Growing your website’s traffic is essential for various reasons, informing the reader with content, to contact a business, or purchase a product. Search engine optimization (SEO) is needed to bring more users.
Search engine optimization
In this month’s case study, we have seen growth in one of our client’s websites. Users have increased by 17.7% over the last 90 days, from January 16th to April 16th, as shown in the Google Analytics screenshots below.
Our results seem great, helping businesses and individual’s websites is our thing. Consequently, we compiled a list of 10 methods that will help in increasing your website’s traffic organically using search engine optimization techniques.
These are the 10 ways to grow website traffic
- Include and optimize H1 tags
- Create and update a sitemap
- Fix broken images
- Optimize images with alt attributes
- Increase page load speed
- Increase your word count
- Optimize meta descriptions
- Optimize title tags
- Update internal and external broken links
- Use internal links
These are 10 methods we used and common practices to have to achieve better ranking results from Google. The results may be small at first but doing all these things will help to get more traffic to your site in the long run.
Include and optimize H1 tags
H1 tags are helpful for search engines they may place a website lower if none are present. When creating an H1 tag, try to not use multiple H1 tags on the same page and use relevant keywords in the headings.
According to Fresh Chalk, 25% of small business websites don’t have an H1 tag.
Create and update a sitemap
Having a sitemap up to date is helpful for search engines for visibility and navigation but it also tells search engines that your pages are updated with new content if any change were made. Try to update your sitemap regularly whenever a page has been changed, deleted, or created. You can create a free sitemap using XML-Sitemaps.
According to Fresh Chalk, only 73% of small business websites have sitemaps.
Fix broken images
Having a broken image can tell search engines that your page may be low quality and may offer a poor user experience. Regularly audit your site for broken images.
According to IMPACT, images are returned for 27.9% of search queries on Google.
Optimize images with alt attributes
Alt attributes make it possible to enter an alternative description in the HTML code for every image on a website. Always be descriptive, do not start with “image of” and use keywords if applicable. You can easily create alt attributes in WordPress by going to Media, clicking an image, and adding your desired text therein the appropriate field.
People who are visually impaired may use screen readers and sometimes rely on alt attributes for descriptions of an image.
Increase page load speed
Page load speed is the most important factor for ranking higher in search engine results. Increase page load speeds by looking over walls of text, large uncompressed images, remove unnecessary plugins, and other elements of your webpage that have long load times. Some free tools we recommend using to test a webpage speed are provided by Uptrends, Pingdom, and GTmetrix
The BBC found they lost an additional 10% of users for every additional second their site took to load.
Increase your word count
Having a web page with a low word count can signal search engines that you have a low-quality page. It is recommended to have more than 200 words on a webpage, search engines favor long-form content. A free webpage word counter tool can be found at WordCounter.net.
According to Backlinko, organic search results that rank on page 1 of Google contain an average of 1,447 words.
Optimize meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are important to let the user know what a page is about before clicking on it. Try to have focus keywords in the description, and use a different meta description for each page. SERPsim has a great tool to view a website’s meta description.
According to codeinwp, search results with a unique meta description get about 6% more clicks than those without.
Optimize title tags
Title tags are one of the important SEO practices. It helps understand users what your page is about. Use keywords in the title tag, try to keep it under 70 characters, don’t use the same tag for other pages, and always use the site title at the end of the tag.
36% of search engine optimizers think the title tag is the most important SEO element, noted by databox.
Update internal and external broken links
Having broken internal and external links hurt the user’s experience and can worsen search engine results. When linking externally try to make the link open a new tab, users might not return to your website if that action is not taken.
Use internal links
Good internal linking practice
webpopular.net offers search engine optimization services that include implementing internal links.
Bad internal linking practice
webpopular.net offers search engine optimization services that include implementing internal links. Click here for more information.
Having very few internal links means very few visits and fewer chances of placing in search results. It is a good practice to add descriptive text links.
According to databox, a blog post should have 2-5 internal links.
What we can do
This is not a comprehensive list for growing website traffic, but they are some of the most important factors and relatively easy to fix. Of course, even if they are easier to manage, individuals or businesses with more than 100 web pages, may have trouble with this. Optimizing a website takes time and research, but that effort can be put somewhere else to use. webpopular.net includes all of these and more to drive traffic, our search engine optimization services help fix issues with websites so they can rank higher in search engine results. Please contact us to see how we can help to grow your website’s traffic.