Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is a tool by Google that provides detailed information on your site’s traffic and search performance. There’s no better place to get this data than right from the source. It means you’re guaranteed to get accurate traffic data.

Aside from raw traffic metrics, you can see:

• total impressions,
• Google Search traffic,
• web traffic sources,
• your position search results,
• and your click-through rates.

Information is power when it comes to SEO and digital marketing. It should be the basis of any strategy, and GSC metrics can help with that. GSC also identifies any problems impacting your website’s performance. These might be poor mobile responsiveness or slow loading times. These features make GSC one of the best tools for checking website traffic metrics. Best of all, using the tool to track traffic for multiple websites is completely free and always will be. This is the case with any tool Google provides.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is another tool from Google that’s essential for website owners. This will be the case for as long as Google has such a huge search dominance. GA4 offers more detail on your website’s traffic than GSC. It shows where visitors come from and how they behave on your site. With GA4, you can track website traffic stats like:

• visitor numbers,
• how long people stay on your site,
• the pages they visit,
• and the actions they take.

Understanding your audience is the key to effective digital marketing. Google Analytics will go a long way to help you achieve this goal. You can see whether traffic is coming from search engines like Google, social media, direct links or paid ads. This lets you measure your ad campaigns’ effectiveness compared to SEO. You do this by measuring traffic from paid searches vs. organic searches. This means more informed marketing strategies and better resource allocation.

Use both Google Analytics. Also, use Google Search Console. Together, they’ll give you a full view of your website performance. You will be able to see exactly how users find you and what they do on your site. Since Google provides both these tools, you’re getting the traffic data directly from the source. 

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a popular third-party tool with both paid and free options. It differs from Google’s tools in that it also provides competitor insights. As well as tracking raw traffic, you can use the suite of SEO tools to:

• check your website ranking for specific keywords,
• estimated traffic these rankings bring,
• see the total number of backlinks pointing to your website,
• and analyse the quality of these backlinks.

One of Ahrefs’ standout features for traffic analysis is its Site Explorer. The free version has limited access – but it does let you see where your competitor’s traffic comes from. You can also see the keywords they rank for and how much traffic these keywords likely bring them. This info is vital for a competitive SEO strategy. Ahrefs can also give you a site health report that highlights any performance issues. Addressing these issues can help improve your rankings and increase your website traffic.

Ahrefs has both a free and paid version. The free plan isn’t as in-depth as the paid one, but it still provides a clear traffic overview and how you compare to competitors. We use the free version of Ahrefs all the time to track ongoing SEO campaigns and do keyword research. We love its simple interface and well-structured data. That said, the free version doesn’t provide as much depth as some other tools on this list.

Semrush

Semrush is a popular marketing tool and a huge name in the SEO space. They have a free tool that also gives you insights into your competitors’ traffic as well as your own. SEMrush has both a premium and a free version, but the free version still has plenty of useful features.

With Semrush, you can:

• track your website’s keyword rankings,
• traffic estimates for these keywords,
• view the source and quality of backlinks to your site,
• and conduct a competitive analysis to see where you stand in your industry.

Semrush’s free traffic analysis feature is more limited than the paid version. It still provides a good snapshot of performance and user engagement. You can benchmark your site against your competitors. You can find strategies to improve your traffic. It’s a good place to start.

We’re a big fan of their Site Audit Feature. It’s great at picking up technical SEO issues that damage search engine performance. Issues we often see using this tool are slow page load times and missing meta descriptions. Fixing technical issues like these is the basis of any good SEO strategy. If you’re looking to enhance your site’s performance, check out our guide to improving website load time.

Serpstat

Serpstat is a powerful SEO management platform. It also allows you to track both your website traffic over time and that of your competitors. Like SEMrush and Ahrefs, Serpstat has paid and free plans. The free one is a great start for those who are new to SEO or have limited resources.

With Serpstat, you can:

• check the ranking of your website for chosen keywords,
• get track estimation for different keywords,
• examine the sources and quality of your backlinks,
• and perform a competitive analysis to understand your position within your market.

Serpstat provides a full view of search analytics. This includes keyword research, competitor analysis, and backlink checking. These can help you identify any missed opportunities to attract more visitors. Serpstat also has a Site Audit feature, much like that from Semrush.

One of Serpstat’s biggest strengths is its competitor analysis tool. Even using the free version, it’s comprehensive. You can see who you share the most keywords with. You can also see the traffic metrics for any website. Best of all, you can see keywords that are driving the most traffic for your competitors. This allows you to capitalise on them as well.

Hotjar

Hotjar offers a different perspective on website traffic analysis. It focuses more on user behaviour and interaction than raw website site traffic stats and metrics. It doesn’t provide traditional SEO metrics, like keyword rankings or backlink analysis. Instead, you’ll gain insight into how visitors engage with your site.

Hotjar provides:

• Heatmaps. These show where users click, scroll, and spend time on your pages. This can highlight what captures attention and what gets overlooked.
• Visitor Recordings. These show real visitor interactions on your site. They offer a direct view of user experience obstacles and engagement patterns.
• Direct feedback options from users like polls and surveys. Theyse help you understand your visitors’ likes and pains.

Hotjar’s focus on user experience metrics complements more SEO-focused tools well. The better you understand your users, the better experience you can create. This will mean a lower bounce rate and better conversion rates. Always keep in mind that user experience is the key tenet of SEO. Google’s ultimate goal is to serve users with sites they will enjoy. The better your site, the more traffic you’ll get.

Why Website Traffic Analysis Is Important

You can’t improve something if you can’t measure it. This is nowhere more true than in the field of digital marketing. Analytics are everything. For a digital strategy to succeed, you need to back it up with data.

You need clear data on how many people visit your site, what they do when they’re there, and how they found you. Otherwise, you can’t know if your content hits the mark or if your ads are engaging enough. Knowing how much traffic you’re getting helps you see patterns. This can tell you what’s working and what isn’t. This can help you make better use of your budget and get a better return on investment. If you see a surge in traffic after a blog, keep up the content marketing. The same goes for ad campaigns, social media marketing, and email marketing.

Lastly, measuring your website traffic also shows you how visitors use your site. This can help you make it easier to use and more enjoyable, which keeps people coming back. Knowing what content your audience likes helps you create more of it, making your site more relevant to their needs.

Analysing metrics and traffic statistics isn’t everyone’s favourite activity. But it is a necessity. Measuring the amount of traffic your website gets and where it comes from is the only way to make informed decisions.

Why Check Competitor Website Traffic?

You know now that checking your website traffic analytics is crucial. So is keeping an eye on your competitors. It’s one of the best ways to benchmark your site’s performance in your industry.

Knowing your competitors’ traffic lets you gauge the size of your shared audience. This can highlight opportunities for growth. Is your competitor getting a lot of traffic from a specific social media platform? That’s where you need to be posting. Analysing your competitors’ website traffic also helps you spot trends in your industry. You might find that your competitor is getting traffic from certain keywords or topics. Those are the areas you need to focus on.

If their content or ads are bringing them success, understanding why can help you adapt. This doesn’t mean copying what they do – rather, learning from their successes and failures. Not doing so means missing out on opportunities to improve your own performance and get more traffic.

The Different Types Of Website Traffic

Each type of traffic has its own value. It tells you how well different aspects of your marketing are working. The two types of traffic you should focus on the most are organic and paid traffic. Here’s a breakdown of the various types of traffic and what they can tell you about your marketing:

• Organic traffic refers to users who discover your website through unpaid search results. These users must have intent related to your product or service. As a result, they are more likely to convert into customers.High organic traffic is one of the best indicators your site is well-optimised for search engines. Job well done – your content aligns well with what users search for.
• Paid traffic represents visitors who come to your site from paid ad campaigns. These could include Google Ads and sponsored social media posts. Tracking paid traffic is the best way to measure the success of your ads. It’s best not to rely on paid search traffic too much – you have to pay a few cents every time a user clicks on your ad. This can get costly over time.
• Direct Traffic is when visitors enter your website’s URL straight into their browser. It can suggest that people are actively seeking out your website. Note: Google often puts unattributed traffic in the direct category.
• Referral Traffic iswhen a user clicks on a link to your site from another site. Lots of referral traffic means you’re making good content and building strong backlinks.
• Social traffic comes from links shared on social media platforms. High social traffic represents engaging content a social media strategy that works.

