How to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Website in 10 Steps

Key Takeaways

Wow you want more organic traffic really more you greedy I love it what's up people my name is Tim I'm with the exposure ninja and welcome to this video all about how to increase the organic traffic to your website and not one not two but ten steps step number one is to define your SEO goal now I know what you're thinking out all these 10 step things the first step is always define your goal well I know what I want I want more organic traffic you freaky an idiot Wow greedy and rude well let me tell you actually it does matter what your goal is and you probably want to be a bit more specific than just more traffic unless you are selling adverts on your site on a cost per impression basis see most businesses are trying to generate leads or sales through their websites so actually just having a pure organic traffic goal doesn't really make as much sense as saying we want a particular number of conversions so let's just do a little bit of quick math let's say at the moment you're getting 10 conversions through your website every day and you want to take that up to 30 but you want to do so with the awesome lovely free organic traffic I'm having to pay through ads well if you want to go from 10 to 30 and let's say that you know your website's organic conversion rate is 2% meaning you convert 2 out of every 100 organic visitors into a lead or sale you need an extra twenty leads per day at a conversion rate of 2% meaning you need another 1,000 organic visitors to your site but not just any organic visitors before you start writing that long-form blogpost on minecraft house now you want visitors with commercial intent so the particular keywords that you're targeting are going to matter and we're going to talk about that in just a second step number next is to assess your website's current health and SEO performance now I love picking on big companies and they don't get much bigger than Balfour Beatty Balfour Beatty is a seven point eight billion dollar not even dollar pound real money a set of powerful B C's a seven eight billion pound come and we're just gonna analyze their websites SEO performance if you love a bit of a rip then enjoy this so first thing that we're gonna do let's say that our goal is to turn the balfour beatty site into a lead generation machine because at the moment it is not it is what we call an investor brochure site or a giant waste of time in marketing speak really what we want to look at is how the site is optimized for SEO and where its ranking currently so from an optimization perspective we can see straight away on this homepage in the page title there we have the word home balfour beatty PLC so we know immediately wash out not doing very well there because they should be using their target keywords in their page title is very unclear from this page which phrases they actually want to rank for and if we stick them into semrush we find consequently they're not really ranking for very much that has commercial intent now fortunately for balfour beatty the majority of their traffic is people searching for bow for busy because they're so well known but if we just do a quick search of the phrases that they're actually ranking for what i've done is i've taken out any phrase which has the words balfour beatty because that is obviously people who know before we through they're expecting to get to the site what we find is actually they're not ranking particularly in the UK they're not really ranking for very much useful stuff stuff that would have commercial intent so if this was your website you'd be pretty disappointed at this stage but you'd also be saying great this is a fantastic blank canvas so we can see on this screen that we've got the keyword that they're ranking for here the position that they're ranking on Google for and the we don't really want to think about traffic too much for this because this is very kind of approximate this is an estimate by semrush and the volume of searches per month for this particular phrase and cost per click now cost per click is important even for organic search traffic because it gives us an indication of how much commercial intent there is behind each of the different keywords that are showing here so even though balfour beatty isn't going to be spending any money trying to advertise for piles love it if they did want to they will be spending approximately 2 pounds 29 click but what we see here is a lack of commercial and temp phrases so what I mean by that is there's not really many phrases here that indicate somebody's actually looking for a company that offers what Balfour Beatty does possibly something like pipe of fabrication where they have a cost-per-click of two pound 30 but not really very many searches for that term now interestingly looking through these keywords it's not particularly clear actually which phrases Balfour Beatty wants to rank for at all and this is really no surprise because when we go on their website the keyword targeting is pathetic let me just show you some examples so expertise is what you might call services expertise is the kind of inward-looking way of saying services services is what we offer to people expertise is what we have very focused let's say that for example we want to go to railway engineering or rail engineering here so this might be a page that they'd want to get ranks for terms like rail engineering firms something like that where there's not gonna be huge keyword search volume but the number of people who are searching for it who are kind of messing around is gonna be fairly low this is people who want a fricking company to build a railway so average order value you would expect it's gonna be reasonably high now instead of using a descriptive keyword optimized headline here they've got