5 SEO Wins to Boost Your Website’s Traffic

What’s your New Year’s resolution for your business? Expand your customer base? Increase the number of sales? Increase the number of returning customers?

How about increasing the traffic to your website? That way you have a bigger audience to sell too, and hopefully, with the right product or service and content on your website, you’ll be able to expand your customer base.

Many businesses have a poorly-optimized website and are missing out on plenty of organic traffic as a result. With a few changes to their sites, they can see an upturn in both their rankings and traffic in a short period of time.

There are lots of SEO changes you can make to boost your website, some of these can be quick and small or even outsourced to save you time.

Here are five changes that may benefit your site to begin the New Year:

Mobile-friendly

Google confirmed in early November that they would be moving to a mobile-first index early this year (later confirmed for 10 January 2017) meaning that a mobile-optimized site is more important than ever.

This is not just a mobile-friendly site that ticks all the boxes in Google’s mobile-friendly test, but one that is optimized to rank in mobile results too. Most of us now have a mobile-friendly site but not everyone is putting in enough effort to rank in Google’s mobile results.

Today, more people are searching on Google using a mobile device than they do a desktop. Although users still convert higher on the desktop, on the whole, I expect it to be only a matter of time before mobile wins in this category too.

So don’t hang around and miss out on potential traffic and customers with a mobile site simply built to satisfy Google but rather, build one to be successful in the mobile-first index.

Redirects To Wisely Use Link Juice

You publish content on your blog, it gets a lot of traffic and social shares, inherits link and then over time, it becomes outdated. Maybe it also gets deleted. Every once in a while it’s worth downloading a list of links to your website to analyze which pages they are linking to.

It’s especially important if you have a blog on your website. Links pointing to old blog posts or pages that are less relevant than they used to be – these can either be updated or their link juice redirected passed onto new pages.

To make this a quick process, download a list of pages on your website that are inbound links and then run those pages through Screaming Frog to find out if any of these pages no longer exist. After running this check, any pages that no longer exist but have inbound links should be redirected to a relevant page on your website.

Competitor Research

If you aren’t doing so already it’s always worth keeping an eye on what your competitors are up to. Have they changed any page titles? Done any link building? Published any press releases?

Run their site through Screaming Frog to see if there are any additional terms they’re using compared to your site and use a tool such as Majestic for a copy of their backlink profile.

You can find quick wins with new keywords to focus on and new publications your business haven’t been in that your competitors are in. Depending on how big your competitors’ sites are and how big their backlink profiles are will determine how long the task is to look through a couple of spreadsheets for this information.

Page Loading Speed

Having already mentioned the popularity of mobile searches it’s important that your website loads quickly. No one likes hanging around for a website that takes forever to load – on both mobile and desktop.

Websites that load quicker also seem to both rank and convert better. After all, who wants to wait for each individual page to load slowly during purchasing when the same or similar product or service can be purchased quicker elsewhere?

Google even have their own PageSpeed tools to help you fix page loading speed issues with your website.

Use Schema To Stand Out

A large percentage of Google results incorporate Rich Snippets, supported by Schema. Yet, at the end of 2016, the percentage of websites making the most of this tool and additional space on Google’s results appeared much smaller.

There are still lots and lots of websites, potentially you and your competitors that are not using Schema or not using it to its full advantage. This could mean there’s an opportunity for you to stand out from the competition or simply to get back on par with them.

Rich Snippets help your listing stand out in the organic results which could be the difference between a user clicking on your website than the results above or below it.

Google shows plenty of Rich Snippet results – perhaps your business could benefit from using Schema to enhance your search results for events, review ratings, products, recipes, and videos for example.