For more details on boosting specific types of traffic, check out our article ‘What is Organic Traffic, and How Does it Compare to Paid and Direct Traffic?

Know Your Audience – Know How To Succeed

If you’re a business owner, your website is one of your biggest assets for getting new leads. Regularly checking your website’s traffic is integral to understanding whether it’s working for you as it should. This knowledge lets you make better decisions for your website and business. Let us know which tool works best for you!

For more tips and resources, visit futuretheory.co/resources

Knowing how well our SEO efforts are working helps us determine what works and what needs tweaking, allowing us to deliver the best possible results. Regularly tracking SEO performance lets us make informed decisions based on real data, ensuring that our clients maximise their return on investment. Let’s unpack how we measure SEO performance and why regular, comprehensive SEO audits are important.

Why Measuring SEO Performance Is Important

Measuring SEO performance is important for a few reasons. Firstly, it lets us see if our SEO strategies are working as they should. By keeping an eye on how a website ranks and the amount of organic traffic it pulls in, we can quickly spot what’s doing well and what’s not. This insight is valuable because it means we can tweak our SEO strategy on the fly, ensuring our clients’ websites stay ahead of the competition.

Tracking SEO performance often is also important because a website’s ranking can change from one day to the next, and what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow. Regularly checking our SEO performance helps us stay agile. We can adapt to algorithm changes, new trends, and shifts in what the target audience is looking for as soon as possible. This way, we can keep delivering the best results possible, keeping our clients’ websites visible and relevant.

Important SEO Metrics To Measure

There are a few key metrics we always keep our eyes on to gauge how well our strategies are performing. These metrics give us a clear picture of where our efforts are effective and where there’s room for improvement. These are the primary metrics we use to measure SEO:

• Keyword ranking
• Organic traffic
• Click-through-rate
• Backlinks
• Bounce rate

Let’s go through what these metrics mean and the value they provide.

Keyword Ranking

Keyword ranking refers to a website’s position in search results – commonly referred to as SERP – when someone searches for a specific keyword or phrase. It’s probably the most important metric to improve to increase site traffic. How often do you find yourself on the second page of search engine results or even scrolling halfway down the first page? Appearing higher in search engine results, ideally in the top 10 for the most relevant keyword, will result in much more organic traffic. Increasing keyword ranking and search visibility overall should be the primary goal when kicking off an SEO marketing strategy.

By monitoring how well our clients’ sites rank for specific keywords, we can also see how they stack up against competitors. This insight helps us make strategic decisions, like targeting less competitive keywords with a lower search volume where we can more easily secure a top spot or doubling down on efforts to outperform competitors in the most important areas.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic refers to visitors who land on a website as a result of unpaid search results. Unlike paid traffic, which comes from ads, organic traffic is generated through search engines like Google when people search for keywords or phrases related to the content, products, or services a website displays. This type of traffic is considered highly valuable because it’s made up of individuals actively seeking what the website offers, making them more likely to engage.

Measuring organic traffic is essential for several reasons – Firstly, it provides a clear indicator of a website’s overall health and the effectiveness of an SEO strategy. An increase in organic traffic indicates that a site is becoming more visible and attractive to its target audience. Organic traffic can also offer hugely valuable insights into user behaviour and preferences, helping us further refine our SEO strategies. By understanding which keywords and topics drive the most traffic, we can tailor our efforts to capitalise on these areas and attract even more visitors.

Why Organic Traffic Is So Valuable

Of all these metrics mentioned, organic traffic is the biggest driver of business growth. Visitors who find a website through organic search are often further along in the buying process, having actively searched for relevant information or solutions. This means they’re more likely to convert into leads or customers than any other form of website traffic. 

Maintaining a strong flow of organic traffic can also reduce our reliance on paid search advertising, offering a cost-effective way to attract users over time. While paid search ad campaigns can boost visibility quickly, organic traffic builds a foundation of credibility and trust with users. You can read our guide to organic traffic and how to increase it if you want to learn more.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-Through Rate (CTR) measures the percentage of users who click on a website’s link after seeing it in search engine results. CTR is crucial because it tells us how relevant and appealing a website is to potential visitors as it appears in SERPs. If a CTR is high, it means it’s resonating with the target audience, suggesting that what we present in search results closely matches what users are searching for. It’s calculated by dividing the total number of clicks by the total number of impressions (how many times a website link is seen), then multiplying by 100 to get a percentage. Don’t worry if maths isn’t your strong point – there are many SEO tools that will measure CTR automatically. 

Monitoring CTR can help identify areas for improvement in our SEO strategy. For instance, if a website is ranking well but the CTR is low, the meta descriptions and page titles might need to be more compelling. On the other hand, a high CTR with lower rankings suggests the content resonates with users when they see it, indicating that we need to focus on other SEO aspects to increase visibility.

Backlinks

Backlinks, also known as inbound links, are links from one website to a page on another website. Backlinks are one of the most powerful SEO ranking factors – search engines like Google and Bing use them to gauge the authority and credibility of a website. The more backlinks a site has from other reputable websites, the more trustworthy search engines will deem it and the higher it will rank on SERPs. The process of gaining backlinks for the sake of SEO through content marketing or other means is known as link building.

Analysing the backlink profile can provide insights into a website’s performance and reputation. By examining the number and quality of backlinks, we can identify which aspects of the content or site are most valuable and attractive to other site owners. This information guides our content strategy and SEO strategy.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a metric that measures how many people navigate away from a site after only viewing one page. The lower the bounce rate is, the better a website is at engaging and retaining visitors. While a bounce rate of about 40% is to be expected, anything higher indicates the website is failing to engage users or is taking so long to load that users lose patience and click away.

While bounce rate isn’t a recognised SEO ranking factor, and it’s hotly debated whether it directly impacts search engine rankings, it can still provide insight into SEO performance. A high bounce rate can say a lot about a site’s overall performance and its ability to engage users. The content might not be sufficiently engaging or clear enough to encourage users to stay on the site. Slow loading times, poor website design, confusing navigation, or a lack of mobile responsiveness might also be driving users away.

While Google might not directly take into account bounce rate when ranking websites, it certainly does factor in the quality of a site’s content and the user experience it provides. Fixing these issues will reduce the bounce rate and, in turn, improve SEO as well. 

External SEO Metrics

External metrics from third-party SEO tools like Moz and Ahrefs give us insight into how well a website is positioned in the broader digital ecosystem and the strength of its backlink profile. Here are four more ways to measure SEO results and gain a deeper understanding of how a website is positioned online:

Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is a score developed by the SEO software Moz to predict how likely a website is to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s based on a scale from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating a greater ability to rank. The authority score takes into account the quality and quantity of backlinks, the age and history of the website’s domain name, and the quality of the content.

DA isn’t a Google ranking factor and has no effect on the SERPs, but it does help us understand the overall strength of a website compared to others. It also gives us a firm idea of a website’s starting point – the lower a site’s DA, the longer its SEO will take to provide results. Consequently, we can adjust our expectations and timeline accordingly.

Domain Rank

Domain Rank (DR), developed by Ahrefs, measures the importance of a website by taking into account the quality and quantity of links pointing to it. A higher domain rank can indicate a website is seen as more authoritative and influential. Like DA, DR has no effect on SEO, but it still has its place. We use DR to measure link-building value on other websites. Having a backlink from a website with a high DR will benefit a site’s SEO. 

Page Authority 

Page Authority (PA) is similar to Domain Authority but focuses on the predictive ranking strength of a single page rather than the entire domain. Each page on a website can have its own PA score, influencing how well that specific page is likely to rank on SERPs. We use PA to pinpoint which pages on our clients’ websites have the most potential to draw in traffic and then optimise those pages to maximise their impact.

