Category: SEO

Whether you are new to the online world or you’ve always had a web presence getting visitors to interact with your website is essential. The main aim is that they take some type of action and purchase a product or service. But in order to increase your chances of this, monitoring website traffic is crucial. When you understand user behaviour, you will increase your profit margins. There are several benefits to knowing how visitors are interacting with your website such as identifying and resolving errors, monitor how your pages are performing, knowing what type of content is most appealing to visitors and much more.  

If you want to know how to identify visitors to your website, keep reading to find out our 6 top tips.   

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic is also referred to as direct access; this is when a visitor arrives on your website without having found their way there through another source. Direct traffic can come from a range of sources including: 

• A link to your website clicked in an email. 
• When a visitor bookmarks or saves your site in their browser.  
• When a visitor enters your web address into their browser because they have used it before.  

Measuring direct traffic is important because it’s an indication of brand loyalty. When a high percentage of your traffic is direct, it means that visitors are actively looking for you because they either recognize you or they are thinking of you. For example, when a customer doesn’t have a website in mind and they are searching for a particular product or service; their first point of contact is Google. They will perform a keyword search and click on the first website that shows up. However, when they know what they are looking for and they come directly to you, there is more chance of them taking action when they get to your website.   

1. Landing Page Conversions

After investing time and money into social media posts and email marketing that target your desired audience, when they click on your call to action, you want them to take action when they get to your landing page. If not, what you are doing isn’t working. Therefore, monitoring landing page conversions is essential to the success of your business. When you have access to what works and what doesn’t, you can make the necessary changes.   

Returning Visitors

When you eat at a bad restaurant, you are not going to go back. The same principle applies to website content. Your total visitors in ratio to your returning visitors will determine whether your content is good enough for your visitors to return for a second helping. When a potential customer returns, it is an effective way to identify website visitor. When planning your content strategy, the aim should be to gain loyal customers who return to your website when they want to purchase a product or service you offer. There are several ways you can evaluate the performance of your content, these include: 

• Direct URL: Direct traffic typically comes from returning visitors; this percentage will depend on your business model and marketing campaigns. 
• Social Sharing: If people are sharing your content, it means they think its valuable. When your content has been of benefit to someone, they want to give someone else that same benefit and so they will share it through social media, email, text etc.  
• Social Media Platforms: If you post your content on social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin, the platform will provide you with performance analytics such as likes, shares, and the number of clicks your post has received. 

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of people who visit your website, and leave as soon as they get there. They don’t go to the menu tap and click through to any other pages, and they don’t read anything on the home page. What this means is that no alarm bell rings for the analytics tool you are using, and so they have nothing to record. The visitor left as quickly as they came, they bounced!  

Bounce rate is a powerful metric for measuring website traffic because it provides you with an indication of the quality of your web page and whether the audience you are targeting is the right one. There are several reasons why a person might bounce out of your website, and two of the most common are a disorganized website, and information overload. In other words, the website was too difficult to navigate and the page was crammed with so much information, the visitor got overwhelmed and left.  

Duration of Stay

Research suggests that the average time a person stays on a website is 15 seconds. If you don’t capture the visitors’ attention during that time, you’ve lost them. According to Jon Lister from Elite SEO, web owners should be more concerned with the length of time visitors spend with their content as opposed to ‘vanity metrics’ such as page views. The number of page views you get is irrelevant if people are not engaging with your content. Therefore, it is essential that you create quality content because Google pays close attention to how visitors navigate through your site. They record things such as whether they click on the back button, and whether they make their way back to the search results because what they found was of no use to them.   

Visitor Flow

Visitor flow refers to the path visitors take through your website. On an analytics tool, this information is presented as a graph and allows you to see the following: 

• The Connection Paths: Where a visitor starts, where they interact, and where they exit.  
• Volume: The volume of page views per collection of pages or per page.  

• Volume of Visits: How visitors arrived at your site. Was it through a campaign? A browser? Etc. 

Visitor flow allows you to gain deeper insight into your traffic progression, which provides you with valuable information about your web analytics in general.  

