How Can You Grow Your Organic Traffic

What’s the number one thing you want to achieve through SEO? Is it to rank for certain keywords? No, it is to increase your volume and quality of traffic and grow your revenue. Those two goals should be top of your list and if they are not, you are thinking wrong.

In the image below you can see the sessions graph (number of individual visits) for ThinkTraffic.co.uk in February versus April. Now This website has never been a huge traffic site (it doesn’t need to be), but in January I decided that I going to invest some additional effort into growing my traffic as a way to demonstrate what can be achieved in a surprisingly short space of time.

• In February the site received a total of 152 visits
• In April the site received a total of 546 visits
• That’s an improvement of 259% in 2 months

 

Here’s How I Did It

Now that guest posting is officially out of favor with Google (at least guest posting for the sake of links) many SEOs and small businesses are wondering what they are meant to do to compete with bigger sites.

(When I say link building “for links” what I mean is building links in an attempt to improve rankings.)

Link building for traffic may seem similar, but it’s a whole different ball game. The majority of links I build for myself are NOFOLLOW and that’s fine…

If you generate traffic and create good content, eventually you will earn some SEO friendly links too.

In this post I am going to outline the main strategies that I used to achieve this huge traffic jump and I will also share the results in more detail at the end. There is no reason why you can’t achieve the same for your site.

 

Step 1 – On Page SEO

As you might expect, I have always been reasonably good at keeping my own on page SEO up to date, but there were certainly areas for improvement. So I started by analysing the site as it already was and spotting areas for improvement, the most obvious areas for improvement were:

• There were a lot of images without alt tags
• Many posts and pages didn’t have optimized titles
• Some content was outdated

All of these are items that are a work in progress, and I have gradually been working my way through each page and post, editing content, adding new insight and in one instance even recycling a post about scalable link building into one about link building without getting a penalty.

With each page and post I have re-worked the page titles and meta tags and I have been working to tidy up the images on the page too. All of this is important for SEO of course, but it’s also a great way to improve user experience.

In addition, I also realized that for such a simple site the navigation was in fact more complicated than it needed to be. So I combined my two faq pages and used javascript to make the resulting FAQ page easier to digest and swapped drop down menus for the more simple layout you see now. This has amongst other things increased traffic going to the blog.

 

Step 2 – Page Speed

You get a quick look at how fast your site is using Google’s page speed insights tool. The Think Traffic site was already reasonable, but there were a few problems which I wanted to fix, and since they were so easy to fix it seemed silly not to.

The site’s main problems were:

• Slow server response time
• Code was unnecessarily bulky

A simple WordPress plugin called W3 total cache solved both of these issues. It does two things:

Caching Your HTML

If your site runs on a CMS (like WordPress) every time a page is requested by a visitor, the CMS has to run some code, retrieve data from your database and create the HTML for that particular page. It does this on the fly and this takes time.

W3 total cache caches the HTML and other code for each page when that page is called, and then, the next time a user requests that page they are sent the cached copy, which saves having to create the entire page again. Since most pages don’t change from one day to the next, this saves a lot of server load and reduced this site’s server response time by 50%.

Minifying Code

When I said the code on this site was bulky, I don’t mean badly written. I mean that the code contains lots of spaces, which make it easier to read and edit for humans. All those spaces make it slower to read for computers though. Take this piece of CSS code for instance:

#container {
width: 300px ;
height: 300px ;
border: 1px solid #ccc ;
}

#contents {
font-weight: bold ;
}

You don’t need to understand what it means, but you can see that it’s in an easy to read format. But it’s actually a lot bigger than it needs to be. W3 total cache will minify this code so that it looks like this:

#container{width:300px;height:300px; border:1px solid #ccc;}#contents{font- weight:bold;}

It doesn’t look as nice, but for a computer it reads just as easily and it will be quicker to download, which makes for a better user experience and keeps Google happy too. W3 total cash sends files to the user ready-minified, but the version you see on the back end is still nice and human-friendly.

 

Step 3 – Blogging Regularly

For small websites it can be hard to keep blogging even when it feels like no-one is listening. But being consistent and persistent is important. Eventually people will start to take notice, but you have to ensure that your content is really, really good.