Page Rank

Page Rank, originally developed by Google, measures the importance of webpage links. While Google no longer publicly shares Page Rank scores, the concept remains a fundamental part of how search engines evaluate links. A page with a high number of quality backlinks is considered more important and is more likely to rank well in search results. Understanding this helps us focus on acquiring high-quality links to improve the relevance and authority of our clients’ pages.

Tools We Use To Measure SEO Performance

We rely on a suite of powerful tools to measure and enhance the performance of our campaigns. These tools give us the insights we need to fine-tune our strategies, ensuring our clients’ websites rank higher and attract more organic traffic. Here are the key tools we use and how they help us achieve SEO success.

Fortunately, not all of them come at a cost – there are plenty of free tools like Google Search Console that make it easy to measure and improve SEO performance. Aside from providing insights into performance after SEO campaigns, these tools can help provide actionable insights over time to get better organic results and improve our SEO approach to keep in line with changes.

Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 is one of our primary SEO measurement tools. It’s the latest version of Google’s analytics platform, and it provides comprehensive insight into user behaviour. We use GA4 to track user interactions, website performance, and conversion rates. GA4 helps us understand a website’s users, recognise patterns, and optimise our clients’ websites for better engagement. It allows us to see which keywords and topics resonate with our audience, assess the quality of traffic, and how to optimise web pages to improve user experience for better on-page and technical SEO. 

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is another invaluable tool in our arsenal. Using Google Search Console provides insights into how the search giant ranks our clients’ websites, showing us the frequency of page appearances in search results, click-through rates, and average position for specific queries. This data helps us understand which keywords and queries draw traffic, allowing us to assess the impact of our keyword targeting and content strategies effectively.

Additionally, it offers performance data across different devices and countries, enabling us to tailor our SEO tactics to target audiences more accurately. By analysing this feedback from Google, we can refine our approaches to enhance site visibility and user engagement. Essentially, Google Search Console lets us measure our SEO success directly, allowing us to refine our strategies as we go.

If you want to cover your bases across multiple search engines, Bing Webmaster Tools has very similar functionality to Google Search Console to help measure SEO performance.

Pagespeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is an essential tool for us, especially when evaluating the performance of SEO campaigns over time. It gives us a clear picture of how website speed and user experience metrics evolve following our optimisations. By regularly checking PageSpeed scores, we identify areas where a site’s performance might be lagging, directly impacting its SEO rankings.

This tool’s insights into loading times, interactivity, and visual stability metrics are invaluable for maintaining optimal website performance. High scores correlate with better user experiences, a key factor in Google’s ranking algorithms. Monitoring these metrics lets us ensure that our clients’ websites remain fast and responsive – which is vital for retaining high search engine rankings and improving overall SEO performance.

Nozzle

Nozzle plays a pivotal role in our strategy for tracking SEO performance when it comes to specific keywords. It allows us to track a website’s rankings across the board, providing a detailed view of how our clients’ positions in search results change over time. This tool’s depth, tracking not just the primary keywords but also long-tail phrases and variations, gives us a comprehensive understanding of search visibility.

By leveraging Nozzle, we’re better equipped to make data-driven decisions and tailor our ongoing SEO strategies to capitalise on emerging opportunities or to address any slips in rankings. Its detailed reporting helps us to pinpoint precisely where and how we can refine our efforts to ensure sustained improvement in SEO performance, keeping our clients’ websites competitive.

SE Ranking

SERanking offers a versatile set of valuable SEO tools that we use for keyword research, competitor analysis, and SEO auditing. Its comprehensive platform enables us to keep a pulse on our clients’ SEO performance and benchmark it against their competitors. The insights gained from SERanking help us craft strategies that push our clients ahead in the SERPs, focusing on the areas with the highest return on investment.

Website Auditor

For technical SEO issues, Website Auditor is our go-to tool. It does site audits to uncover issues that could be hindering our clients’ SEO performance, such as broken links, duplicate content, and on-page optimisation opportunities. It’s always important to ensure the technical foundation of our clients’ sites is solid before moving on to on-page SEO and content optimisation. TReducing any technical SEO errors, like broken links or slow loading times, paves the way for higher rankings and improved user experience from the get-go.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is essential for our link-building efforts and content marketing strategies. Its extensive backlink database and content analysis tools allow us to uncover link-building opportunities and track our clients’ backlink profiles – essential for increasing their DA and overall SERP rankings. Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer helps us find high-potential keywords to target with our content. 

How Long Does It Take To Achieve SEO Success? 

When we talk about achieving SEO success, it’s important to remember that it’s not an overnight process. We often get asked, “How long does SEO strategy take to show results like more traffic?” Our answer is that it varies, but generally, you can expect to start seeing improvements in 6 to 12 months. We always approach SEO as a marathon, not a sprint. It requires a multifaceted approach with varying individual timelines, including keyword research, on-page optimisation, content creation, and link building. 

Here’s a quick breakdown of what we do and how it impacts the timeline:

1. Initial Analysis and Strategy Planning: We start by understanding our client’s business, their target audience, and their competition. This phase helps us to craft a tailored SEO strategy. While this stage doesn’t produce immediate ranking improvements, it’s a necessary starting point for long-term success.
2. On-Page Optimisation: Next, we focus on optimising the website’s content and structure. This includes making sure the site is mobile-friendly, loads quickly, and contains the right keywords. Improvements can start to show within a few months, but the full impact is often seen around the six-month mark.
3. Content Creation: We work on creating valuable, relevant content that resonates with the target audience. This helps improve rankings and establish the site as an authority. Depending on the competition, it might take a few months to a year to see significant movement in rankings from content creation alone.
4. Link Building: Establishing high-quality backlinks to the website from reputable sources is another critical component. This process can take time as we focus on building relationships and creating content worth linking to. The results from effective link-building generally become evident after several months.

We always make sure our clients understand that SEO is an investment in their future visibility and success online rather than a quick fix. While they might start noticing some positive changes in traffic and rankings in the short term, the most substantial and lasting results often become apparent after the first year.

In reality, Google considers over 240 recognised factors when ranking websites, extending far beyond just a website’s content. Your website performance and core web vitals, such as speed and loading times, are also important when it comes to SEO and greatly influence your search engine ranking. Having an unreliable web host can negatively impact those core web vitals and, by extension, your website’s SEO. In this article, we’ll explain how web hosting affects SEO and what factors to look for when choosing an SEO web hosting provider.

What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is what allows your website to be accessible online, and every website needs to be hosted. In short, when you pay for a web hosting service, you’re renting a small space on their server to store all the files and data that make your website functional. When someone tries to access your website, their browser sends a request to the server. The server then retrieves and displays your site on the user’s end. The web hosting provider you choose affects how quickly that whole process happens, and if the website host provider fails, so does your website – so choosing the right hosting provider is important. 

Why Uptime and Reliable Web Hosting is Important for SEO

Website ‘uptime’ is the percentage of time your website is accessible to users, including all its pages and essential functions. No website is up 100% of the time – sometimes, websites need to go down for essential maintenance, for example. However, if your host regularly experiences server issues, this will cause your website to go down and affect your site’s uptime. This could happen because they don’t have the infrastructure to handle large spikes in server traffic. Many hosting companies provide a 99.9% uptime guarantee, at a minimum. This equates to only nine hours of downtime a year. 

It can be hard to determine your website’s uptime – no one can watch their website 24/7. However, there are tools available online that allow you to run uptime reports, testing the reliability of your web hosting provider and holding their 99.9% uptime guarantee to the test. If you find that your host isn’t meeting this guarantee, it’s definitely time to find a more reliable one – the amount of downtime your website has can significantly harm your website when it comes to effective SEO. Here are a few reasons why:

Poor uptime hurts user engagement and SEO

The internet is a fast-paced environment, and internet users have very little patience for 404 error pages. If your website is down, they won’t wait around for it to go back up – they’ll exit and go to your competitor’s website instead. 