tomorrow's railway today super conceptual really clever but doesn't actually mean anything if that's not what you're searching for and you can see the amount of copy that they've used on this page to sell that service and include their variation keywords and all of that is almost nothing so very unlikely that this page would rank for anything so when we're analyzing a site like this we'd say really not optimized for SEO other areas that you might want to check your website SEO health is to log into Google search console check for any errors make sure that a good number of your pages are being indexed things like that just making sure that Google's actually finding your website in the first place step number three is to find out who your target audience is and identify your competitors so there's a few different ways you can identify your target audience you can go into Google Analytics and you can use the audience information there so one of the ways that you can analyze your audience although you've got to use caution is inside Google Analytics so here you can see we've the audience and then we've got over you you can also go into things like demographics so you can have a look at your audience's age and gender now a word of warning here some of this data is okay some of it is just plain weird right so if we go into interest for example what we'll find here is that the interests are very sketchy shoppers value shoppers 3.5 7% well pretty much everyone is a shopper right so a lot of this stuff is really just its ambient noise but the very best way to understand your customers is to actually talk to them now if you don't talk to them day-to-day in your job talk to your sales team find out what sort of people are these what you want to do is build up a bit of a customer avatar but you also want to understand the particular phrases that they're going to be searching for so go back and listen to sales calls find out when your prospects are picking up the phone and talking to you when they say hi we're looking for a company that does X you want to know ok great said that's the phrase that they're using to describe us those are the sorts of terms that we want to rank in order to get more of those people now another thing you can do inside analytics it's not just looking at all of the users that are coming to your site but actually looking at the people that convert so you can just set up a segment which is just the converters and that will give you data on not just that all the people that are coming onto your cyber who's coming onto your site who is actually turning into a leader so next step is to understand that your key competitors so let's say for example that you're trying to rank for a phrase like cheap mobile contracts what you'll be doing is having a look at the sort of businesses that are ranking for these now not just in the organic results but actually even in the ads as well but we're gonna start on the organic results so here what we're going to do is we're going to do some competitive analysis on each of these different sites I'm just gonna give you a very quick overview now and then we're gonna look into them in a bit more detail later on so for example here we've got you switch ranking positions 1 & 2 we've got money supermarket ranking position three we've got phone house ranking in position four then affordable mobile so what do we know about these sites well firstly is not the mobile networks themselves which are ranking for this term actually it's comparison sites isn't it you've got the first three positions so you switch as a comparison site their ranking twice money supermarket is a comparison site don't know what phone house is all about let's just have a quick look so this is a commercial site right so this is a shop so this is the first kind of shop site that's ranking for this term so if I'm a shop I want to find out what phone house is doing to get ranking in a world that seems to at the moment be dominated by comparison sites now if I'm going up against the comparison site likewise I want to know what these companies are doing to get that visibility right so what sorts of content have we got on this page look we've got all this text copy here there's a reason that tax copy is theirs because it's needed in order to rank we've got this page here with all these easy to use filters which is going to increase engagement so we can start to build up a picture of what sort of page does it take to rank for this term if we want to outrank you switch we're gonna have to make a page which is better more useful and better optimized for this term here's the money supermarket page that they're going straight for engagement here they want to get you clicking in and using the site because that's a good signal for Google and it's also great for visitors as well so we've got that nice straightforward thing there and then look we've got phones and then we've got the content with internal links through to other pages as well and more links as well so you can see what it takes the rank for the particular search terms that you're targeting and what sort of businesses are ranking now make a note of these because we're going to come back to them later on in fact I don't want to keep you waiting so we're gonna come back to them right now step number four is to research your competitors SEO and content strategies so what I would do in this case is I would get each of these different businesses here so we're gonna start with phone house and we're gonna stick them in semrush and we're gonna see what they're ranking for so by putting a website like this into sandwich we can quite quickly build an understanding of what they're doing to compete in the space that they're doing now I'm seeing this for the first time but immediately I can see the term phone house has had 11,000 almost 12,000 searches