In February I decided to set a blogging schedule, which I have been following since. The schedule is to publish a new post every Monday and Wednesday. This achieves a couple of things:

• You have to commit to writing new content
• It helps to get into the habit of writing
• Consistent blogging makes new ideas come easier
• It gives your readers some consistency

I use a plugin called WordPress Editorial Calendar to schedule posts, this is also a great way to visualise what posts you have lined up and what drafts you have in the pipeline. I generally try to queue up at least a week or two of posts, and then if I have an idea for a new post which needs to be published sooner, I can just click and drag the posts around.

Writing Linkable Content

There are a lot of ways to attract links, and sometimes just saying “write really well” isn’t all that helpful. I have tried to attract shares, links and attention in a few ways, but in particular a recent post I published about why your split test is taking so long did well for a couple of reasons.

It was partly inspired by Larry Kim’s post Everything You Know About Conversion Rate Optimization Is Wrong. With that in mind, when the post went live I left Larry a comment letting him know that I had referenced his post in my latest post. Larry already knew my name because I have commented on a few of his blog posts lately, and he was kind enough to Tweet my post, as well as reTweeting my Tweet about the post.

This post was also nicely relevant to a post I wrote for Moz.com a while back (how to do CRO with little traffic) so I popped an email to Keri Morgret at Moz and she added a link in the Moz post to my new post.

This certainly isn’t the only way to attract links and mentions, but it shows that by getting to know the right people you can get a foot in the door. Larry’s Tweet alone exposed my post to his 13,000 followers.

 

Step 4 – Blog Commenting

I published a post last week about how you can drive crazy amounts of traffic using commenting. Well it’s no joke, you can. I have added around 30 blogs to my Feedly feed in the past 2 months and I now get fresh content emailed to me most days.

I don’t read every post, but I do have a constant flow of interesting content that I can read if I like. I generally try to read a post fully and leave a comment that adds some value, gives an alternative view point or an additional insight. This achieves a few things:

• The bloggers start to recognise your name/face
• You keep up to date with the latest news in your niche
• You get traffic from the link (but not SEO juice!)
• It helps you to find new blog ideas to write about

Overall I would say this has been the biggest factor in growing my traffic so far, no just because of the direct traffic but because of the relationship building and idea generation.

Bonus Tip: Using Forums

In a similar vein to blog commenting is using forums. Chances are good that there is a popular forum that is relevant to your niche. I am a regular contributor to the UK Business Forums, since my target audience is small businesses (mainly based in the UK, but not exclusively).

Being a member allows me to include a (NOFOLLOW) link in my bio, which appears every time I post something, and because all of my posts are really helpful, thorough responses which help other users with their online marketing, I often get traffic from answering questions. In fact, this is the source of some of this site’s most engaged traffic.

 

Step 5 – Growing Our Twitter Audience

Finally, I have also set a schedule for Twitter. I used Buffer to schedule Tweets in advance, that way, when I read a good blog post, or see something interesting or helpful, I queue it up to be posted. This has meant that for the past 2 months the @Think_Traffic twitter account has sent out at least 2 posts per day, every day.

I have also been using Hootesuite to monitor Twitter activity. I regularly reTweet other people’s Tweets and reply to other users, and I make sure that I understand which of my Tweets are most popular – this then informs my content strategy moving forward.

 

The Results

As I mentioned at the start of this post, in 2 months traffic (visits) has increased by 259%, but let’s look at that in more detail.

As you can see in this image, page views, users and sessions have all increased by similar amounts. The pages per visit has dropped slightly, but only by just less than 12% which is a good result considering the big traffic increase. This shows that the new traffic is good quality. In April we also got a higher percentage of return visitors, which is a good sign too.

This image shows how our traffic is composed. As you can see, in February a large portion of traffic came from search (mainly Google) with direct and referral making up most of the rest. Social media was a very small segment. Whereas in February traffic sources are more even and Social traffic has grown substantially. This is great because it means that not only are we getting more traffic, but we are now less reliant on Google.

Of course all traffic sources have grown considerably, and that’s what we want to see, if all of your traffic is growing and becoming more diversified you are building a solid foundation and reducing your risk of sudden traffic loss at the same time.

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