A little return to our roots of giving you digital marketing tactics that you can use today. We cover 3 Simple Ways to Increase Your Traffic From Search Engines with completely free tools that you should be using already! This is a full episode but I’ve tried to make it very applicable, so let’s dive in!
Before we begin, we’ll be diving into Google Analytics and Google Search Console – you need a google account for this (Moz’s Beginner Guide). If you don’t have this set up on your website then get em… NOW. Both are fairly straightforward to install and if you have WordPress, then you can likely do this with a plugin. It really is just copy and pasting.
Improve Click Through Rate
Click Through Rate is simply the percentage of times a user (a person/people) clicks on a given thing. In this case, the title of your content (a blog post or page). The main things that affect this are your title and meta description. In order to increase the click-through rate, you’ll need to make your title more interesting! Gee-whiz?! Duh? So KEYWORD | KEYWORD 2 | BRAND won’t work anymore at least not for competitive phrases. You’ll need a better formula. You’ll need to think like a magazine writer.
One Formula that typically works to increase click-through rate on blog posts is this
ODD NUMBER + ADJECTIVE + KEYWORD TOPIC
Example: 3 + Simple Ways To + Increase Website Traffic
When you increase your CTR two things happen.
- You will naturally get more traffic (the clickers)
- Google will see this as a ranking signal and you’ll get more opportunities for clickers.
Improve Bounce Rate
Bounce: to exit a location/situation – according to the urban dictionary and frankly Google Bounce Rate is the rate at which people leave your site. Technically, bounce rate is the percentage of people that view one page and hit the back button to go back to the search results. Improving the bounce rate, means lowering this percentage. This is a bit harder than tweaking the title. You’ll have to look at your content and figure out why people are visiting your page and leaving immediately. Is the content poor, or does it simply answer the question too quickly.
There really isn’t an easy fix to this one. You may have to elongate your content, add new content or update it. The best advice is to get to know your customer and speak their language here.
Bounce Rate, like click throughs do two things. The first thing is that the naturally keep people on your website longer, viewing more pages. This in and of itself is an improvement. However, the other thing that happens is that you’ll notice your ranking increasing. Officially, Google says this is not a ranking factor but in experiment after experiment it is proving that this is one of the factors that is changing search results.
Get on Social Media
You’ve heard me say this multiple times and we’ve done shows on different channels, but now is the time go social! (I know, I know, I need to take my own advice here). Right now I believe that social media sites are experiencing growing pains, but that does not mean that you shouldn’t be there. Choose a channel and go for it. Talk to your customers, interact with them on social and reap the rewards. Google sees these social signals as “social” proof (no Dad joke intended). If you need some help, listen to these podcast episodes and see which one fits you.
Just like all our tips, social gets you an increase in traffic 2 ways.
- You get traffic from the social interaction. As you interact people will be curious and click on your links.
- Although not confirmed, there does seem to be correlation to brand searching, social interaction and rankings.
Click Through Rate and Bounce Rate are key metrics you should know, but before you get too hung up on those, make sure you know the other 5 Key Metrics That Every Business Owner Should Know!
