We all want a constant stream of people viewing our site.

 

A constant stream is good but what we really want is a constant stream of high quality users, the kind that are interested in our offering and enquiring. Or better yet, converting then and there.

 

How do you go about building organic traffic to your website?

 

Let’s start with the stuff that is easy to fix.

I say easy because it’s stuff that most people can test and can go to you, or your local web development company, to fix.

 

Speed – I feel the need, the need for…

 

The speed of your website is paramount to rising up the rankings on search engines. If your site is slow, people will leave. Basically, we know that people are impatient, because if they clicked on your link from an organic search, they know that there are 4 million other results to read simply by hitting the back button. If your website is taking longer than 4 seconds (many suggest quicker, but us Aussies are a docile bunch comparatively) the user can get frustrated. Pingdom has done a great job of researching the correlation between the likelihood of a user bouncing as time goes by.

 

Things you can probably do in house:

1. Optimise your images – If you have 2000px wide image in a 300px wide box you need to resize. It is just a waste and will not look any better.
2. Redirects – If your landing page has a redirect, a browser has to execute that before it can start loading. If it then has to redirect to a mobile page such as m.domain.com (more on mobile sites later) well then it will have to execute that one as well.

 

Things that you might need help with are:

1. Enable compression, optimising css, removing renderblocking JS and leveraging caching.
2. Learn more about page speed with google here and test your speed with pingdom.

 

Mobile – Being mobile is the new agile

I mentioned mobile above, but it still bears repeating that if your website is not responsive yet, make it so. We know that mobile accounts for well over 50% of all searches, and search engines like to send their searchers to websites with a good experience for the operating system that is being searched on.

 

Good design is good

57% of people won’t recommend a business or brand with a poorly designed mobile site. Ouch! Imagine your shirt not being pressed being the reason you missed out on a new client. A bad user experience can quite easily cause lack of interest in your website. People won’t link to, and share, bad content.

 

Design is not just limited to the overall look of your site, it’s your individual pages as well. If you have a new page or blog entry, make sure it’s not just a mountain of text; make it easily consumable, some simple suggestions are headlines, bullet points…

hang on…

• headlines
• bullet points (yay)
• imagery (appropriate imagery)
• videos
• a readable font (size, colour and style)
• provide a CTA and sharing options

 

 

SEO – ESOteric or essential

SEO might seem like a bit of voodoo, but there are tried and true methods that can help boost your rankings, and in turn boost your traffic. SEO will help by making it easier for the engines to crawl your website, read your images, etc. but a good strategy will also help your website offsite by making sure there are no bad inbound links and create good high quality inbound links.

 

Keywords: this can be considered part of your SEO strategy or your content strategy, but once you have discovered who you are writing for (ideal customer/s) and what they are searching for, you will then have a pretty clear idea of what your keywords should be. Also spend some time on how you will use these in longtail search.

 

Influence the influencers

Speaking of inbound links, ask your favourite industry influencers to share your content. If it’s good, they will want to share it because it looks good on them to share good work. Ask nicely and engage them with why you think your content would work for their audience. No is the worst thing they can say.

 

You’re still reading? I haven’t scared you off yet? Well… the above was the easy part, and the ugly truth for why you might not be getting any traffic, is that your content is bad. There I said it… it had to be said…

 

Content is king

The more people like your article, the more they will want to share the article and things will just snowball from there. It’s hard… it takes time… and if you are not dedicated to the process, it’s pointless. Quality over quantity always!

 

Practice makes perfect – you won’t hit it out of the park on your first attempt, but then again you don’t have to publish your first attempt. Or you can publish it and learn from mistakes.

 

Writing copy that opens your brand up to new audiences and creating copy that will turn your leads into clients, isn’t something you can do half-heartedly. It’s a skill, and like any skill, it takes dedication to learn.

 

So what have we learned

The easy part – making your content as accessible to your targets as possible

The hard part – making your content creative, convincing, informative, entertaining, compelling.

The above question, or variations thereof, come up often when talking with clients (and family and friends that want to bend your ear at a get together).

On a side note, I feel for the doctor oft cornered at a party with requests like, “could you just have a look at this mole?” Working in digital marketing, I am more and more finding myself answering questions from IT to Print: ‘I think I have a virus on my computer…’ to ‘how wide should my letterbox drop go?’

But enough about my dazzling social life – back to the job at hand.

Why do I have more clicks and less sessions on my analytics?

It comes down to a fairly mundane answer.

First of all, we make sure that the figures we are talking about are correct. Every once in a while you get a zero from analytics only to find out that a client’s landing page didn’t have the Google Analytics (GA) tracking code on it.

Then, if we are indeed trying to compare apples to apples, it’s usually due to a combination of factors.

But the main contributors are:

• Click and close: A user may click on the link and then close the page before the page has loaded, which means the GA tracking code didn’t have a chance to register a hit on Analytics. This can happen because the user accidentally clicked the link, your server is slow, they have slow internet and gave up, or they just simply changed their minds. Also, it’s a good idea to have your GA code near the top of your page so it can load quickly and thus track that click… even if it is a bounce.
• Multiple clicks: A user may click the link multiple times in succession. Like with ad servers, your mail distributor will track all the clicks instantly but GA will only record a session every 30 minutes. So, if a user went to read an article on their computer, changed to another page and then went back to the email to click on the link again to finish reading the article, Mailchimp will have registered two clicks and Google only one.
• Road blocks: Many people wittingly or unwittingly might be throttling your analytics via use of a browser setting like switching off javascript (js) or having a technology or add-on for their browser that actively blocks GA.

So unfortunately, like with many systems, it’s not perfect, and your numbers will not often marry up 100%. But there should be some consistent differences which will let you extrapolate findings to see what’s working and what isn’t in your emails or other marketing endeavours.