Google highly favours websites that provide users with a good user experience (UX) and have a higher user engagement rate. Poor website uptime will result in a higher ‘bounce’ rate (people who only visit one page of your website and click off), low session durations, and fewer pages visited by each user. Google uses these factors to determine the quality of your website’s UX and ranks your website accordingly. Having a good UX is one of the core pillars of Google’s algorithm, so having good website uptime and choosing a hosting provider that’s reliable is crucial!

Your website is often down? Google won’t be able to crawl and index it

Search engines like Google use bots called ‘crawlers’ to scan websites, analyse their content and index them accordingly. These bots check websites regularly to make sure the information they have is still up-to-date. If your website experiences frequent downtime because of issues related to hosting, it could coincide with the bot’s visit and prevent it from being crawled and indexed. This delay could impact the search engine’s ability to discover new content, leading to lower rankings and reduced visibility in search results.

If you’re wondering why your website is consistently going down even though your host has 99.9% uptime, check out our article on the most common reasons websites go down to rule out other factors.

An SEO-Friendly Hosting Company Should Ensure Fast Loading Times

Poor quality web hosting can result in slow loading times for your website, even if every other part of your website is perfect. This could be because your host uses poor-quality servers that can’t handle a lot of traffic, slow server response time from your host, or the server is a long distance from the majority of your website visitors. If you use shared hosting, slow loading times also might mean you need to update your web hosting plan you’re on to have more CPU, RAM, and bandwidth allocated to your website.

Having a slow website significantly impacts the UX and, in turn, impacts your SEO. Internet users are used to having everything available at a lightning-fast pace, so when a page takes more than a few seconds to load, frustration starts to set in. Anything more than a few seconds of loading time will result in a higher bounce rate, sending all the wrong signals to the search engine algorithm. The faster your website loads, the higher it’s likely to rank on search engines.

How fast should your website load?

The faster your website loads, the better. On the first page of Google search results, the typical page speed is 1.65 seconds, and one study showed that 40% of internet users will click off a site if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. These industry standards don’t just apply to the desktop version – these days, 55.5% of all website traffic comes from people browsing on mobile devices, so ensuring the mobile version of your website loads in under a few seconds is important, too. 

While there are many other factors that impact how quickly your website loads, such as how many plug-ins you have, the number of files that need to load and the size of the files, the quality of the web server plays a huge role. Choosing the best web hosting plan and provider for your needs is vital to ensuring your website loads quickly and is SEO-friendly. 

How to check your website speed

It’s important to regularly check how fast your website loads for viewers to ensure it consistently provides a smooth experience. There are lots of tools available online that allow you to do this, like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. These tools are free and easy to use – just enter your URL, and they do the rest of the work. If you find your website consistently has a speed index of over 4 seconds, no matter what alterations you make on your end, it’s time to find a new web host for the sake of your search engine ranking and UX! 

How your web host’s server location can impact SEO

When looking for an SEO-friendly web host, server location is one of the most critical factors. Hosting your website on a server in the same country or region as your target audience can signal relevance to search engines. This is because each hosting server has a unique IP address, and search engines use this information to determine the server’s location. When your server’s IP address is associated with your target audience, search engines will rank your website accordingly. This improves your website’s visibility where it matters the most, boosting your search rankings.

Server location impacts your website’s speed

When a user accesses your website, the request has to travel between their location to the server and back again. Therefore, hosting your website on a server closer to your target audience will reduce the physical distance that data has to travel. This, in turn, results in faster loading times for users in that region. This is especially important for businesses that cater to a specific area. For instance, a plumber based in Canberra would want their web hosting service to be located in the same region to ensure that their website loads quickly for their highly-localised audience. As we mentioned above, speed is one of the most critical factors in technical SEO, so make sure you select a web hosting service provider with servers in your specific location.

Consider whether to add a Content Delivery Network to your hosting plan

 If your business operates across the globe instead of one specific region, it’s best to pick a host that offers a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN is a network of servers placed in various locations around the world. When someone visits the website, they get the content from the nearest server instead of the website’s main server. This makes websites load faster and perform better, no matter where the user is. However, CDNs can be costly and an unnecessary expense for smaller businesses trying to excel in a local market only.

Web Hosting for SEO Needs to Be Highly Secure 

Good hosting services do more than just make your website accessible to users – they also provide a secure hosting environment and implement robust security measures to protect their servers from unauthorised access, malware, and other threats.  This is vital, as most browsers flag non-secure websites warning to discourage websites from quickly through. If this happens to your website because your host offers poor security, it will result in a high bounce rate and tank your search engine ranking.

The same goes if your website gets hacked – Google might flag it as potentially harmful to users and deindex it entirely from the search engine results page. It’s important to remember that search engines always prioritise security and trust when ranking websites, so choosing a host that ensures your website is secure is essential for SEO best practices.

The importance of an SSL certificate 

The best way to indicate to search engines that your website is secure and protects the data of its users is to have an SSL certificate. SSL stands for ‘Secure Sockets Layer’ and is like a digital ID card for your website. When a website has an SSL certificate, it means that the information you send to that website, like passwords or credit card numbers, is encrypted or scrambled during transmission. This encryption makes it much harder for hackers to intercept and read your sensitive data. You can tell a website has an SSL certificate when you see “https://” at the beginning of the web address and a padlock symbol in your web browser’s address bar. 

Google highly favours websites with an SSL certificate and will always rank it higher than websites without one. Most good web hosting companies offer free SSL certificates as part of their hosting package, and this is one of the more essential things to look for when choosing a host. It’s an essential hosting factor not only for your SEO efforts, but the security of your website as a whole. 

Increased trust leads to better SEO metrics 

Having a secure website and an SSL certificate not only ensures the safety of your visitors’ data but also positively impacts your website’s SEO at an organic level. A secure website will have a padlock icon in the browser’s address bar, instilling a sense of trust in users. When visitors trust your site, they are more likely to engage with your content, spend more time on it, and explore multiple pages. Search engines take into account these positive user engagement metrics, like lower bounce rates and longer session durations, when ranking websites. Security+ can indirectly improve these metrics and is important to look for in a hosting provider.

Reliable Canberra Web Hosting

Web hosting is a commonly overlooked factor in SEO, but it plays a huge role in ensuring your website is fast and reliable, and this positively impacts your search engine ranking. We hope this article helped you have a firmer grasp of how web hosting can affect your SEO efforts and gave you some insight on how to choose the best web hosting for SEO. If you’d like to learn more, you can visit our resources page to learn more about SEO practices and all things website-related.

At Futuretheory, we offer reliable and fast web hosting with servers in Australia. We use enterprise-grade hardware for exceptional performance and speedy load times, as well as providing a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This gives you peace of mind to focus on other aspects of your business, knowing your website is in good hands. Our hosting features unlimited bandwidth and free SSL certificates. Our web hosting is also highly scalable, meaning you can upgrade from shared hosting to dedicated hosting at any time as your web hosting needs change and your business grows. We’re a great option if you’re looking for a hosting provider for SEO-optimised features.

We’re also an expert WordPress host, given that our team not only hosts numerous WordPress websites but is also comprised of WordPress developers so that we can look at your website holistically. An experienced WordPress host is able to make sure your website is optimised for everything that a WordPress website needs to run smoothly.

As a full-service digital marketing agency, we also offer web design, WordPress site development, maintenance, and SEO services. Whether you’re looking for a new website or just a new web host, we have the expertise and experience to help. Think we can help? Get in touch.

Benefits of Using Google Trends

Thanks to Google, we can access an outstanding wealth of information at our fingertips. Our reliance on Google search plays a huge role in what information we see and the decisions we make – including our purchases. Long gone are the days of flipping through a hefty, alphabetized Yellow Pages book to find a plumber and picking the first one that starts with “A.”

