Easy Search Engine Optimization Wins
The final part of our series on how to get more traffic to your site this month actually pulls together all of the strategies we’ve looked at so far. Just as with some of the other strategies, with the aim of increasing traffic as quickly as possible, this final strategy again looks at how to get more from what you already have – by looking at the ‘sleeping giants’ on your website.
Anytime you optimise the pages on your website for the search terms you think your customers and clients are searching for, you are making a lot of assumptions. You’re assuming that these are the best terms to focus on, that you’ve covered all of the terms relevant to your business or services, and that you’ve optimised your pages in the best possible way to demonstrate to Google that these are the most relevant terms you should be ranking for. Effective website optimization involves not only these assumptions but also the continuous evaluation and adjustment of your strategies to enhance user experience and improve conversion rates.
Despite the very best optimisation, if it’s based purely on these assumptions you could be missing out. This final strategy is going to show how you can drive more traffic to your site by investigating what Google thinks of your pages and what your customers and clients are searching for to find your business, and then looking to make improvements to capitalise on this information. Google Analytics is an essential tool for understanding these metrics and gaining actionable insights to tailor your content and campaigns for better search engine rankings.
Three Types of Web Pages to Optimise Better
There are three key areas we want to look at, and for this you’re going to need to go back to your Google Search Console (GSC) dashboard to find the information you need. We’re looking for:
- landing pages on your site that you haven’t optimised or are not part of your regular SEO project but are getting a good amount of clickthroughs
- pages on your site that seem to be getting lots of impressions but not many clickthroughs for relevant keywords
- pages on your site that are ranking in positions 6-15 for good keywords/search volumes, impacting your search engine rankings
If you can find a page that is doing well on its own and optimise that page with the meta title and on-page optimisation strategies we’ve shown you, there’s a good chance you could improve the rankings for that page and drive even more traffic to your site.
If one of your pages is getting a lot of impressions but not many clickthroughs, you could use the strategy for improving your clickthrough rate to increase the amount of traffic that page gets without improving its rankings.
If you have pages that aren’t really getting much traffic and are typically ranking on the bottom of page 1 or the top of page 2 for their main keywords, using all of the optimisation strategies we’ve gone through to try and improve their rankings could really help increase the traffic they get. Moving your rankings for a good keyword from the top of page 2 to the bottom of page 1, or the bottom half of page 1 to the top 5 results, can really have a positive impact on the impressions and clickthroughs for that page.
As a side note, analysing your GSC data to find pages that fit these criteria is also a good way of understanding if there are other keyword topics that you might have overlooked that you should really be optimising pages on your site for. Using seo tools can further aid in this optimization process by providing insights and support for effective SEO strategies.
So, you know what to do if you have any of these types of underperforming pages, but how do you use the information in GSC to find them in the first place? When you’re in GSC go to the Performance Report and you should see something similar to the image below.
To find the first kind of pages, those that are getting a good amount of clickthroughs but you haven’t done anything to optimise them, just make sure the results are ordered by Clicks and then select the Pages option across the top, which should give you the URLs on your site that are attracting the most clicks for the time period measured. If any of these pages aren’t part of your on-going SEO efforts, you can click on the URL to see which search queries it is getting clicks for and look to optimise it better for those terms.
For the type of pages that are getting a lot of impressions but not many clickthroughs, you want to make sure the results are ordered by Impressions. Then, you can scroll down through your best-performing pages by impressions and find any that might be particularly light on clickthroughs. Again, clicking through on any individual page and then selecting the Query option along the top of the columns will tell you the search terms that page is getting impressions and clicks for. To help with the analysis, you can click on the Average CTR button above the main graph and this will add the clickthrough rates for each query/page to make it easier to see which are performing below average.
Finally, to find the type of pages that are ranking at the top of page 2 or the bottom of page 1, make sure the list is showing the impressions and clicks for the search queries and then you’re going to need to click the Average Position button above the main graph to add a fourth column, which will show the average position for one of your pages for that query in the search results.
If you look through the list and focus on queries with average rankings of 6-15 and a good volume of impressions, you can find terms that should drive more traffic if you can improve these average rankings. Clinking on the search query will allow you to select the Pages option at the top of the columns to see which page it is that is ranking for that term.
One word of caution with this last method, you might find that a page with average rankings of 6-15 for one query might actually be ranking 1st for a different query, a ranking which you might lose if you change the optimisation for the other search term you’ve discovered, so always check what your pages are ranking for and where the majority of their traffic is coming from before you make big changes to the optimisation.
To be safer, you can approach this last method slightly differently and select Pages option instead of Queries and then again order the average position and look for pages that on average rank 6-15. Clicking through for more information on these pages and selecting Queries across the top of the columns will give you the terms the page ranks for, so you can better decide whether to optimise the page for terms where it doesn’t rank as well, knowing the other terms (and corresponding impressions and clicks) it does rank for.
Finding the under-performing pages on your site and better-optimising them using the strategies we’ve shown can be a great way of making more of what you already have and getting a boost in the traffic your website receives.
Maximise the Impact of Your Website Performance Optimisation Efforts – Bonus Strategy
We’ve now shown you 5 SEO strategies you can use to increase the traffic to your site this month, any of which can be effective, but you should really see some benefit if you do them all. Of course, you’re only going to receive the benefit of these strategies when Google has seen all the improvements you’ve made, and with the search engine taking anything from hours to weeks to crawl pages on the Internet, you don’t want to be waiting around for the Googlebot to show up so you can get your extra traffic. Page speed and utilizing a content delivery network (CDN) are crucial for optimization, as they significantly improve loading times and user experience.
Fortunately, there is a way you can prompt Google to come and look at your improved web pages much sooner than if you simply waited for them to notice on their own – using this technique we’ve seen improved pages re-indexed in hours. Optimizing for mobile devices is also essential due to the significant web traffic they generate and Google’s mobile-first indexing approach.
Once you’ve made your optimisation improvements to your page, copy the URL and then go back into Google Search Console (make sure you are in the same version of the property as the live site, i.e. the http(s)://(www.) is correct). At the top of the dashboard, you’ll see a section where you can paste your URL to have Google inspect it (see image below). Fixing broken links is important for better website performance, ensuring that search engines can effectively index your content.
Paste your URL in there and then press enter. After a few seconds the results of the inspection should pop up (all green ticks hopefully) and you should also see an option that says ‘Page changed? Request Indexing’ (see below).
If you click on this option Google will then check your URL is working okay and then add it to a priority queue for re-crawling, where it should see all the improvements you’ve made and then make adjustments to how and where your listing appears in the search engine results. This usually happens within a few hours, sometimes a day or so, but it is much quicker than if you just left it up to Google to re-crawl your site.
Hopefully, this series of 5 (+ bonus) strategies will help you make some relatively simple changes to your optimisation that will help your site attract more traffic in days rather than weeks. If you have any questions or want to discuss how our London SEO Agency can help you take a more strategic, long-term approach to growing your business with a comprehensive SEO project, submit an enquiry to find out how we can help