Web Development

Your Strategic SEO Checklist to Building a High Traffic Website

  • On : September 7, 2021

Everyone wants a website that sees a lot of traffic, high engagement and a high conversion rate. Unfortunately, with over 1.86 billion websites online, creating a highly engaging, competitive website that generates a lot of traffic is easier said than done. Fortunately for marketers, there are a range of tactics available to help build a search engine optimised website designed to outperform the competition.

Here’s your SEO checklist to strategically build an optimised website designed to draw traffic.

Tools to get you ready 

There are a number of tools and tactics widely and freely accessible that will help with the initial activities of optimising your website to climb the Alexa and Google rank. The best bet is to begin with a suite of analytics software and search tools, which can be quickly learnt over a couple of weeks.

 Google search console

The Google Search Console is a very powerful free SEO tool that can help optimise your site for search engines and is full of useful features like:

  • Fixing website errors
  • Determining which keywords bring you the most traffic
  • View Google Search traffic data for your site
  • Much more

The Google Search Console is the first step in building a strong foundation for your SEO and is just one of the many tools that we recommend using.

Bing webmaster tools

Bing is another search engine that your website should try to optimise for. It may not be as popular as Google, but it accounts for up to a third of all searches, so it’s definitely worth your time. With a built-in keyword research tool, it’s got a few useful features that can help further optimise your site.

Google analytics 

Google Analytics is another free tool you can use to analyse the most important website details such as how people find and use your site, as well as the number of users that visit your site. It works even better when connected with the Google Search Console and will provide a lot of helpful SEO information from inside of your Google Analytics Account.

Here are a few examples of what Google analytics is capable of:

  • Surface insights from your data on key changes, new trends and other opportunities you should be aware of
  • See if your traffic is increasing
  • Find the most popular pages on your site

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO plugin on the planet and makes it super easy to optimise your WordPress site for search engines. It also helps you with the more technical elements of SEO. This plugin makes it much easier to optimise your WordPress site, providing a miniature checklist for web pages and blog content to ensure that your pages have the highest possible chance of reaching your target audience

Keyword research

Understanding your company and your keywords are the foundation of SEO. Conducting extensive keyword research is one of the most useful activities your organisation can undertake, as this will allow your business to identify which keywords are worth focussing on and which ones to avoid. One of the ways you can effectively undertake keyword research is through using Google suggest to find ‘Long Tail Keywords’, which are useful due to their specificity and as a result are not as fiercely fought for.

  • To do this, you first type in a keyword into Google
    • Before pressing enter, look at the keywords that Google suggests. These are keywords that have come straight from Google and so you know people are searching for them.

Another tool to make it even easier is Keywordtool.io. This tool collates Google Suggest keywords and so makes it much easier to scale.

What you can do for your page

Include your Keyword in your URL

  • URLs are important as they help Google understand what your page is all about. Keyword-rich URLs can improve your organic Click Through Rate (CTR)

Keep your URLs short

Use external links 

  • Having external links helps build credibility as it shows your page is well-referenced and trustworthy. An ideal number is to have 5-8 links to authority sites for each article.

Use internal links 

  • When publishing new pieces of content, especially blogs and articles, it’s important to link to 2-5 other pages on your site.
  • One way to do this is to link your internal links using keyword-rich anchor texts. This is where you add a hyperlink to keywords on your page, will tell search engines what the page you’re linking to is about.

Problems you need to stay on top of

Technical SEO can make or break your rankings. Luckily, fixing these technical problems isn’t that difficult and here’s how.

Identify crawl errors

  • A ‘Crawl Error’ refers to when Google has trouble viewing a page on your site. If Google can’t view your site, they’re not going to be able to rank it. Luckily, the Google Search Console has a ‘Coverage’ report that can find and crawl your site.

Make sure your site is mobile-friendly 

  • With Google recently launching a new ‘Mobile-First Index’, if your site isn’t mobile optimised, it’s not going to rank very well. To find out if your web page is mobile-friendly, use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
  • Put in a page from your site and you’ll get an easily understandable ‘yes or no’ answer.

Fix broken links

  • Broken links can really hurt your SEO
    • Using DrLinkCheck.com you can scan your site for broken links and fix them accordingly.

Limit website downtime

  • If your site goes down, users get mad
    • Unplanned site outages can negatively affect a site’s reputation
    • Using Pingdom, you can easily track site downtime. Pingdom will ping your site hundreds of times per day and send you a notification if your site is down so you can fix the problem ASAP.

Tips for content

Make your content easily readable

  • No one likes reading giant walls of text; breaking it down into smaller chunks will reading easier and more user-friendly. This will lead to lower bounce rates and make it more likely your audience will read your page.

Use multimedia

  • Multimedia makes for better content and is a lot more appealing than just a block of text. Images and other forms of multimedia help content rank better. Examples of other multimedia include:
    • Images
    • Charts
    • Infographics
    • videos

After implementing the following tactics, your website traffic should be surging as your brand skyrockets ever closer to the top of the search engine rank ladder.

If you need advice with your SEO strategy, optimising your website, or require the services of a professional marketing team, contact us today!