so that's a lot of branded traffic so people are searching for this so I'd imagine that they're doing some significant offline or other online marketing which is generating good branded impressions which will obviously help their ranking and we've also got a kind of different spelling of phone house so that would be people who've heard it mentioned or had it been referred to them so that's quite interesting and immediately can build up a bit of an understanding about what they're doing not online in order to get this sort of visibility so we can see the keywords are they're ranking for and we can be fairly safe that these are the keywords that they are targeting so mobile phone deals quite a broad term there we can see the page that's ranking for that so let's just have a look at that page and we can quite quickly develop a bit of an understanding about what their pages are doing in order to rank so not too much information visible immediately but then you click on that little read more thing and there it is so there's all the copy good to see old-school SEO still lives a nice straightforward user interface just getting people in finding their deal and clicking through the site because they're really looking for that early engagement what else we got sim only deals as a phrase they're targeting like that 165 thousand searches a month very strong phrase to rank for what are they doing to rank for that so we can just start to build up a bit of an understanding about what it's taking to rank for each of these different terms now interestingly we've got the similar sort of approach here here we go and there's a lot of information on these pages you know it's rare to find a page that's ranking for terms like this which doesn't have a lot of information certainly those dreadful balfour beatty pages that we saw earlier they're never gonna rank for anything but these pages are exactly the sorts of stuff that we expect to see ranking these days so the next thing that we might do is you might head over to link Explorer on we might stick in their website to see what sort of link profile they have and what sort of SEO they've been doing so with a domain Authority of 43 out of 100 actually they're not doing as well as we might expect for a very very competitive term like this so with around 1000 different domains linking to them for a twelve and a half thousand inbound links they actually don't really have the sort of link profile that you might expect comparing them against compare the market or use which or someone like that would have much much bigger visibility but obviously something about phone house is helping them to rank so we can then have a look at the particular links which are coming in if we just click on inbound links we'll be able to see what some of their their biggest inbound links are so we can see that they've been doing a bit of to marketing they've been getting some coverage in places like the Express which is interesting so this appears to be getting national press they're getting some coverage in very big newspaper type sites they're on daily deal sites they're on money-saving expert as well so we just can have a look at some of these links and get a bit of a picture about what sort of outbound link outreach they've been doing in order to get the sort of visibility which they're using to build their business and on tech radar as well so this is definitely a conscious SEO campaign they're not ranking accidentally and we can see here you know some nice coverage on tech radar they've been doing this for a little while if we go back and see when their traffic started to take off so really in this second half of 2018 things started to get serious and I would expect that we'll probably find these links have started appearing around that time if I could only go on the Express's website battling through all of this rubbish yeah here we see so the Express this link went live in August 2018 which is around about the start of that big old increase so we've got that one we've got this one here on money-saving expert when this one go live doesn't seem to have a date but we've got the link from this post which is great what have we got here so this is this is the one on tech radar so 27th of November 2018 so all around that sort of time so we can see now immediately we know if we're going to compete with them we pretty much know what we've got to do it's gonna be the highest possible tier websites that we need to get really good content pieces placed link back to the website loads of information on those pages so step number 5 is to begin to develop your content and SEO strategy so what we really need to do is understand where your website is weak on content targeting the particular keywords that you're going after so let's say that you were trying to rank for sim only deals and you had very little content on your page about that topic well that would be an obvious place to start writing up some content so you look at what sort of blog posts you could be writing you'd look at your product category pages how could you get more information on those pages to make them legitimately the most useful and interesting pages on that topic so really you're looking to see where is your website weak on content that you need to beef that stuff up if you're gonna compete for these keywords and you should have a pretty good idea based on the competitive research that you've done by this stage another thing that you'll want to do at this point is identify your list of target keywords so which are the phrases that you really need to rank for in order to hit your leads or sales goal now we have other videos on how to find those keywords they'll put a link somewhere up here or down there or maybe even over there once you've got that list of keywords you want to map each of those keywords to a particular page