Trying Different Methods For Improving Traffic Through SEO

Running Tests

The first thing that I did, was to run Google’s Lighthouse check. Google analytics (requires you to have a Gmail account) or Google Chrome (Via more tools then Developer Tools, press the last tab) with Lighthouse, you can see your SEO score for both the Mobile and Desktop versions of your site. It gives an indication of the things that lowered your scores. For instance, with the mobile score, my text is a little small which means that smart phone users have to zoom in. By seeing how my site looking on a mobile via lighthouse I realised the text on the home page was too large and going off the screen. When I made the change to a different text, I only had three mobile visitors, a week later I have eleven visitor. Understandably people were not interested in seeing a website whose text trailed off the screen. These little or big things affect your overall score. This test works best for people who code their own website, as Squarespace and Wix are not correctly calculated through the test. You cannot remove or play with the code other then linking to somewhere else. Google has other test such a mobile test to make sure your website is mobile friendly. Be careful of other sites that claim to test your SEO score. Even though I have internet protection, one of the sites managed to download a tool to the Chrome extension.

SEO Experts Know Their Niche Well

One thing that many of the posters on Reddit/r/SEO have made clear to me is, that makes sense to me is that a lot of SEO marketing experts who sell expensive courses, are in fact selling to other people in their niche. My niche is art and my journey of building my art business. So SEO encompasses this topic, as you want your business to be found on Google, but it isn’t the basis of my blogs. When you get to their level of notoriety, you post something and immediately see a change in your traffic. Their area of expertise is a topic every person who is building a website has to learn about. The difference, as people have mentioned is that certain things may work best for a niche that deals with SEO and not for others.

Keywords

I added better keywords to my blogs, with long tail keywords and short tail keywords. This is helps you be found. Long tail keywords are long precise keywords, that are used when you are searching for something specific. They are more likely to be used when searching with your voice. Short tail keywords are less specific and intentionally one or two words, that are more general; so it is easier to search for your blog. Short keywords, are likely to be used by many more sites; so you may be ranked many pages from the first search page. But there are many sites that can help you find keywords. One is Ahrefs.com which costs money, so I didn’t try it. From what I have gathered, it has impressive analytics and is a useful tool for generate keywords. One site I couldn’t figure out was SeedKeywords.com, I may not have used it correctly. The way it works is you come up with a search scenario and you are then suggested the most popular keywords for that scenario. I was never suggested any keywords by this site. The last site I tried was, LSI graph.com, you are suggested keywords with analysis showing how popular each keyword is based on your search. You are given a number of three daily searches for free, before you are asked to pay a fee. I found it useful to try. The most helpful keyword generator was Google itself. If you type your preferred keywords into the search box, Google will suggest keywords that people are searching for. One more thing, there are tutorial websites, Reddit, Pinterest Business Account(if you try to make an ad you can see what keywords are popular), forums and book titles, that can help you find interesting keywords. Adding better keywords or even keywords to my blogs has had a small positive effect on my traffic numbers. I did this in stages, every time I added or improved my keywords I saw a couple of extra people visiting on that day. For now this the only thing I have tried, everything else is something I am learning about and planning to experiment with, one by one.

Link Building

I am early in the process of understanding backlinks. From what I have gathered, link building is the best way to grow your website or blog and people link to your site from other sites. This tells Google that you are an authority on this topic and Google then ranks you higher in the search engine. There are two types of backlinks, Nofollow (seen on social media platforms, forums, commenting on other peoples blogs, do not help your SEO ranking) and Dofollow links (seen on websites, they are ranked by Google) are both important because you are seen by other people. They can substantially increase your traffic numbers. That is why you want to aim for both types. One idea that has been popular for the last five years is to increase your backlinks using the skyscraper technique. You email many blogs or sites, with a template email, you ask them to link to your blog post, that is relevant to a subject they tackled. The bigger the website the more likely you will need to pay compensation to have your link on a blog. If you are new, it is unlikely that they will link to your website, no matter how well informed your blog entry is. This advice has fallen out of favour on the subreddit reddit.com/r/SEO. Their logic again makes sense to me because at this point in time, everyone is trying the “Skyscraper Technique.” If you are receiving many requests to read and backlink to small bloggers, it is unlikely that you would have the time or inclination to do this. As with social media, there is very much an idea of scratch my back and I will scratch your back, so therefore what do you get out of this? You have to make natural backlinks, paying compensation to other websites for backlinks, can hurt your site in the long run. At the moment I am watching Ahrefs Link Building Beginners Youtube video, where he made a point to say that this practice goes against Google’s ethos. If they may rank your page lower or not show your webpage at all. It is a costly strategy, six months ago it cost around $350 on average to pay a website to backlink to yours. You want to aim for natural backlinks, by putting your website on directories, being active on social media, commenting on other peoples blogs and other methods, I have yet to learn about. One other way to gain a natural backlink is to write a guest blog entry. There are large sites such as Medium.com or websites that are in your niche, that accept people’s submissions. Also Podcasts or Youtube videos further elaborate on the topics you blog and would be considered nofollow backlinks. These help you be discovered by other people. The good thing about Youtube videos is that they show up at the top of the search on Google. There seem to be various ways to get backlinks, it is something I am still wrapping my head around the whole concept. So I am making a indepth study of this topic.

Experiment

I plan to start experimenting and see what helps my SEO ranking. Change the website, break it if needed and fix it again. Possibly changing the layout of my website to see if it affects my Google ranking. It is the same thing with technology, you ask yourself, what does this do if I try this. So you push the button and learn in the process. On Squarespace I cannot change the structure of the code, but I can make my site load faster by resizing my images. The speed at which the website loads at helps the SEO score, but it doesn’t make or break it. Some people have suggested renaming images with keywords to their image titles. That may be something I may trying down the road. My focus is learning about backlinks. It is a similar concept with building a social media account, you have to build your account by engaging with other people. You cannot just post and think, I will be noticed by other people, eventually. There are just too many people on the internet, you need to make yourself heard. So this is what I intend to do, to make little or large changes to my website, to see if it will increase my traffic. I haven’t paid for any courses, I am reading everything I can find to learn about this topic, I don’t wish to be a marketing or blog expert. What I learn on this journey, I will post it on my blog. Hopefully it may help someone and save them time. It seems that there is no quick fix or magic word to improving your traffic through SEO. Doing many little things seems to have an overall effect on your SEO ranking, as I have already seen a small increase in visitor numbers, just by working on my keywords.

Coauthored with Francesca Darcy who has more technological expertise then I possess and helps me with the technological aspects of my business. Twitter @francesca_darcy