The Phoenix Sofware Blog!

Why Organic Traffic and SEO is important ?

Your website can be an amazing low cost sales channel that works 24/7 bringing new leads and sales to you.

The challenge is that there are now over 1.7 billion websites world wide and you can't just build a website, launch it and expect that customers will find it and do business with you unless you have a carefully crafted approach to managing this asset.

The good news is that if you approach your website in the right way, you can build an amazing asset that works for you 24/7, driving new leads and sales to you. You can "own" your niche and totally dominate your competitors.

The purpose of this Blog is to empower business owners and people who want to improve their website with practical steps and actions they can take to increase website traffic and therefore get more business results from their website assets.

Let me explain more...

What is Organic Traffic ?

Organic Traffic is a term that refers to the visitors that come to your website as a result of an unpaid ("organic") search result. Visitors who are considered organic find your website after using a search engine like Google or Bing, so they are not "referred" by any other website. Organic traffic is obtained from the appearance of the site in the results of a search that users perform in their search engine. Organic traffic is free traffic, this aspect being what makes it the type of traffic that website owners want the most.

What is SEO ?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the art and science of getting your website setup optimally so that you will rank high in the search engine results and therefore drive more traffic to your site and dominate your market from your competitors.

Current Environment regarding Organic Traffic and SEO

• The search engine market in New Zealand is dominated by Google. Statcounter reports that 94.47% of all searches in New Zealand over the last 12 months have been done via Google. The next competitor is Bing at only 3.33%. Therefore, if you want people to find your site – you must do everything you can to rank highly in Google search.
• Google has increased the amount of space taken on page 1 of search results for their paid ads – leaving less room for organic results. They are also creating a preference for brands so large brands like Coca Cola have more authority than a local brand.
• Several years ago you could do things to fool search engine spiders so they would rank your site highly with minimal effort from you. For example you could add your key words in white text (so they are hidden to user) and repeat them 100 times. You could be confident that you would be ranked highly.
• The search engine spiders are now incredibly sophisticated and use a ton of metrics and analysis to decide how they will rank your site. If you try to trick them – you will simply be removed from the search results all together.
• In May 2021 Google introduced the core web vitals update. This update means that Google now consider your website performance and several other key technical metrics as important when they decide ranking for your website. Therefore if your website is slow to load, difficult to use or has technical issues your ranking will be affected by this.
• Google is regularly updating key criteria that they consider for your rankings and while you may be ranked well today, if you don't keep on top of these changes your website search results will be affected.

At the end of the day Google's objective is to provide the highest value search results & content to their users when they do a search. They want to provide their search user with the highest value authoritative search results so they keep using Google.

Therefore if you do the required work to ensure that Google respects your website as high quality and authoritative, they will reward you with sending organic traffic to your website.

While Google (and other search engines) publish a ton of information to help guide what they deem as high quality and authoritative - as a website owner it is ultimately up to you to put this into action and ensure that you get the desired results. If you put the effort in - you will get the results.

Key things to consider

SEO is a very complex area - however there are some key overall items that are more important than others. Here is a high level summary of what I consider important:

Knowing your audience and what you are selling to them is vital.

In my opinion, the most important thing to start off with is knowing your audience and clearly depicting what you are selling to them.

1. Who are your target customers ?
2. What are your key products and services ?
3. How do your prospective customers find you and purchase these ?.

Once you have a clear understanding of the above, you can then either assess your current website with that in mind or build a new website to give you the best results for your customer and therefore have the best competitive advantage for you.

Content is KING

Ensuring that your website content targets the needs of your audience is vital for website success.

Allocate some time to think about the following regarding your current website content:

• Does the content provide high value to your prospective customers? does it serve existing customers well ? Is it easy to read, providing unique content that is laid out and structured well and authoritative?
• Is the grammar and overall look and feel of the website of high quality?
• Is your content engaging and does it keep the user looking for a while ? If a search result finds content on your site and the user goes away from the site quickly (bounces) then Google considers the content to be of low value for future searches and you are penalised.
• Am I clearly articulating the value of my products and services I am selling?
• Are there easy to use, clear cut calls to action for what I want my customers to do - whether its contacting me or purchasing a product?
• How does my content and layout compare to my top 3 competitors?
• Ask yourself - if you were a potential customer and did not know about your industry - how would you rate your website compared to your competitors ? Also get input from others - whether they are recent customers or independent people that will give you an honest answer and provide feedback to enhance your website.
• Look at your website on a mobile as well as a normal computer screen. The number of searches using mobile technology has increased markedly over the last few years and now well over 50% of all searches are from a mobile device.
• Ensure you have linked to your Social profiles – for example Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin , Pinterest etc.

