The most visitors come to the site from search engines. What is more, they come from the several first positions. And only some people can look through the second and the third page of SERP. Website owners understand that traffic on sites is their income. That’s why everybody is trying to increase the amount of the site visitors and hit SERP’s TOP-10. In this post, I’ll tell you how you can improve your site’s ranking and increase traffic in 10 free and easy steps. Follow them and don’t forget about your brand image.
In-depth-articles
According to MozCast Feature Graph, in-depth articles are 6% of Google SERP. This number seems to be not very big, but quality articles can bring you high traffic, CTR, link follows, social activity and brand awareness. Everything you should do here is to write clear, detailed and professional instructions on different topics. Such content became the main secret of stable traffic and high positions in SERP for some companies. They noticed 10% increase of traffic after using this tactic. Become one of them!
New content
Websites that don’t get new links anymore are losing their positions at Google. Updating of the content is significant for machines, as well as for site visitors. Every person likes to get the hottest information and seldom reads old articles. Also, you can get high traffic if you write about the latest news one of the first sites or just in time. Google also pay its attention to the novelty of the content while ranking sites.
Site Usability
Usability of your site also influences its ranking. The more comfortable and pretty your site is, the less pogo-sticking it can have. Don’t confuse pogo-sticking with bounce rate; they are related, but not the same. Bounce rate is a percentage of visitors who visit a single page on a website. And pogo sticking happens when a user performs a search, clicks on a result, clicks back to SERP very quickly, and clicks on a different result. This situation occurs when the visitor is fully and immediately unsatisfied with your website.
So improve your site usability to increase position in Google. It should have comfortable navigation, optimised texts, be up-to-date and simply amazing (with cute images, graphics and so on). To find what your visitors like and what they don’t like on your website, you can use some specific tools. One of them is CrazyEgg. Enter your domain in its search box and watch the results. Pay attention to these indexes while renewing your site usability.
Site Audit
Your site position in SERP is straight related to its quality and optimization level. So you should not allow different errors exist on your website. You should check the following indexes
- server response setting
- loading speed
- validation of the page HTML code
- viruses and harmful codes
- duplicate pages
- all feedback-forms’ work
- robots.txt files and XML-map
- assigning a site to regions, localizations
- navigation structure
- filters or restriction imposition
- affiliates
- backlinks
It is very hard to make such analysis by yourself. That’s why I suggest using specific SEO tools to save your time and energy, for example, Serpstat. Enter your site domain in Serpstat search box and go to Site Audit > Audit Summary. Here you should create a project to get the data about errors and loading speed of your site.
Audit Summary report displays the number of found errors from three categories: high, middle priority, and low priority errors. Also, Serpstat suggests ways to fix these errors. In this tool, you can find information about backlinks too.
Video and Images Optimization
Video and images are the most popular content on Google. At first, people look through them, and then — other results. Create snippets with videos to bring extra traffic to your website. To do it, develop XML-map and add schema.org video-label. Images on your site should not be huge, so compress them when it’s necessary. And use only bright, colourful and appropriate to the topic ones to attract visitors to the site.
Viruses
When Google find viruses on a site, it puts the mark “This site can harm your computer” under its URL. It goes without saying that users don’t want to follow such links and the site loses its traffic and position. You can scan your site for viruses on special Google service — Transparency Report. Just enter your domain in its search box and learn the results given there.
Google Search Console Manual Actions
If your site lose traffic, check Google Search Console panel. Enter your domain in its search box and go to Search Traffic > Manual Actions.
Google doesn’t like websites that spam the Internet. So your site may be sent to cyber jail through a manual action because of
- Unnatural links to your site: impacts links
- Unnatural links to your site
- Unnatural links from your site
- Hacked site
- Thin content with little or no added value
- Pure spam
- User-generated spam
- Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects
- Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing
- Spammy freehosts
- Spammy structured markup
Each its penalty is fixing in different ways. You should know exactly the problem.
Smartphone SEO
About a half of users search information by their smartphones. So you make a huge mistake and lose a big percent of traffic if your site is not optimized for smartphones. Google confirms that sites which are not smartphone-optimized get low ranking.
Snippet Optimization
Google is continually expanding snippet opportunities in SERP. They may contain events, video, songs and so on. Video and Authorship Labels in snippets help increase the number of links following. To optimize snippets create the most suitable title. Now its maximum length is 500 pixels.
On-page SEO
When it comes to on-page SEO, we mostly speak about meta tags and keywords. And the easiest way of this optimization is the second one. To get higher traffic use keywords in texts, titles and even URLs, but don’t overdo with them. It’s essential to choose queries with high volume and add them to the content. Here SEO tools can help you.
Enter the main keyword of your site in Serpstat search box and go to Keyword Research > SEO Research > Keyword Selection.
Pay your attention to the column with keyword difficulty also. It shows the level of competition for a query. To vary the text you can use related keywords (phrases that are semantically connected to the queried keyword ) and search suggestions (popular search queries that pop up under the search box as you start typing your query) from the same-titled reports in Serpstat tool.
Summary
There are plenty of ways, how you can increase traffic to sites. Some of them are expensive, or only SEO specialists can manage with them.
I gave you 10 free and easy steps to improve your site ranking and increase the number of visitors. They are
- In-depth-articles
- New content
- Site usability
- Site audit
- Video and images optimization
- Viruses absence
- Google Search Console manual actions absence
- Smartphone SEO
- Snippet optimization
- On-page SEO
Use every one of them, and your site will hit the TOP.