Now, we’re much more likely to turn to Google and trust its algorithm to show us exactly what we’re looking for based on our search query. This makes understanding how people use Google and how to leverage that information a crucial marketing tactic for businesses today. Additionally, content creators can use it to find keywords and keep their finger on the pulse of what their audience is interested in. Journalists can use it to get real-time information about public interest. Here are some of the primary ways you can use Google Trends to tailor your marketing strategy and improve your content’s SEO:

Identifying Currently Trending Topics

You can see what searches are trending at the moment under the Google Trends ‘Explore’ page. While most of the top results are often major world events or celebrity news that might be hard to tie into your topic, the key is to look out for specific niches that relate to your business that are buzz-worthy at the moment or upcoming holidays and events local to you. This means Google Trends can help you find related and unique angles to write about that might not have a lot of keyword competition yet, plan out your content marketing strategy or ensure your content’s current relevancy.

For example, at the time of writing, the national mental health initiative R U OK Day is currently trending in Australia. Now would be the perfect time to publish a blog post about how your business looks after your employees’ mental health and what the day means to you.

This is a broad example. You can also use Google Trends to find trending search terms and topics related to your specific industry or niche. Relevant trending topics and related queries can help you better understand what your target market is looking for and adjust your marketing accordingly. For example, if you own a women’s apparel brand, you can type “women’s fashion” on the Google Trends Explore page to see currently trending related topics.

These five topics are currently breakout keywords related to women’s clothing. Breakout terms mean that Google doesn’t have enough data yet to give a before and after percentage of the search volume but that there’s been a 5000% rise in search interest recently. This makes them ideal keywords to use: they don’t have a large amount of competition yet, meaning it’ll be much easier to get a foothold and rank on Google. Now would be a perfect time for the hypothetical fashion brand to write a blog post entitled ‘Top 5 Suits for Spring,’ or advertise a promotion for sandals.

The downside of using breakout topics and queries as a keyword tool is many of the terms might just be fads and won’t benefit you long-term. A fad might be worth making a social media post about, whereas a truly powerful keyword with staying power is worth incorporating into your long-term strategy. This is where Google Trends differentiates from traditional keyword research tools: it shows you snapshots of what people are typing in Google’s search bar during a specific moment in time, not the total searches overall. However, tending terms and trending topics can help content marketers inform their decision-making as part of a larger keyword strategy.

Identifying Seasonal Trends

Google Trends is also helpful for finding seasonal trends and the right time to capitalise on them. Let’s say you run a clothing business that sells Halloween costumes. You might think mid-October is the right time to publish ads or run a pay-per-click campaign. However, you can use Google Trends to see that people start searching for Halloween costumes as early as the start of September, with a sharp upward trend until the 30th of October. This serves as an indicator you probably want to get a head start on your marketing earlier rather than later to capitalise on the seasonal trend. 

A flower shop would want to do the same thing around Mother’s Day with the keyword ‘florist near me’. Almost every business has seasonal trends and annual holidays that will result in a spike in traffic with the right marketing, and Google Trends can help. To narrow it down to seasonal search trends that are specific to your location, you can change the subregion to your state or city. This means you can plan to target the right keywords for your location at just the right time. This is particularly useful for smaller local businesses.

Identifying seasonal spikes in business 

Google Trends can be used as one data set to influence business decisions—for example, most cafés close for a week or two over the Christmas to New Year period. However, Google Trends shows that the search query ‘cafés near me’ has an annual spike in searches in late December and early January. This indicates a high demand for cafés that are still open during the festive season, and it might be worthwhile staying open as much as possible during this period to make the most of the demand. To see long-term data like this, you’ll want to set your date range to the “past 5 years” timeframe.

Monitor Your Competitors and Market Trends

You can also use Google Trends data to see how successful your organic marketing efforts are compared to your main competitors. To do this, go to the Google Trends Explore Page and put in your business name, then your competitors in the ‘compare’ box, and you’ll see how the search volume is trending for both. While this doesn’t provide a complete picture of how two businesses stack up against each other, it is a useful tool if you want to check how your marketing campaign is performing. If your competitor had a large increase in search volume during a specific period, you might want to check what marketing and promotions they were running at the time to get a better understanding of what works.

You can compare two search terms in Google Trends or as many as 25. Here’s how it looks, using some tech titans in the mobile phone industry (past and present) as an example:

Comparing search results also allows you to make informed decisions about which products or services you market and when, making the most of trends and seasonal fluxes. This allows you to discover what you should market and create content about at any given time based on the data you find in Google Trends. Using the example of women’s apparel business again, here are two items of clothing trends compared with each other:

One of Many Tools in Our Keyword Kit

While Google Trends doesn’t function as a standalone keyword planner, it can complement traditional keyword planners by providing a dynamic, minute-by-minute perspective. If you’re savvy enough to tell the difference between a fad and a search query that will stay on the up and up for a sustained period, Google Trends can provide a great opportunity to get ahead of the game and take advantage of rising keywords before there’s a lot of competition. Where Google Trends really shines is the ability to keep track of seasonal spikes and local trends – an important part of content planning. Digital marketing and SEO is a competitive space,  so using every resource possible – especially the free-to-use ones – can make a real difference to the success of your marketing and help you be one step ahead of competitors. Our article on Digital Marketing for Membership Organisations can also provide valuable insights that can be translated to almost any industry, as well as our article on how to generate organic traffic to your website.

What do the different traffic sources mean?

There are lots of different types of traffic, but these are the three main streams to focus on:

Organic search traffic refers to anyone who visits your website from unpaid sources, like from non-sponsored Google search results. It represents brand new eyes on your business and is essentially free traffic, making organic traffic the most important form of traffic your website can get. Any traffic your website gets from search results without any paid advertising or promotion involved is considered organic traffic.

Paid search traffic, on the other hand, refers to traffic from paid advertising campaigns you can run on search engines like Google or Bing. These search results appear first on Google with the “Sponsored” tag.

The biggest difference between direct and organic traffic is user intent. Direct traffic is traffic that comes from anyone who visits your website by typing in the URL directly in their browser or from a bookmark, not from a referring website. Lots of direct traffic can indicate loyal customers already familiar with your business. However, any traffic that Google Analytics can’t identify the referring website of is categorised as direct traffic, not referral traffic like organic and paid traffic.

Why is Organic Traffic Important?

The benefits of organic traffic are precious because they allow you to reach people who have never heard of your business. They’re not random people either – they come from organic search results by searching specific keywords on Google and other search engines, with a relevant and specific intent related to your business. This is the traffic that has the highest chance of conversion. As your organic traffic grows, you’ll also see direct traffic increase in time as a result.

Your website’s traffic also affects where your link on a search engine is ranked. Search engines like Google use website traffic as a metric to determine how relevant and popular your website is and rank it on the search engine results page accordingly, making it easier for potential customers to find your website when searching for relevant keywords.

Another benefit and key difference between organic and paid traffic is that it’s cost-effective, making it a more sustainable approach in the long run. While the strategies that drive organic traffic might carry costs initially, the traffic is free. On the other hand, every single click that comes from a paid search ad carries a cost. This cost is normally between $1 and $2 for every click – which adds up quickly if you’re hoping for a large spike in traffic. Organic traffic offers a way to diversify your traffic streams and reduce your dependency on these often costly paid search campaigns. 

Focusing your efforts on organic search traffic is also more credible to potential customers than paid advertising. Around 94% of all search traffic goes to organic results over paid ads because people trust the search results below more than the “Sponsored” ones above. This is why organic traffic is more important than paid traffic and the search engine marketing industry is growing exponentially: the market size increased 11.4% annually on average between 2017 and 2022, reaching $225.3 billion in revenue.

How to Increase Organic Traffic To Your Website Through SEO

The branch of digital marketing that focuses on improving organic traffic is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Google uses an algorithm to rank the order in which websites appear in search engine results based on over 200 factors. SEO is the art of fine-tuning your website in line with these factors, so Google ranks it higher when someone googles topics related to your organisation.

The first step is to find and analyse the terms with high search volume people use related to your business. This can be done through keyword research, using a keyword research tool like Google’s keyword planner. Keyword research helps understand user intent, allowing you to better tailor your website to match. These keywords should be integral to your website’s pages and content to increase your ranking when people search them.