Final Thought 

To analyze whether your website is successful, you need to evaluate things such as conversion rate, click-through rate, bounce rate and where your visitor traffic is coming from. When you have access to this information it enables you to make the necessary changes to improve your website. Please note, website traffic monitoring is not a one-time event, what worked this year, might not work next year. User behaviour is constantly changing and it’s essential that you are up to speed with it so that you can continue turning visitors into paying customers.  

The search engine algorithm is constantly evolving and you need to know the new technologies and techniques to change your optimization strategy accordingly.

SEO Trends

Here are the top 5 SEO trends you need to know about in 2018. If you want to learn more about content marketing do visit Click Consult for a quick advice.

Structured Data adoption is on the Rise:

To provide information quickly for search queries in the form of rich snippets, Google is using more and more structured data. With the use of structured data the search engine can create meaningful meta descriptions from existing content that means you should make your meta descriptions stand out. Structured data is used by Google to make rich snippets in ways such as; rating stars, food calories, opening and closing times, event details etc. So be sure to make your content accordingly.

The Era of Voice Search:

In the olden days it may have seemed like a farfetched dream, but it’s a hard fact these days that 1 out of 5 searches are from voice queries (that means around 20 percent) and the numbers will increase with the days, as claimed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The world is moving forward to the era of voice queries, with the introduction of Google Home and Pixel devices and other devices like Samsung Bixby and Amazon Echo. I am a proud owner of a Pixel device and this news comes as no surprise to me because I, myself use the Google assistant for day to day questions and searches. Furthermore, Google Assistant is now available for almost all Android devices and this will mark the increase of the voice search query percentage.

This is the time to opt for optimizing your SEO strategy for voice search. An easy way to do this is by focusing more on long tail keywords and syntax commonly used, and by writing well informative and broken-down content so it may answer more search queries at a time.

AMP is the way to go!

The world is on the go now and almost 60 percent of the web searches now come from mobile phones and tablets. Even if you create a new website these days mobile optimization is now a standard and Google uses AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and PWA (Progressive Web Apps) to make your mobile pages even faster. It is observed that AMP pages are already an integral part of the Google SERPs and the trend will grow in 2018.

Featured Snippets:

People want information and they want it now. Google is working hard to make web results quicker and more informative in the form of featured snippets. Even, when you make a voice query with the Google Assistant it brings back these featured snippets. Featured snippets are robbing the top 10% of traffic from top positions with the adoption of structured data. To fight these, a new trend has arisen in the form of Q&A content which is optimized to provide short answers to long search queries. Furthermore, it is advised to structure your content in an easy-to-read manner so it is easier for Google to pull relevant information for featured snippets.

Image Search is Gaining Potential:

With faster internet connections and friendly social media platforms, the users now demand more visual online interactions. Image search has been significantly improved by Google. As in 2018, your content should be a comprehensive interplay between text, images and videos. With apps like Google lens available for now all android phones, the competition is more than ever as the users don’t have to even leave their gallery for a web search.

Do read this advanced guide for SEO tips on Click Consult.

If you have been in the SEO game for a long time, then you should probably know that backlinks are one of the most important rankings factors. There have been a lot of discussions regarding the use backlinks as of late, with plenty of webmasters saying that SEO backlinking services should be avoided entirely as it’s no longer effective. Many fear that links are not as useful as before because of the Penguin update released by Google which wiped out a ton of blog networks that were used exclusively for building links.

Backlinks Will Continue to Be Effective

While there’s a good reason to be afraid of future Google updates, it’s important to keep in mind that backlinks will continue to be effective. Even Google said that they tested a version of their search engine which didn’t use links as a ranking factor. The results were very poor compared to how their search engine functions right now. This goes to show that backlinks will always be used as one of the main factors when determining a webpage’s ranking.

Quality Over Quantity

Now that the issue about backlinks being ineffective is out of the way, it’s time to discuss the importance of getting high-quality links. When it comes to link building services, quality beats quantity any day. Blasting your site with thousands of links and seeing it rise to the top of the results pages used to be a popular technique, but Google and other search engines have become a lot smarter now. Doing this same technique today could actually end up hurting your site, as it could trigger an algorithmic penalty that would remove it completely from Google’s search index.

