11 Steps to Drive More Traffic to Your Website
Jim Stewart recently hit the road to attend three speaking events at the invitation of The Adviser Bootcamp Digital Marketing Event in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. The Bootcamp events were aimed at providing finance brokers the knowledge and skills required to establish effective digital marketing strategies to increase customer bases and drive brand recognition and sales. Jim’s sessions included invaluable knowledge on why SEO is needed, establishing Facebook ads, explaining how to write effective, compelling content, and leveraging the power of digital marketing for instant ROI. Throughout the Bootcamp, Jim explained the cornerstones that each broker should implement on their site.
What Does Google Know About You?
Firstly, you need to know what Google knows about your site. Type in site:yourwebaddress and the number of results returned is how many pages Google thinks you have. A number vastly more or less than what you actually have and you have a problem. Far too many results can indicate duplicated content on your site that will hurt your rankings. If you have a WordPress site and it’s a blog, chances are it hasn’t been configured correctly and Google is seeing mistakes such as images having separate pages. Configuration issues are easily fixed but in the meantime can hurt rankings. Pages that no longer exist may need to be manually removed as Google isn’t realising that they no longer exist.
Set Up Google Search Console
You need to set up Google Search Console on your site as it brings together everything that Google knows about your site in one easy to read platform. It contains data that you can’t obtain anywhere else, so it is imperative that you have it for your site.
The Secret to Getting to Number One in Google
Build your brand and have a great user experience. Google’s ranking signals fall into two main categories: relevancy and authority. Rankings aren’t decided until the moment someone conducts a search. From there, key factors come into play; location of the searcher, when they searched, and the demographic of the searcher.
Relevancy comes down to the query being done and the user’s intent. Google knows enough about you to know what you are specifically searching for.
Authority is brand. Brand is what you should be doing outside of Google. It’s what people know about your business and from things you do on Facebook and the like. Building a strong brand means that you don’t have to focus on Google so much, as Google will associate your brand with authority and drive traffic your way.
Publication and configuration are also essential elements that need to be mastered. Publication relates to blog posts, news articles and relevant, quality content. Configuration concerns elements such as site speed.
Speed
Slow sites have few fans. If your site takes more than three seconds to load, 40% of traffic will have clicked away. Speed is something you can control and should. Use Google Page Speed Insights to check your URL. It will show you the speeds for both desktop and mobile. You need your speed to be in the 80’s, preferably around the 85 mark. Optimising images is a key factor in page speed. Most site owners just upload a giant image, when really you need to resize the image before uploading it so it will be the size it will display at. A visitor will have to download a giant image which slows the page load time down and contributes to a poor user experience. The faster your site is, the better the conversion rate.
Errors
You need to set up Google Search Console before you can recognise any errors. Once it is, it is an easy process to run reports and identify problems that may be holding your site back.
Duplication
Duplication is a problem for your rankings. What you may not see, Google does. Elements of your site may be remnants from your web developer, such as placeholders. Lorem ipsum pages are often mistakenly left in place by developers. Google still sees these pages and indexes them. As they are low quality pages, they reflect badly on your site’s quality and in turn affect your rankings. Google does not want to send users to low quality sites where there is no benefit or poor code that may harm the user.
Keywords
Optimising the wrong keywords is a waste of time. So what are the right keywords? Don’t use jargon for a start, especially industry-jargon. No one will be searching for that. You have to think like a user and use words that customers are using. A good exercise is to ask friends what words they would use to search for your business. There are lots of fantastic, free tools to help you hone in on keywords. Google Trends is an awesome tool that separates singular and plural and it sometimes pays to use several tools to make sure you cover all angles. If you want to spend a little money on one, then SEMrush is hard to beat. SEMrush allows you to see what keywords your competitors are buying on AdWords, and what they are paying for those words. Inside Google Search Console is a useful tool called Search Analytics that identifies traffic and opportunities you may not know existed.
Content Structure
Marketing is about getting your brand known, and that means publishing. The same content rules apply to your website as if you were running a magazine; good content and an enjoyable user experience will see readers return and grow. Correct document structure is good SEO. Use keywords in your page titles and convey what you want to say. Keywords should also be used strategically in file names, alt tags, images and PDFs. IMG0001.jpg isn’t helping anyone. Rename an image using keywords before you upload it.
Sliders
Sliders, those big advertising boards that swish across the top of a website, may look flash and appealing to some, but they kill conversions. Remove them as soon as possible. They absorb valuable real estate that can be utilised for converting visitors into sales. They are also very unappealing to mobile users, and Google is moving towards a mobile first world so you should double efforts for mobile user experience.
Google My Business
You need to let Google know that you service a particular area. There are only ten spots up for grabs on a page, so you need to set up Google My Business so that Google can show local search results. It’s easy to set up. Just go to https://business.google.com and set up you details. Google will send a postcard containing a PIN to that physical address to verify your I.D. You can also use the service if you work from home. It is important that you also get structured data for your site, which is where you give your words context.
HTTPS
From October, Google will require you to obtain an SSL Certificate if you want to be HTTPS compliant. HTTPS encrypts the information between your computer and a website and decrypts it at the other end, avoiding information hijacking in the middle. Once it is set up, visitors to your site will see a little green padlock that says ‘Secure’. If you don’t have HTTPS, visitors will be greeted by a red padlock that says ‘Not Secure’. Visitors to your site will see this on forms, which isn’t great if you rely on them for lead generation. Visitors will be scared away and find solace in the arms of your secure competitors.
Establishing these cornerstones of a website will stand you in good stead for the foreseeable future, with a strong foundation on which to increase traffic and conversions, and easy monitoring and systems in place that will help embed your site in the top search results of Google.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