These are some other key SEO strategies:

• Regularly populate your website with high-quality, keyword-rich content that your target audience will find genuinely informative and helpful. Doing this increases your authority with the Google Algorithm and gives people more reason to visit your site and stay longer. While it requires a bit of work and takes time to show results, this is one of the most surefire ways to increase your place in search rankings. To get a few tips on how to do this, you can read our guide to creating great website content.
• Make sure your website design provides a good user experience (UX). Good UX means ensuring your website is responsive and mobile optimised, loads quickly, and your website structure and layout facilitate easy navigation. Google takes all these factors into account when ranking your website.
• Another strategy is link building, or “backlinking.” This means strategically increasing the number of hyperlinks to your website on other sites. If your website is linked from one website to another to on lots of heavily trafficked and reputable sites, the Google Algorithm takes this as an endorsement that your website is valuable and trustworthy and ranks it accordingly.

These are just a few of the many different SEO efforts a digital marketing agency would implement to improve your ranking. SEO is an ongoing marketing strategy that takes time and expertise, but it is the best way to drive more organic traffic to your site in a sustainable, long-term way. The results won’t be instant, but if your SEO is done right, they will pay off, and you’ll see an increase in organic traffic. 

How To Track Organic and Direct Traffic With Web Analytics

Tracking your website’s overall traffic numbers is vital to ensure your marketing strategy is working and your website is doing well overall. You can access Google Analytics and Google Search Console if you’re the website owner. These are the best analytics tools to monitor how much overall site traffic you’re getting and whether the traffic lands on your website from paid, direct or organic sources the most. This is invaluable data you can use to make informed decisions about improving your website’s content, user experience, and marketing to get organic traffic on your site and reach your traffic KPI.

You can do this in Google Analytics by clicking on “All Traffic” and then “Channels” to see a detailed breakdown of where your traffic is coming from. For each channel, you can see detailed website analytics like bounce rate (how long users stay on your site) and how many individual people that source of traffic has sent to your website. You can click “Source/Medium” to get more detailed information about the specific websites and platforms driving traffic. Under “Referrals,” you can see a list of external websites that have referred traffic to your site, a great way to check on how your link-building efforts are tracking.

Under “Acquisition,” click “Organic Search” to see which keywords best drive traffic to your website from the search engine rankings. This is how you check that your organic SEO campaign is working and which keywords you should keep focusing on. It also offers key insights like impressions, click-through rate, and how your website ranks for different keywords. 

This website analytics tool is handy but not perfect. If you see an unexplained spike in direct traffic in Google Analytics, there could be a few reasons for this other than a lot of people typing in your URL directly all of a sudden. An experiment run by SearchEngineLand and Groupon revealed that as much as 60% of traffic considered to be direct traffic is actually organic traffic that Google Analytics has mislabelled. Sometimes Google doesn’t always get it right where traffic comes from.

We hope this article gave you a clearer picture of what direct, paid and organic traffic refers to and how the traffic is different. Now that you know more about organic and paid traffic, you might want to start learning about Search Engine Optimisation, what it is, techniques, and more! Start with our article on What is SEO.

How Does SEO Work?

There are a few factors that come into play to get good SEO. This comes down to keyword research, optimising webpage content and earning inbound links to increase authority and ranking on your preferred search engine. SEO is a forever changing beast that needs constant attention as the rankings are likely to change regularly depending on the age, competition and/or algorithm of the search engine itself. The goal of SEO is to drive traffic to your website and then create domain authority with Google or your chosen search engine. When you have domain authority, you have visibility. This occurs when your site is showing higher on search engine result pages (SERP). 

How do I get my page ranked on Google?

Search engines work by using bots that essentially read through (‘crawl’) web pages to collect information about those pages and index them appropriately to be found by search engines under the right queries based on relevancy and authority. This index is what is used by a search engine when you look for particular terms in your web search, similar to a librarian who is able to look up the required information using an index. With Google being the dominant search engine available, most people optimise their webpages for Google’s search engine based on the sheer search volume it attracts on subjects.

Google has algorithms for SEO that are changing all the time. It works on analysing pages in the index and use ranking factors to determine the order pages should appear in search results. The idea is that the better optimised your website is for particular keyword terms and content, the higher up it will show in search results. However, this is heavily dependent on how much competition you have and might be more difficult to achieve if you have international and/or highly regarded competition. To identify and deliver the correct information to users, Google will ‘crawl’ each webpage to determine the search queries and identify the appropriate relevancy and authority of a page compared to the identified competition. You can obtain relevancy through hitting keywords on topics as well as other factors included in on-page SEO. Authority is measured by the popularity of a website on the internet which can be obtained by traffic to the website. This tells Google that this is valuable content for readers and it will increase your visibility when people search for you.

SEO vs Paid Search Advertising

The main difference between SEO and paid search advertising (such as Google ads) is that SEO relies on organic search rankings, which means you can’t pay to be in that space, you have to earn it. SEO factors in your content and website and using the search engine’s algorithm, it matches search intent of users to the content most relevant based on the given search keywords. To understand the difference between SEO and paid search advertising, you can see the advertisements at the top of most search results pages. These webpage links look the same as the other below though they do have the word ‘sponsored’ or ‘AD’ written above it, this is not SEO, this is an example of paid advertising. Search results that don’t have the words ‘sponsored’ or ‘AD’ are a direct result of SEO and are providing the most organic search results that are in line with the query posed to Google. These results are a direct reflection on how powerful search engine optimisation can be.

Utilising paid search advertising can help with the initial stages of SEO by helping provide potential clicks to your site to help booster your SEO rankings. Both options should be considered as strategies to increase your SEO. While the concept of SEO may seem easy to grasp, Google SEO has algorithms that are changing all the time. No one can predict when Google will change the algorithm, what will change and which pages will be punished for it. 

On-Page and Off-Page SEO

There are two important sides to SEO that need to be considered: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. In short, on page SEO refers to the areas of your website you can control including content and keyword usage. Whilst off page SEO happens outside of your website and relies on mentions and backlinks. We’ve explored the differences in on and off page SEO further below. 

On-Page Optimisation

On-page SEO refers to building content that will improve your ranking. This includes using the correct keywords, writing high-quality content frequently, making sure your metatags and titles are keyword-rich, it is well-written, and much more. Metatags are known as invisible tags that provide data to search engines and users about the content on your page. These tags don’t have a direct impact on search rankings but can increase click-through rate from the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). You can optimise these to highlight the most important pieces of your content to make your website stand out amongst the others in search results. These metatags are known to satisfy a person’s query but also intrigue them just enough to click on your site. These kind of tags come in many different forms including alt-text for images, headings, meta descriptions and many more.

Off-Page Optimisation

Off page SEO is optimisation that occurs off your website and onto either another site or platform. This can be in the form of backlinks, content marketing, social media and reviews. Backlinking involves building relationships and creating content that people will want to share. This then can link back or drive traffic to your website. Building backlinks can be a lot of work, though and is not as simple as on-page SEO. Off-page SEO is just as important in building your site’s domain authority against the other websites of your competitors. This type of SEO creates a higher authority with search engines and considers them more relevant, credible and trustworthy. Without it, your site may struggle to rank higher than your competitors that have a higher authority with a search engine.

Black Hat vs White Hat Strategies

No, we’re not talking about actual hats you wear on your head. These are both optimisation techniques you can try to reach your SEO goals. Though results will vary based on how you do it and which technique you choose to give a go. 

Black hat SEO strategy is when you go for quick gains but it does not bode well for long term SEO prospects. Many people used to use this type of tactic to rank sites, however times have changed. Black hat SEO uses sneaky tactics such as keyword stuffing and link scraping in order to rank higher, quickly. This can work for the short-term and will bring traffic to your site, but after a while, search engines like Google will penalise (or even blacklist) your site so you’ll never rank. These kind of tactics violate search engine guidelines in an attempt to manipulate search engine algorithms. This is not the way to go if you want your SEO efforts to count long term and turn into favourable search engine rankings. Not to mention many within the SEO industry believe this tactic to be unethical to get higher in the search results.

