Our Blog

3 Important Tips for Improving Organic Traffic

If you increase your organic traffic, you’ll lead more potential customers to your website. This could improve your conversion rate and generate more revenue.

Usually, increasing organic traffic requires plenty of time and effort. It also needs constant monitoring, ensuring that you see a return on all your efforts.

In this blog post, we’re going discuss 5 important tips for improving organic traffic. There are plenty of strategies at your disposal, but we believe the tips we’re going to discuss in this blog post could yield the most results without taking up too much time.

Let’s get started.

Improve your website speed.

Search engines want to provide users with the best answers to their search queries as quickly as possible. In mid-2018, Google introduced its Speed Update. The update made how fast your website a.k.a. page speed a vital ranking factor in mobile search engine results.

As a result, creating excellent content is no longer enough. You also need a fast website. If your competitors have a faster website than you, you may get left behind in search engine rankings.

Begin by determining how fast your website currently use. You can use PageSpeed Insights. It’s a tool created by Google that tests how your website speed using data from actual Google Chrome users.

Enter your URL, and the tool will scan your website and score its speed. It will also provide optimisation tips like properly sizing images or minifying your code.

Armed with suggestions from PageSpeed Insights, you can then make the necessary changes to speed up your website.

You can also create a list of your top competitors and test their website speed using PageSpeed Insights. You will then have an accurate picture of how fast your website truly needs to be. 

For example, if you see that their website is several times slower than yours, you’ll know right away that speeding up your website could you a huge boost in search engine rankings.

Check if your webpages have been indexed.

Before we proceed, let’s break down a few SEO concepts first.

Web crawlers, also known as spiders or spiderbots, are bots that “crawl” through the Internet to find pages that need to be indexed by search engines.

However, crawlers have a “limited” budget. They might be unable to crawl all the pages on your website, especially if it has hundreds of pages.

This could result in search engines failing to index some of your webpages which could mean bad news for your organic traffic. Users can’t come to your website if they don’t even see it in search engine results.

You need to check if search engines have indexed your webpages, especially the ones you’ve assigned target keywords to.

Use Google Search Console, a tool created by Google for this specific purpose that also helps you optimise your website better.

You need to add your website to Google Search Console. Open the site, enter your URL, and click on Continue. You will then be asked to verify website ownership through a variety of options.

You could download an HTML file from Google Search Console and upload it to your domain. You could also add a piece of code to your homepage or connect your Google Search Console account with either your Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager accounts.

Once you’ve verified website ownership, click on Coverage on the sidebar. Click on Excluded, scroll down a bit, and click on Crawled – currently not indexed. You will then see a list of webpages that Google crawled but didn’t index.

Webpages could be crawled but no indexed for a variety of reasons.

First, Google might think that the content on the webpage is “thin” which means that it doesn’t offer unique information. It’s stating information that could be found on other more established websites.

Google also might think that the webpage is a duplicate which means that the exact content has been published on another URL. For example, you submitted a guest post on another blog and published it on your blog afterwards.

It’s also possible that the page is new and hasn’t been indexed by search engines yet. If this is the case, you can “ask” Google to index the page by uploading a new sitemap. You’ll learn more about sitemaps in the next section.

Upload a new sitemap.

A sitemap is a file containing a list of all the files on your website. It tells search engines how the content on your website is organised, making it easy for them to crawl and index webpages.

If you’re using WordPress, uploading a sitemap can be quite easy.

You’ll need to install the plugin Yoast. Once that’s done, click on SEO on the sidebar and select General. Click on the Features tab and select On for the XML Sitemaps feature.

Yoast will then automatically create a sitemap for you. No coding needed. Once it’s done, it will give you the URL for your sitemap. They often look like this: https://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml.

Go to Google Search Console and click on Sitemaps in the sidebar. Enter your sitemap URL under Add a New Sitemap and click on Submit.

It’s unnecessary to upload a new sitemap every time you make changes to your website. However, it might take a while for them to index your new content.

We recommend uploading a new sitemap whenever you make major changes or add plenty of new pages. By doing this, you’re giving search engines a “nudge” and ensuring that all your new pages are indexed.

Conclusion

Improving organic traffic could lead more users to your website, improving your conversion rate. The tips we discussed in this blog post are ones you can implement on your own. Give them a try whenever you have some time to spare.

If you need help improving your organic traffic, we’d love to help. Cornerstone Digital is an SEO agency in Sydney that can help you find your ideal customer via SEO. Call us on (02) 8211 0668 or email us atinfo@cornerstone-digital.com.au.

• Comments (0)
• Trackbacks (0)
• Permalink

Darlyn Herradura

A self-professed book and digital marketing nerd, Darlyn Herradura focuses on building trust between customers and businesses with the written word. She understands that creating valuable content is the best way to get found online and happily spends her time doing that.