Improve SEO: Start Using These Secrets to Increase Traffic

The clickthrough rate, or CTR, is the ratio of people who end up clicking on your link. It is worth noting that Gary Illyes of Google has made many statements that suggest CTR is not a determining factor when it comes to search ranking.

Whether that is or isn’t the case, you can still make some adjustments to improve your CTR, including:

• Adding power words to your titles
• Add brackets/parenthesis
• Use curiosity as part of a copyrighting process
• Avoid title tag truncation; this can be checked on SERPsim.com

Using Google PageSpeed Insights, you can analyze your website and receive a score between 0-100 on how your page ranks. 

Review lab data such as:

• First Contentful Paint
• Speed Index
• Largest Contentful Paint
• Time to Interactive
• Total Blocking Time
• Cumulative Layout Shift

To learn more about performance scoring, you can refer to this Web.dev article.

Refreshing content on pages or posts that you published previously is a great way to increase your site’s organic traffic. 

Performing content updates doesn’t necessarily mean rewriting the entire post or page, it just means refreshing the outdated sections. This video walks you through how to do this.

People search for the same thing in numerous ways. Google recognizes this automatically and creates a set of ranks for the nearly-identical sets of results for many keywords. In fact, according to this study, an average #1 ranking page will also rank well for about 1,000 other relevant keywords.

Going through existing content and removing content that has lots of external links to link to you instead.

Sam Oh describes how to “steal” backlinks in this video. If you use the Ahrefs Content Explorer, you will be able to see all of the 

Internal links are links from one page to another – on the same domain. For example, linking to our Contact Us page. 

Why link to your own pages? Internal links positively affect the flow of PageRank, which directly relates to your website’s Google ranking factor.

Broken backlinks are broken inbound links from other websites. These tend to occur when:

• A page was moved or deleted that has backlinks
• The linking site made a mistake when linking to you

Regardless of what led to this, it’s not ideal. By implementing 301 redirects, redirecting broken page links to another relevant page, restoring the page,  or recreating the page at the broken URL. A great resource for identifying broken pages is the Wayback Machine.

A featured snippet is what you see when you perform a Google search a full or partial answer to your query is displayed directly in the search results (see screenshot below)

By reviewing queries for key phrases and keywords of customers that are using to get to competitor sites. If your pages aren’t ranking, it may be due to a formatting issue or incorrect HTML markup. To learn about featured snippets in more detail, read this article.

Even if you make all of the mentioned changes to try to boost your rankings in search engines, it won’t happen overnight. Recent research suggests that only about 5.7% of newly published pages reach the first page of Google within a year. If you’ve been following along, this shouldn’t surprise you, as we’ve mentioned before that SEO is a long-term game.

That being said, if you’ve been patient, followed the suggestions, and you’re still not getting the results you want, chances are you might need a new SEO strategy. One that we recommend is called the “Middleman Method”, which involves choosing a “money” page to boost, finding relevant opportunities (either by using a Google “site” search or by using the ‘Best by links’ report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

Your sitemap should be registered with Google Search Console to allow Google to properly analyze your site. An example of a standard sitemap is in the screenshot below:

If you are using WordPress, you can simply download the Google XML Sitemap plugin. If you have indexing errors, they will show up and skew your Google Analytics report and make it harder for you to capture wins. Such issues could be any of the following, from Chloe Bodard at BrightonSEO:

• Errors in your sitemap: 404, 301s, or canonicalised URLs
• Orphaned URLs
• Missing/inaccurate Last Modified Date
• Missing key pages
• Noindex pages and URLs blocked by robots.txt file

Login to your Search Console and click the site that you want Google to crawl. There, click “Fetch as Google” in the “Crawl” section.

This will help you to ensure that Google is correctly crawling the page and its direct links (when selected).

Today, most people search on Google by using a mobile device. In 2016,  Google updated their search index to be mobile-first, meaning their algorithms will primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site. Dynamic serving or responsive site owners (where the site content is the same across mobile and desktop) shouldn’t have to change anything, but older sites that have separate mobile and desktop sites will need to update their site structure if they don’t want their ranking to be affected. 

You can quickly check if your site is indexing by going to Google and typing: “site:yourdomain.com”, which will tell you how many pages Google thinks your site has. Another way is by returning to your Search Console and then going to “Index Status”. This page will also display the number of pages that Google has indexed. 

While reviewing URLs and checking to ensure they are reindexing properly, you can request that an inspected URL be indexed by Google to run a quick test to see if it has any immediate indexing errors.

Creating and tracking goals in Google Analytics is somewhat of a larger sized project than you may want to tackle today. Analytics allows you to track goals via URLs, time, pages/visit, and events.

This post by Neil Patel describes the critical goal types in GA and how to build each of them. Stay tuned for a Google Analytics Master Guide, to be announced on our blog, coming soon! 

Keywords and key phrases help people that are looking for your products and/or services online via search. Whether by Google, Bing, or another similar service, regularly using words that are related to your market increases the chances of your page ranking higher than your competitors’.

Alternative text, alt text, and alt descriptions all refer to the words used to describe the appearance and function of an image on a webpage. 

Alt text is especially important for individuals that may be using accessibility software, such as screen readers, to access your website. If you don’t have alt text for your images, the screen reader will skip over them and the individual won’t know what they missed. Try to add alt text for every image that you upload – it’s a best practice!