White hat SEO strategy is the SEO best practices to build a sustainable online business. White hat SEO is the safest of the optimisation techniques and works within the rules and expectations of users an search engines. It is best done by creating high quality content that is factually correct, user friendly and understanding the optimal keywords that users are searching for (without using too many keywords in one go as this can quickly become keyword stuffing which is a black hat strategy!). There are no tricks or quick fixes with white hat SEO that undermine an algorithm of a search engine. Doing SEO this way focuses on your human audience, using the appropriate search intent for SEO success. White hat SEO is not a quick fix to get obtain a search engine’s organic reach. It takes time, patience and can be a waiting game over a certain period of time but you will see your web pages rank higher on Google and other search engines if applied correctly.

Black Hat SEO Techniques

• Duplicate content: trying to rank for a certain keyword may cause you to create duplicate content so you can get the keyword/s in multiple times. Google may penalise this tactic.
• Invisible text and keyword stuffing: This is an older tactic where you include lots of keywords at the end of your article in the same colour as the background. This tactic will get you blacklisted very quickly and kept out of search algorithms and results.
• Cloaking and redirecting: Cloaking is a misleading tactic in the SEO world. It’s when you mislead bots into thinking there is relevant content on your page relating to a certain subject and then it’s not there. There are good and bad ways to redirect. The wrong way is to buy lots of keyword rich domains and redirect all the traffic to a single site.
• Poor linking practices: There are variety of ways to get links but some of them are black hat techniques. These include using link farms and purchasing links. Link farms are when a selection of websites all link to each other regardless of relevancy. Purchasing links is risky considering you don’t know what kind of links you will actually receive and how effective they will be. Do not purchase a package that promises 5,000 links in 24 hours – this is the wrong way to build links. You need to get links from relevant content and sites in your niche that have their own traffic.

White Hat SEO Techniques

• Understanding and implementing keyword research: back in the day, keywords just meant one word terms. Now they have become a string of terms. These terms can be longer phrases in a particular niche that draws in the intent and context of the page content.
• Creating quality, relevant content: the Google search engine has a variety of tools that it uses to evaluate site content. These things include the length of your content, topic and relevancy, distribution of keywords, age of article and internal and external links included. 
• Making your site responsive and mobile friendly: with more and more people using their mobiles to browse the web, it’s important to make sure your content translates well to mobile. This also includes user experience (UX) design which entails how a user experiences your website and the accessibility standards around it.
• Claim your local business listing (GMB): when it comes to local SERPs, having a local business listing can rank you higher than others on the map based on location. Research shows that more than 80% of smartphone shoppers conduct searches ending in “near me” to get the most relevant and geographically close option. 
• Utilising content marketing opportunities: creating content on your site is useless without traffic. To make sure your content is put in front of others, you can share links to your site or page via social media, through email marketing, and/or have it published on websites that have a higher ranking.
• Using schema markup: this is known as the language of search engines. It is used to read and understand your content pages. You can utilise schema markup by creating meta tags, title tags and many more for your pages. Using schema markup is important to Google as it can use this information to create snippets and fill out the “people also ask” section on the search results page. 

SEO Techniques for Success

SEO requires a lot of time, patience and action. It is not something you can expect to see results from in a day, overnight or even within a week. Depending on the site and it’s authority, it can take up to a few months for any changes to be seen and may only be a small change in the beginning. SEO relies on daily actions with a long-term goal. Here are a few techniques that can build up your website for good SEO:

Choosing a Simple, Memorable Domain Name

Your domain name matters more than you would think. If you already have a domain name, it’s not a massive deal for SEO but it can be the difference between users finding your website on the first go rather than scrolling through search results on their preferred search engine. Try choosing a domain name that does not include hyphens or generic names like bestbeautysalon.com. You want users to have a memorable experience on your site and that goes for the naming conventions as well.

Well Thought Out and Executed Content

There is a well-known saying “content is king”, coined by Bill Gates back in 1996. Research shows that a Google user is happy when they find the result that answers their query in the best way. Search engines like Google looks at ways to always try to provide the best experience possible by sending you to the content that is the most relevant and has the best user metrics. You should be making sure your content is answering questions correctly and the best way possible.

Creating good content however requires a few elements to be included:

• Quality: the competition in content can be fierce. Therefore, your content needs to provide high quality value. This involves adding more value than your competitors by making it more in-depth or more insightful to ensure your site ranks higher in the search. It also is helpful to create longer content – this tends to rank better as users peruse your site longer, which Google loves.
• Intent: Search engines such as Google will put lots of emphasis on the search queries intent. It wants to understand what the user is looking for when they search something. When creating your content, it is important to understand this as well. This will help you create the best content for your audience and the search engine algorithms.
• Freshness: Posting frequently helps your Google rankings. However, posting frequent content is just one way to keep your website fresh – you can also update old content with new or updated information to stay relevant and up to date. Updating your content can also help you stay at a certain level in rankings or even propel you higher than before. Updated information is always well regarded when it comes to SERPs.

How to write great content

1. Understand user intent: Before putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard!) you need to know what your reader will want to accomplish when they land on your page.
2. Know who your audience is: It is important to understand who your reader is – what they like, what they dislike, why they’re there, etc.
3. Break it up: People have increasingly short attention spans, so writing big chunks of text can be painful for the reader. Break it up with headings and images to help digest the information and keep your readers interested in your content.
4. Make it actionable: Every part of your website should have a clear call to action, including your content. It should be clear to the reader what their next steps are.

Conducting Keyword Research

SEO is all about targeting the right visitors to your site. You need to attract your target market, not just anyone on the internet. Attracting to your target market can lead to either selling your products or services to someone who is in the market for what you’re selling. This is where keyword research comes into it. Keywords are the phrases that users type into search engines to generate results. The key to keyword research is discovering and identifying terms and topics relevant to your business to match the user’s search intent. Google understands this technique and rewards a site by bumping a sites visibility up the search result list the more it gets found and clicked into. 

Utilising On-Page and Off-Page Optimisation

Improving the actual structure of each page can have big benefits for SEO. Common on-page optimisation strategies include optimising the URL to incorporate keywords, updating the title tag of the page to use relevant search terms, and using the alternative text (alt text) to describe images. Updating a page’s meta tags (such as the meta description) can also be beneficial. Google also uses on-page SEO to understand a users experience and intent for landing on a page which then helps organise and rank your page. Off-page optimisation can be utilised by having other sites link to your page. This works best when the content is relevant on both sites.

Introducing Images and Videos

Adding in images and/or videos is not a requirement for SEO though it does help show a search engine the quality of the site. It also helps to keep users engaged on your page longer the same way using longer content does. 

Creating Easy to Digest Website Architecture

While external links are helpful for SEO, so are internal links. You can improve your website’s SEO by making sure key pages are being linked to and that relevant anchor text is being used in those links to improve a page’s relevance for specific terms. An XML sitemap can be a good way for larger pages to help search engines discover and crawl all of the site’s pages. An XML sitemap is a file of all your websites essential pages so that search engines can crawl these pages to understand the website structure. It’s important to have Google crawl your website pages entirely to have an impact. This can be done through a tool called Google Search Console.

Using Semantic Mark Up

Another SEO strategy is optimising your websites semantic mark up. A semantic mark-up (such as Schema.org) is used to describe the meaning behind the content on a page. This can include helping to identify who the author of an article is or the topic and type of content on a page. Semantic mark up can help Google generate rich snippets to be displayed in the search results page as the main answer to a question – this can be in the form of extra text, review stars or sometimes even images. A great use of semantic mark up is by using heading tags within your content writing instead of manually changing the font size every time you need a subheading.

Focusing on Local SEO

Local search engine optimisation is best used for local businesses. You can use this by including a specific location into your keywords in content to ensure you come up for search results based on location only. This type of SEO is targeted for smartphone users mainly as searches locally generally occur on a smart device. While locality is imperative to local SEO, you must also include items such as the company’s name, address and phone number. These other items help the search engine determine your location even further. To rank higher with local SEO, reviews from users can help highlight the businesses authority in the online space.

