Is setting up shop online that different from managing a brick-and-mortar store? While some might argue about the convenience of promotions, varying costs of advertising and POS, there are many similarities between the two.
When you open a new shop, you expect people to notice it and flood in to buy your products or services. Similarly, when you open a new site, you expect visitors who are interested in checking out your products and services. However, that rarely ever happens to a new website or even an old one that hasn’t received any sprucing up for a few months or even years.
The smarter way to continue receiving paying visitors is by focusing on organic traffic. Now, every website gets a variety of traffic. If your site gets impressive traffic, that’s great news, but have you checked what portion of the traffic comes from bots? Stats show that bots made up over 40% of the web traffic in 2018.
Now, that can be a significant part of the traffic you are receiving on your site. While bot traffic can be useful, they do not contribute actively to sales figures. Every website needs to focus on organic traffic. That is the crowd of visitors, who file in directly from search engines like Google.
Where can you begin the journey towards healthier organic traffic?
The first thing you need to do is get a hold of the detailed traffic insights from your queries report. For that, you will need to set up a Google Search Console user account. While the reports are not as detailed as Google Analytics reports, these hold enough actionable information for the website owner cum manager.
- Go to the Google Search Console and go to your Property Settings.
- Next, click on the Adjust Search Control option.
- Enable the User Metric to receive regular updates and reports.
- Click on Edit.
That should give you access to your search control reports. To access the information on organic visitors, go to Acquisition > Search Control > Queries.
How can keyword intent influence your website performance?
The next step entails understanding the intent of keyword usage by exploring the queries report. It is no SEO hack, but a critical part of upgrading any SEO strategy. You can determine which keywords are driving traffic and which ones are really worth the money you might be paying for them.
As per Google, keyword intent is currently crucial in the performance of a website. Determining keyword intent can be indeed tricky for any website owner or entrepreneur, which is why lots of companies hire an internet marketing consultant or an SEO analyst for the job. According to leading marketing consultants, four types of keyword intent exist, and they include:
- Navigational – the keywords that users leverage to search for the website.
- Informational – the ones users search to find answers/solutions to their questions.
- Investigational – these are the ones likely to lead the users to transaction actions.
- Transactional – the visitors use these to buy items or pay for services.
Therefore, most business websites pivot on transactional keywords, whereas a blog publisher is more likely to capitalize on investigational keywords. Most marketing companies know which keywords are critical for different types of websites and businesses. Therefore, if you do not have the time to research keyword intentions and keyword variants, a good idea might be to hire an internet marketing consultant or an SEO professional to break a sweat for you.
How can a keyword planner expand your product/service reach?
The next logical step for any website owner is to set up a keyword planner for their site. It can expand the reach of any product via using a set of relevant but new keyword variants. The keyword planner can become your site performance’s best friend if you learn how to use it.
Your marketing team already knows how to make the best use of the planner, and it can expand on the keyword ideas that your site currently uses with success. Now, it also entails filtering out the keywords that do not contribute to site traffic. You need relevant visitors with a high potential to convert. Therefore, using less-relevant keywords cannot help your site. You need to drop them to minimize your SEO and paid ad campaign expenses.
You should also get a good look at the performance of each keyword once your marketing team begins generating the performance reports. They should provide you with actionable information leading to the expansion of your website’s reach. While working with professional marketing consultants, do not forget to request specific keyword tracking. That is something Google Analytics does not do.
How can you capitalize on referral traffic?
While we are still on the topic of traffic, let us also talk about referral traffic a little. When you see new referral traffic to your site, don’t hesitate about monitoring them for link building. When someone links to a blog or article on your site, explore every opportunity to ask them if they can provide a strong link to one of your website product pages as well.
You can track all referral traffic by using your Google Console Account.
Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Referral.
That will take you to the percentage of referral traffic, their average session duration, new sessions, bounce rate, and much more. Keeping an eye on your referral traffic can help you boost your site visibility without really spending a fortune on paid ads and SEO gimmicks.
Why should every website get custom alert and SEO dashboard?
With new algorithm updates rolling out almost every day, you should urge your team of marketing professionals to set up an alert system for any drastic changes in traffic. It can save you from unpleasant surprises like the kind many websites received during the Google Broad Core Update and the Maverick update.
Setting up custom dashboards and custom alert systems for traffic monitoring is actually lesser than a day’s work for professional SEO and marketing teams. These are services that Google Analytics typically does not offer to users right out of the box. If you already have an SEO strategy, you might want to check if you have a functional SEO dashboard. That will make the job of your team a lot easier and faster than setting things up from scratch.