In case you’re wondering what the best backlinks are, then you should aim for relevant and contextual links. Links from social profiles and blog comments still have their place in your overall link building strategy, but you should focus on contextual links from sources relevant to your niche. Reaching out to other webmasters for guest posting opportunities is still a great way to build links to your site.

Diversifying Your Link Profile

While contextual links should comprise most of your total links, you should still try to diversify your link profile by utilizing different online platforms. As mentioned, you can build links to a social media site, social bookmarking, blog comments and forum comments. This makes your backlink profile more natural in the eyes of the search engine bots.

Optimizing Anchor Text

Here is one aspect to link building that many webmasters tend to ignore. Aside from the quality of your backlinks, you should also keep an eye out on your anchor text profile. Using the same exact match anchor text repeatedly can trigger a spam detector, which could penalize your site and hurt its ranking. It’s also highly recommended to diversify your anchor text profile the same you try to gather links from different sources.

As a general rule of thumb, you wouldn’t want to use the same keyword twice as your anchor text. Instead, you can mix them up by using related keywords and LSI terms. Here’s where keyword research comes into play. In addition, you should also use naked URLs and generic terms such as “click here” as most people tend to link to other websites this way.

Start Improving Your Rankings with Effective Link Building

The concept behind link building services is very simple. Problems arise when you try to take shortcuts. In the world of SEO, it pays to be patient and wait for results to come before doing anything that may harm your rankings. Just stick to the basics and you should be well on your way to dominating the first page of the results pages.

Even for those starting a website, it is imperative to have any may people visiting that site as possible. This will lead to more engaged readers, more newsletter subscribers, more sales and more clients. It can also lead to a positive brand awareness, positive reviews and the creation of natural referrals. This can be done with online and print advertising, but beginners often opt for increasing their search engine optimisation (SEO). This process involves different methods that can be used off-page and on-page that will increase the likelihood that a website will show up in search engine results for a certain search term. Furthermore, it is important to have a site show up for search terms that are relevant to their field and for a site to be shown as high up on search results as possible. This is because it has been found that most people do not look past the first page of results on a search engine such as Google. While strategies can be introduced by business owners, it is often best to implement the help of a professional SEO service.

SEO for Beginners

Professionals will know what kinds of strategies to use that are honest, reliable and will garner results over time. Aside from finding an expert SEO service, here are the best tips SEO for beginners.

Ensure that a website fully functional

A great way to make sure that a site gets noticed by Google is by ensuring that it is fully functional. This means that is loads in a timely manner on all devices used. It means that it is reformatted for when a tablet or smart phone is used. It means that there are no broken links and that all images are of good quality. When everything is working great and has good loading speed, it is more likely that pages will show up in search engine results and more visitors will be obtained.

Include tags and keywords

It is important for beginners to include relevant keywords and tags as an on-page technique. This means researching what a potential audience may be searching and using those search times as keywords or tags. For example, someone looking for an IT company may type in a search term such as “fix my computer”. It is important to research what the best terms are to use, and this is information that can be gained by hiring a SEO service. Search words can be included in blog posts and on web pages, and tags can be included in headings and in pictures.

Start building a strong back-link profile

It is important for those who are starting out to begin building a strong back-link profile. This involves having a website link featured elsewhere on the internet. This can be achieved by writing guest posts for other relevant blogs. Further strategies are to share links to social media pages and to create great content, so it is more likely that visitors will share that content. All of these methods and more can be taught and implemented by an optimisation expert.

At the end of the day, there are many different techniques that can be implemented increase a webpages visibility. It is important to remember that overdoing strategies can lead to receiving a penalty by Google or been registered as spam. Because of this, it is imperative to seek professional help and to do a lot of research. With some help, a website can enjoy the benefits of more visibility such as more visitors, more sales, and more clients. While some methods are more advanced than others, beginner SEO techniques are still known to make a difference and should be used by everybody.