Tracking Results on Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a Google tool where you can optimise the visibility of your website, check on indexing and crawled pages as well as search queries and errors. This tool will also tell you if you have anything important missing from your HTML and you can optimise for that. Google Search Console can be used to monitor the amount of traffic coming to your website, the amount of impressions you receive from search results, the click through rate and the average position your site is ranking on Google. A great feature of Google Search Console is their top queries feature which tells you exactly what areas your web pages are showing up in search results for users. You can also track how many clicks you get from certain terms which can help you understand how to optimise your content better for more search results.

Tracking Results on Google Analytics

Google has another product to assist with SEO called Google Analytics. Using Google Analytics, you can track your websites performance, understand visitors demographic and behaviour when interacting with the site, measure the return of investment (ROI) of marketing campaigns and improve your bounce rate of users. A bounce rate relates to the amount of time a user spends on a particular web page. By analysing your users bounce rate, you can determine how best to create enhancements to create the search experience longer and fulfilled.

Summing Up Search Engine Optimisation 

SEO is not a one size fits all approach to understanding how people search for products or services or how to rank best on the major search engines. There is no secret recipe unfortunately as there are many ways of tackling search engine marketing and optimisation. SEO can be a tough beast to tackle if you’re new to learning SEO. You can research and do a DIY job of managing the SEO for your webpages alone or you could engage with a SEO expert to learn, understand and see the benefits of utilising search engine optimisation for your businesses online presence. It’s best to try as many tactics as possible (without using black hat SEO techniques) to achieve the best result. You can’t put all your eggs into one basket with SEO, it works based on a variety of different components of your online presence. SEO takes time, effort and a lot of patience to hopefully achieve higher rankings on search engines though it is definitely worth the extra leg work needed to make it happen.

What is SEO?

SEO (or search engine optimisation) is the process of improving a page or a website so it will appear higher in search engine results, such as Google. This means your product or service will see more visitors and likely increase sales or bookings. Search engines such as Google and Bing use bots to crawl through pages on your website and identify what your website is about. It uses this information to show your website in related keyword searches.

With so many websites in existence, Google, Bing and other search engines have the challenge of choosing which websites are most relevant to the user’s search. This is where key metrics come into play. Search engines will analyse website metrics (such as bounce rate and load time) to rank competing websites for the user.

What are the SEO techniques that we need to follow while designing a website?

Navigation and website structure

Your navigation structure and overall website structure can impact many important search engine metrics, including average time on page, bounce rate, engagement rate and conversion rate. If users are unable to find information on your website or have difficulty navigating through your website, it is likely that they will leave your page and go elsewhere. This causes your average time on page and bounce rate to increase, negatively impacting your SEO.

How can you create a good structure?

• Keep your menu system simple. Reduce the number of items on your menu to make it easier for the user to make a decision.
• Don’t use complex or technical jargon in your menu – instead, use terms that will be easily understood by the user.
• Your menu should be consistent on every page of your website. This means your menu shouldn’t change between pages and shouldn’t move locations either.
• Make sure your URL for every page follows the same structure and that it is clear, concise and descriptive. The user should be able to guess what page they are on from the URL alone. This means not using URLs such as futuretheory.co/fth124-usr-43/tarjf4902, and instead using a URL such as futuretheory.co/canberra-web-design-how-to-build-a-website/.

404 page

Often, users will quit a website if they encounter a 404 error page or message because they have hit a dead-end from a broken link or a page that does not exist anymore. This can be harmful to your bounce rate and other key metrics. It is important to reduce the likelihood of encountering a 404 page, however, there is a great opportunity to design an engaging 404 page that will keep users on your website in the event they do reach it.

Design a custom 404 page. Think creatively about how to grab the users attention and redirect them back to the home page or an equally useful ‘restart’ point. This can be done with photographs, images or creative copywriting. To redirect the user, consider including a search bar or a list of common pages to get them back on track.

Loading speed

The speed at which your website loads is an important search engine ranking factor.

There are a few factors that can impact your loading speed. Here are some things you can do to reduce your loading time:

• Minimise your CSS and JavaScript usage
• Use compressed images and files
• Use a content delivery network (CDN) if possible
• Minimise the use of redirects
• Use caching for repeat users
• Find a web host near your audience

Images, image size and alternate text

Almost every website you visit will use images – while some may only use a few, some designs will rely heavily on images and photographs. Relevant and interesting images can help increase the average time-on-page and engagement rate, while also making it easier for the user to understand what they’re reading about or searching through.

Unfortunately, using lots of images can slow down your loading time. And, if a user has a slower internet connection, there is a risk that your images will not load at all. When uploading images to your website consider the following:

• Add titles to images (where appropriate) and make sure they use relevant keywords
• Add alternate (alt) text to each image that is descriptive and keyword-rich. Alt text is used when an image fails to load, or when a user is viewing your website with accessibility features.
• Compress your images before uploading to reduce how many megabytes/gigabytes a server needs to load. This will not reduce the visible quality of the images but will increase load time significantly (vs uncompressed images).

Pop-ups

Pop-ups can be harmful to search engine results. In many websites, pop-ups appear as soon as the user lands on the site, which is bad for a few reasons. First, you make it difficult for the user to get to the information they expect to see. This adds another click for the user to close the pop-up. Second, the user may be deterred by the pop up immediately, and they could quit back to the search results, impacting your bounce rate. Even if the information below the pop-up is perfectly written, with the right keywords and all the information the user needed, Google may view this increased bounce rate negatively and assume the information on the page is not relevant to the keywords you’re showing up in.

If you desperately need to use a pop-up, try a non-invasive pop-up or an exit-intent pop up that only appears when the user is about to depart the website.

Responsive design

Modern phones, laptops and PCs have screens of all sizes. Your website needs display correctly on as many of those devices as possible. This is where responsive design is important. Responsive design uses one design, which adjusts particular elements depending on the screen size. For example, the menu system may change to a hamburger menu on a mobile or a small screen while it will show the full menu on a desktop computer. Google rewards mobile-friendly, responsive sites. You can test how friendly your site is with this tool: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

Website design affects SEO

There are various factors of website design that do impact how your website appears in search engines. Search engines such as Google take into account things like navigation and website structure, having a good 404 page, loading speed, images, images size and alternate text, pop-ups, responsive design and lots more. The more effective your website is at guiding a visitor and providing the right information in an easy way, the higher up your website will show in search engines such as Google.

If you’re after our Canberra web design services, get in touch and we’d be happy to help.

Until now, we haven’t offered SEO services to our clients despite the clear need for it. Why? It’s simple. We haven’t been able to come up with an offering that we would use ourselves. That’s the test we put everything before we offer it to clients. If we use our own services and they stand up through all the punishment, then its good enough for our clients as well.

The results

We started SEO on our own site in September (two months ago). Since then we’ve been slowly watching our rankings rise for our targeted keywords and are proud to present the results below. Across the board, we have been able to achieve between 189% and 2,150% increase in rankings. This has taken our site from page 3-5 of search results to page 1 for most search terms.

Understanding the results

We haven’t disclosed what search terms we were going after, however, note that these search terms are searched thousands of times a month. If we can get even a fraction of this traffic, this builds our leads for new projects.

Our industry is a relatively competitive one as well. We have competitors from all over Australia and the world. This makes the results we have achieved even more impressive (since the competition is so high). We are confident that the best is yet to come as we keep chasing the #1 spot in search. For our clients interested in SEO for their own site, we’ve got packages available here. These packages are designed so that you only pay for results.

There are a few things to note about our results. These aren’t caveats but a few points to consider when thinking about SEO for your own website:

• The success of SEO work depends on the keywords you target
• Competitive industries are harder to rank for
• Results are usually expected within 6 months
• A majority of the work happens behind the scenes
• Simple SEO tasks can be done by beginners however true results are the territory of experts

SEO is a great way of marketing but you need to have a website designed to convert visitors into clients. Contact us for a complimentary website review. This complimentary review will give you insights on how to improve. Of course, we also design and develop websites, and offer packages for projects combining websites and SEO.