5 Ways to Boost your Google Traffic on WordPress

Did you know that a blog is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website? And getting traffic from Google (or any search engine) is critical to your blogs success, yet this is a mystery to most site owners.

So let’s change that.

Today I’m going to give you 5 ways to boost your Google traffic on WordPress – a few simple SEO tips!

Honestly, I know you probably want to gouge your eyeballs out when I start talking about SEO (search engine optimization), but don’t.

Google can send you TONS of traffic to your site. And once you know a few simple things to make it work, and keep working (long after the social media platform algorithms change and stop working – you know I’m talking about you Instagram!) you’ll be boosting your Google traffic to your site in no time!

So, with that in mind, here are 5 ways to boost your Google traffic on WordPress.

Make sure your website is mobile friendly.

Is your website and its content optimized to fit different screen devices? Search engines like Google give mobile-optimized sites a boost in search results when the searcher is on a mobile device.

If you check your analytics, you’ll find that more and more of your readers are using smart phones and mobile devices to fulfill their internet needs. Google knows this too!

Isn’t it annoying when you do go to someone’s site that isn’t optimized and you have to pinch and zoom to read the copy? You probably leave their site, right?! Google knows this and that’s why they boost sites that are mobile responsive.

The key: make sure your website is mobile friendly. Not sure? Take this simple Google mobile-friendly test.

If your site is not mobile-friendly, we can help you. WE ONLY DESIGN MOBILE FRIENDLY, RESPONSIVE WORDPRESS SITES.

Optimize your photos and images.

Yes images are visually appealing to have in your blog posts, but even more than this, your photos and images are SEARCHABLE by Google.

When you search (or anyone searches) you might notice that IMAGE search is right next to the standard ALL search (upper left hand corner). And guess what? I probably use the image search more than the standard search, and so do a lot of people!

So what can you do? Optimize your images for SEO.

Instead of wasting those amazing photos you have on your site, take advantage of having them found in searches too!

Heck, you’re already doing a lot of the work. Optimize your images for SEO and get more traffic from Google!

The key: Name your images accordingly (descriptive to your post + the image itself) before you upload them to your wordpress. While in WordPress you can enter the alt text for the image as well.

Improve your search engine results.

Your website does not only need to look good for humans, it needs to be easily interpreted by search engines so that they can crawl and index your content efficiently.

Did you know that when you are looking at search results, there are three main elements you see:

-the page URL,
-the page TITLE (aka heading of your page or blog post), and
-the meta description (a brief description of what your page or post is about).

Here’s an example from my Google search: ways to make money blogging.

And guess what? You have control over these! The best tool in wordpress to create your own, clearly written meta description – one that is relevant to your headline and the content of the article – is the Yoast SEO (free) plugin seen in action below.

The key: keep your pages and blog posts keyword focused, keep in mind that these are your ‘advertisements’ on Google searches. Make them interesting, compelling, and helpful.

BFF tip: Think about what you would click as a searcher!

Update existing posts and pages by optimizing your keywords.

Always, always, always write content that your audience will love, then make sure it’s content that Google will love too!

Here’s what I do and what you should do too…

-I write blog posts that I know my audience will love (and search for).

-Then I do a Google search to see what word or words I can add to my title to narrow down the competition.

Example: I thought about writing a blog post titled “How to decide what to blog about”, but after my Google search results of 1,490,000,000. I decided to change the title to obtain lower search results. By searching “5 ways to decide what to blog about”, Google search results were 31,200,000 – which means I have less competition and a better opportunity for my blog post to be seen.

-Lastly I will adjust my keywords in my title and place the keywords throughout my blog post (or page) to obtain the better lower search results competition number AND get a ‘green’ light reading on my Yoast SEO page analysis.

If you do what I just outlined above, this little ‘extra’ step can push you up the rankings on Google and bring you more traffic QUICKLY!

The key: know what your keywords are for your blog post and/or page. Add the keywords in the right place on your post or page. This means adding your keywords in the:

-url
-title/heading
-first 100 words of content
-meta description

BFF rule of thumb: I typically have my keywords in 5 places on the actual post itself… url, title, within the first 100 words, somewhere in the middle, and in the last 100 words.

Improve your site speed.

You know how we just talked about how annoying it is to go to someone’s site that isn’t mobile friendly (#1 above), it’s also annoying for visitors to wait for your site to download!

Trust me, if it takes your site more than 3 seconds to load, you end up with about 40% of your visitors abandoning your site. Yes, 40%… OUCH!

Google is all about the reader’s experience, so it watches how users behave. Thus, if your site is slow, Google will not boost you.

Do you have a slow site speed? Use this Pingdom tool to test your homepage (the most viewed page on your site) and at least one blog post to see how fast they load.

The key: if you’re slower than 3 seconds, it’s time to contact your developer.

FINAL NOTES

Getting more traffic from Google isn’t that hard, you just need to know what to do!

Start by implemening one or two of my 5 ways to boost your Google Traffic on WordPress and I’m sure you’ll start seeing an increase in your Google traffic numbers!