users peace of mind that you’re considerate of their security when browsing your website.
7. Improve page loading speed
Having a fast loading website is a known ranking factor from an SEO perspective. It is also important from a user experience point of view. With more people accessing websites on mobile phones than ever, load speed has become vitally important as users become less and less patient with slow loading websites.
8. Have a responsive website
The days of having a website that doesn’t adapt to the device you’re using are gone. However, I see far too many websites that only have a desktop site. It is now absolutely essential to have a responsive website. This basically means your website changes depending on the user’s device (phone, tablet, or desktop). This enhances the user experience and Google is always going to favour websites that provide the best experience. With this enhanced experience, users are likely to stay on your site for longer and are less likely to bounce straight out, both of these influence how Google will rank your website in their search results. Responsive websites can also help improve load speed.
9. Craft enticing meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are the snippet below your page title that appears on Google’s search results page. They aren’t a ranking factor in their own right so stuffing them with keywords won’t help you rank better. However, they are important for enticing users to click on your link rather than another website. For example, if your website was ranking second for a certain keyword, but was being clicked more often than the result in the first place, this would send a signal to Google to suggest that your result is more popular and this could result in you taking the first spot.
10. Avoid breaking links
Broken links are common for any website. They can occur when moving domain name or simply deleting old content. The problem from an SEO perspective is that these pages may still appear within Google’s search results, and create a poor user experience for anyone who clicks them. The solution is simply to use a 301 redirect when removing any pages from your website or moving an entire domain name. This will keep Google and your users happy.
How can I help?
I offer a range of different services to help you drive more traffic to your website from Google. This includes auditing your website and coming up with a list of recommendations to a full consultancy/training session. I’m expertly placed to offer these services, with a vast amount of experience in SEO, including building both the Visit Broadway and Dog Friendly Cotswolds websites from nothing to over 100,000 hits visits per year - with a large proportion of these coming from Google. Interested? Get in touch - I’d love to help.