on your site which you're going to focus on for that keyword so by now you've got your prioritized list of pages you've got your prioritized list of content topics and you've got your prioritized list of keywords now it's time to start writing time to improve your existing website's content when you're doing a competitor search have a look at the quality of the content that is on the sites which are ranking for the phrases that you want to be targeting a good benchmark is to make the quality of your content three times as good as that stuff well honestly is probably not that hard a lot of content on the Internet is absolute rubbish so rather than just writing absolute gibberish every different thing that you can think about the topic here's how I'd suggest approaching this ask yourself every single question that a potential customer might have about this topic and then simply write the answers for each of those questions so let's say that we're talking about sim only deals for example now you could write 600 words on sim only deals but you would end up running out of things to say pretty quickly but the other way of approaching this would be to think of all of the questions someone might have about sim only deals so am i locked into a contract with sim only deals what are the best phones to use for sim only deals which network offer sim only deals how much does a sim only deal cost is sim only better than pay monthly how much do I save can I get pay as you go on a sim only you could probably come up with 20 different questions about that topic then you just write a couple of paragraphs for each one and before you know it you've got 40 paragraphs of amazing content on that page now a word of warning not every page can sustain 40 paragraphs of text that might be a little bit too intimidating but you get the point if you need to increase the amount of content on a page don't just make it spammy crap you can actually make it genuinely useful for people at the same time as helping your SEO step number the one after that is improve your website's technical SEO and usability this step includes things like making sure your website makes sense on all different screen sizes if you've got massive cookie banner messages which obscure everything and require your mobile users to delete five different pop-ups before they can even see anything on your page you might be surprised to know that stuff is not good for your usability likewise if you've got huge loading times that stuff can really harm usability and that can impact ranking so it's good to make sure that things are loading nice and quickly you can use tools like Google's PageSpeed insights although do take the results of tools like that with a pinch of salt the best way to test your load times is to actually use your website and see what sort of load times you're getting also in this category is finding and fixing things like 404s now 404s are an inherent part of the Internet if I go to your website com4 slash Tim Cameron kitchen I would expect to get a 404 and that's okay but the important thing is that you don't have links on your website to other pages on your website that no longer exists and produce a 404 in SEO terms that's known as bad juju you can also do things like increase internal linking so what you're doing here is increasing the number of times one of your pages links internally to another page for example let's say you've got your page all about your best sim only deals so you might want to link through to a page all about pay monthly versus pay-as-you-go contracts if you don't want to so that question on the page you want you think there's another page on your site which is better serve to answer that question now the benefit of adding those sort of internal links between the front pages to your site is that obviously you're showing google of that page is particularly relevant for the term that you're using in the link and it also helps you pass the link juice hi link juice to the relevant pages on your site step number we're nearly done is to create a content marketing strategy and stick to it so remember all those juicy links that we saw that phone house has well if you analyze your competitors and you find that they've got a whole bunch of juicy links and you've got a whole bunch of not juicy or not links then you need to close the gap so to do that obviously you're gonna have to go and get some links now this video is not about how to go and get links we have other videos which will appear all over the place about how to do that but what I will say is that the competitive research that you do can be a really useful way to find out the sort of publications that you might be able to get links for pay close attention in particular to the people who are writing about that topic on that website so for example we saw in phone house we saw they had links from places like they Express and we know that it's David Snelling who's written this so what we might do is we might go out and find David Snelling we might do some outreach to him find out what sorts of topics he's going to be writing about in the future and see if we could provide an opinion on one of those topics to get a link step number penultimate is to consider some in organic ways to boost your website's traffic I thought the whole reason we're doing this SEO stuff is that we don't have to pay money to Google on Facebook well under certain circumstances you might want to pay money to Google or Facebook for some traffic for example let's say that you wanted to get ranking on a new page which is yet to be indexed where you might run some PPC traffic to that page to show Google those people going on it to help it get indexed but also to get a bit of an understanding about user metrics on that page so monitoring what's happening with people on that page where are they