Website Traffic and SEO

In this post, I’ll take a closer look at SEO and the process of optimizing websites for better placement within organic search results to improve website traffic.

In part 1 of this series, Website Traffic and Search Engines, I cited recent estimates that 3.5 billion searches are being conducted each day and stated the almost obvious: the higher up within the results that a site is found, the more likely it will get some traffic from search engines.

Part 2, Website Traffic and Search Engine Marketing, provided an overview of organic and paid search results and how both pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and organic search engine optimization (SEO) – the two main practices of search marketing – can be used alone or in combination to build website traffic. Ideally, they should be used in conjunction with each other.

What Exactly Is SEO?

SEO is a practice that uses a collection of techniques to achieve the following goals:

• Get as many of the site’s pages included in the search engines’ index as possible.
• Get those pages ranked as high in the organic area of the search results as possible.
• Keep those pages that are ranking well at the top of the search results.
• Continue creating fresh content that is optimized while it is being created.

Since search engines list individual web pages in search results, not just home pages, each page that ranks well for a given search becomes a potential point of entry for website traffic.

Because the overarching goal of any search engine is to return those pages it believes most relevant to the keywords used in a search, the aim of any SEO campaign is to make the individual pages within a website highly relevant for specific keywords and phrases. Because search engines interpret the searcher’s intent for using that key phrase, it’s important to look at the search results for a term or phrase before you target it. The search engine’s interpretation of intent may be entirely different than yours.

What Factors do Search Engines Consider?

Search engines are very secretive about which factors count for strong rankings. Both what’s important and the weight of each ranking factor change frequently – without notice. Plus, differences exist on what’s important and what isn’t among the big three search engines – Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

Despite all this secrecy and constant change, since relevancy is the primary goal of any search engine, making your pages seem relevant from a search engine’s point of view should include at least these basics:

• Make sure the content of the page is relevant to the keywords you are targeting.
• Make sure certain items within the code of the page reinforce that keyword relevance.
• Secure links to the page – both from within your own website and from other websites, blogs, social networks, etc. – to further reinforce that relevance.

Other key factors search engines look at include the age of the website and even the depth of its content(number of pages) on the subject and related subjects.

Search results have become more and more personalized, to the extent that two searchers using the same keywords in the same search engine may see different results.

All of this seems very intimidating doesn’t it? However, if you keep relevancy in mind, make sure your site or blog doesn’t contain barriers that make it difficult for search engines to index, continue to build your content and secure quality incoming links, you’ll be on a path to success. Another key to SEO success is analyzing the data you collect to identify what types of content attracts visitors, keeps them on the site and encourages them to share those pages elsewhere, such as on their social media sites.

As Google has increased its worthiness on EAT – Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness of your site and its content, don’t publish garbage just for the sake of building your content library, and don’t ignore your content once it’s published. Content can become outadated in a relatively short period of time depending on its topic. Google, and search engines in general, like to see fresh content that wasn’t published years ago. Keep it updated and if you make significant changes, republish the page or post. That will give it a boost in the search engine results (SERPS).

The SEO Process

Optimizing a site for search involves several steps that fall into two phases:

1. Initial site review, strategy development and optimization
2. Ongoing maintenance and continued improvements

First Phase SEO Steps

The first phase of SEO involves the largest investment of time and money over the shortest period.

Steps in the initial phase of the SEO process include:

• An evaluation of the website (site audit) and its competitors (initial competitive analysis) to identify search engine challenges and opportunities.
• Comprehensive keyword research to find the best keywords – both for the site as a whole and for individual pages within the site.
• Developing an SEO strategy with an action plan that addresses how to overcome the site’s shortcomings that may exist in indexation, competition, site architecture, navigation, content, coding and link popularity.
• Implementing the SEO action plan. Set priorities. Take care of any issues that found that don’t align with SEO best practices and start taking care of “low-hanging fruit” tasks for relatively quick improvements in rankings.

The Second SEO Phase

The second phase of SEO is an ongoing process that meets the site’s needs and the budget limitations of its owner. This SEO phase includes:

• Monitoring results and making adjustments to adapt to changes in the business, changes in what the competition is doing, changes in search engine methodology, and – longer-term – changes in keyword popularity. How did the search engines and visitors respond to the changes you made in phase one? What is working and what isn’t?
• Building the site’s content on a steady basis by continuing to focus on targeted keywords, identifying gaps in content coverage and mapping target keywords to new content to be developed. That way, you can have the new content optimized while it’s being created. Don’t publish 100 new pages overnight if you were only working with 12 pages to start.
• Continually improving the site’s search engine visibility, through promotion on social networks and blogs, for example, and through continued internal and external link building. Examine your competition’s external links. Where ware they coming from? Have a plan and set goals. Don’t go out and buy links or put your links on spammy directories. That used to work, but not these days.

In all cases, a regularly scheduled review period is necessary – usually monthly – to measure results and monitor any significant rankings and traffic changes. What is the data telling you? Is you user engagement (time spent on the page and the site) improving or dropping off.

Search rankings change constantly – usually within a relatively narrow range – so checking rankings daily or weekly is mostly pointless. Also, results are becoming more and more tailored to the individual searcher’s preferences and location. What’s more important is measuring and monitoring website traffic that’s attributed to organic search.

If your website ranks first in the search engines for a keyword phrase but that ranking doesn’t translate into traffic, its number one ranking is irrelevant.

SEO results take time to bear fruit, but unlike PPC, SEO can have a long-lasting payoff in building targeted website traffic.

Have you tried search engine optimization (SEO) in the past? What kind of results did you see, and what do you find worked and/or didn’t work for you? Have you seen positive or negative results after a recent Google algorithm update? What have you done about that?

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