Website Technical optimisation is essential

In May 2021 Google introduced the core web vitals update. This update means that Google now considers your website performance and several other key technical metrics as important when they decide ranking for your website. Therefore if your website is slow to load, difficult to use or has technical issues your ranking will be affected by this.

Here are some key technical things to consider:

• How fast does your website load ? You can run a speed test at https://gtmetrix.com/ too see how fast your current site loads. Just go to that URL and type in your web URL and it will run a performance test. You are ideally wanting an A but anything over a C is ok. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss further.
• Do you have SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) enabled on your website ? Check for the padlock.
• Does your site work well and optimized for mobile - is it responsive for different size screens ?
• Do you have a Sitemap ?
• Do you have caching enabled and optimised ?
• Have you optimised your images and video files ?
• Have you optimised your code files - Javascript, CSS ?
• Have you setup your Google search console and Google analytics to monitor your site ?
• Have you optimised your key words and meta descriptors to put a focus on your key content ?

There are many more possible technical issues that can affect your website. The list above is a helpful starting point of some key items.

Also make sure you have an excellent Hosting Provider. I have had many web Hosting Provider's over years of building websites. I highly recommend my current web host - Greengeeks. They have top class hosting and excellent support - simply the best I have experienced. If you are technical and want a web host - have a look at https://www.greengeeks.com/track/u120236 If you are not technical or would prefer to have someone else do this - please Contact Us to discuss your requirements.

Authoritative links and outreach is very important

Google rewards sites that have high quality links between your site and another of authority. If there are a lot of high quality links between your site and sites of authority then you will gain credibility and rank higher in search results. However on the flip side if you have lots of links but they are too low quality or irrelevant sites then you go down the rankings and are penalised.

• Consider what sites in your industry or community have a high authority and request that you link to them. This may involve writing an article for a news site or providing a blog or just asking for a link.
• Use a tool like https://neilpatel.com/seo-analyzer/ to analyse your competitors websites to see where they get their back links from and see if you can get similar back links.
• Contact people who run other websites where the content is high quality and see if you can get them to link to you. Remember that it is important that their site is of high quality and relevant. Offer to provide articles or blogs for them.

Suggested Approach / next steps

I recommend that initially you work out how important your website is to your business now and in the future.

It may be that you see your website as being a critical asset and you want to drive a lot of your business through your website or it may be that it provides some functions but not a key driver for you.

The amount of effort you put into optimising your website will depend on answering the above question. I will assume for the rest of this article that you see your website as an important asset and want to maximise results from it - otherwise I expect you would not be reading this article in the first place.

You may want to write down some goals of what you would like your website to deliver for you - for example by 2022 90% of new customers will find me through my website and I have automated all back office functions.

In order to get the best results from SEO you must have a really good foundation. That foundation is the structure and content of your website.

Do an assessment of your current site based on points made earlier in this article - especially around content. Also do a technical assessment of performance and look at your main competitor's sites.

If you decide that your current website has good bones and just needs some adjustments - that's great - you can start straight away with the SEO of that site. If you decide that you need a new website to gain the best competitive advantage - then you will need to start with having a new website built and deployed.

Whether you are starting afresh or enhancing your existing site - these are the key things to consider ...

• Getting to know your target audience – what are they wanting. Get clear on who your customers are and how you want them to find you.
• Content that is high quality and authoritative - work out your key selling points or key areas of expertise and promote those. Do you have awards / claim to fame - make sure these are highlighted. If you have specialist areas that you want to promote - then target those - for example if you are a Mortgage Broker and have a lot of expertise in Investment Property then make sure you do high quality authoritative content around that topic and design your site to promote this aspect.
• Assess your top competitor's sites and see where you can sell your story better or provide better content and functionality to your customers.
• Technical optimisation of the site to make sure it is FAST, mobile friendly and has no technical issues that Google could penalise you for.
• Keyword research / analysis to make sure that you optimise your keywords and content so you get found.
• Outreach to get high quality links from your site to other authoritative sites.
• Implement ongoing monitoring tools and monitor your site.
• Create an ongoing SEO plan to keep track of latest trends so you can keep your competitive advantage. SEO is an ongoing activity. This includes ongoing updating of your content, ensuring technical stuff is ok and reaching out for links.

I hope you found this blog useful. Please do not hesitate to Contact me if you would like to discuss any of these topics further or would like an obligation free chat about your website or SEO needs.