clicking where they scrolling are they bouncing off all of this new user data will help you so that you can improve the quality of that page and that will help you increase its ranking over time by implementing the things that you have serve in your tests and we have a free PPC guide which will be linked in the description to help you get started with this some people often surprise that we do from run PPC as a kind of SEO tool but there's actually a lot of data that Google Ads can give us which SEO can't so for example when we're running a pay-per-click campaign we'll be able to see which keywords are bringing conversions not just traffic but actual conversions and that can then be sent to the SEO team to inform them to say right you know what this particular keyword here is bringing us loads of traffic but it's not bringing us that many conversions whereas this keyword here not so much traffic but loads of conversions that traffic is really good quality now we'd only get that data from pay-per-click and we can then take it to the SEO team and say right ok forget this one this one's just vanity this one this is the phrase that we want to go after so having a pay-per-click in conjunction with SEO can often be good news step 10 step 10 you made it maintain your rankings over time and it sounds easy but actually it's not because you might think right great we've got that visibility we're ranking for the target keywords fantastic we're all good SEO is constantly changing to get top ranking you've just knocked someone off and remember that there are other people other people who might be watching this video who are gonna be taking you on trying to knock you off so you've got to constantly stay at the top of your game what got you where you are might not be enough to maintain that ranking one year from now so you've constantly looking at positions two three four and all of those to identify what are they doing who's rising up the rankings who do I need to stay ahead of SEO is not a one-shot thing it's a constant thing and you've got to have that awful paranoia you're always looking over your shoulder thinking who's coming to get me who's coming to steal my lunch so my main takeaway for you in this video is to trust no one and on that cheery note let's summarize so step number one was identify your organic traffic goals whether you're just looking for visitors because you're selling ads or whether you're looking for conversions because you're selling stuff step number two is to assess your website's current health and performance you can use SEMRush you can have a look at your on-site optimization using the quick process that I showed you step number three is to identify your the audience and your competitors understand which keywords are they searching for something you can be making sure that you are targeting those in your SEO work step four is to research your competitors content strategy so what sorts of topics like writing about on their website how much content are they posting and how good is it step 5 is to create your own content and on-site SEO strategy so having a really honest look at your website what are we doing poorly what are we doing well what sorts of topics do we need to be writing more about and what sort of stuff are we doing that really hasn't worked so far step six is to get out there and start improving that content so beefed up your content by using the sort of questions that people are going to be asking about that topic make sure that your stuff is genuinely better than the other stuff that's ranking at the moment because that's the only way that Google's gonna justify putting you ahead of more established websites step number seven is to improve usability and technical SEO through things like making sure your site resizes on different devices making sure you're reducing the 404s that are popping up and also making sure that all your metadata is sorted as well step number eight is to create a content marketing strategy and stick to it this is all about getting links now you would have done some competitor analysis to see what sort of links your competitors have so you're going to go after those links with the hunger of a modern at millennial dog chasing a non meat meat truck step number nine is to promote your website and consider paid traffic sources like Google Ads to both get data and also improve your pages of performance as dirty as that feels yes you might have to use some PPC to help your organic visibility and then step 10 is to maintain your rankings over time by making sure any challenges to your throne are stamped out and you're always keeping one step ahead of their content and their link strategy so I hope you found this video useful on this Whistlestop tour through increasing your organic ranking don't forget to Like and subscribe and do all that stuff that people ask you to do to engage with this you can even drop a comment if you've got a question about digital marketing and we might use it to make another video on don't forget also to check us out on social media we're extremely active everywhere and that's not sure we're extremely active in a few select places LinkedIn at Twitter Facebook and Instagram and don't forget if you want some help increasing the organic traffic to your website you want professional help from real legitimate professional ninjas digital marketing ninjas then go to exposion intercom forward slash review on that page you'll see a forum where you fill in your information tell us about your business goals and what will happen as one of our team will create a fifteen minute video for you where we will show you on the screen in front of you how to increase the amount of organic traffic and conversions that you're getting through your website is genuinely awesome so go to exposure ninja com forward slash review to request that today