Free Guide and Checklist
The point of having a business website is to generate traffic from prospective customers who discover your site, are impressed by what you offer, and buy from you.
Ah, if only it were that simple! Countless steps and factors make this endeavor overwhelmingly complex, especially in B2B. But no one can deny that traffic is an excellent indicator of business success and is the basis of any good business infrastructure.
And organic traffic is the most valuable kind of traffic. Organic traffic has the highest conversion rates to actual business; it is free and unaffected by the changing algorithms of social media platforms.
But driving organic traffic can be very challenging depending on your industry, type of business, the resources you have to manage SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and, of course, Google can be pretty unpredictable.
Together with a team, I was forced to learn all about maximizing organic traffic in-house when I worked at a small start-up. It took us about six months to test the various tools and plugins to find the best way to climb the search engine rankings.
Some tips and tricks are captured in my book, in the chapter aptly titled Climbing the Search Engine Rankings.
I put what I learned into practice. As a marketing consultant, I won a client who wanted to drive business for their hyper-niche B2B SaaS company.
The founder felt strongly about not doing any outreach campaigns and was not ready to run ads. Naturally, website optimization to drive organic high-intent traffic became the priority.
The strategy included Social Media and Nurture – but more on this in my consecutive articles.
The result? STUNNING! In just 4 weeks, I increased the client’s organic website traffic by over 1000%, covering their key markets. (Note:1. They are hyper-niched, targeting tiny numbers of potential customers. 2. As someone just starting as a consultant, I wanted to overdeliver and work with a specialized mentor ).
How did I do it? Let’s dive in!
This brings me to the main point of this article. I will provide practical tips that can be applied to any business website, whether a new site, an existing one that’s not meeting expectations or if you simply wish to drive consistent growth.
There are three critical parts to driving organic traffic:
Part 1 (This article): First things first: Run an SEO Audit.
*Assumption: You already know your keyword target and what the page should be optimized for. For my client specifically, I conducted keyword research and identified the priority keywords that indicate high relevancy and intent.
Part 2: Following this, you can implement the enhancements based on the audit.
In the following article of the series, I will highlight the 30+ top most common steps you can take today to improve your website rankings and drive traffic.
Part 3: And finally, the strategy to maintain your traffic momentum for the long term.
Part 1: How to Run an SEO Audit
It is so important for business owners and marketers to look behind the curtain and not just make guesses, considering the many free tools available that help you do just that. Read on to find the tools for a comprehensive audit.
Not surprisingly, Google provides some of the best tools—covering everything from page speed to user experience (UX), search engine optimization, user conversion flow, and more.
Google Analytics: Learn Where Your Visitors Come From
Google Analytics is a free tool that provides much valuable information to help you see from what channels your web visitors came from, what pages they visited, whether they took action (clicked, filled out a form, etc.), and what keywords they searched for to land on your site.
You can track new users to your website and see whether your traffic has decreased, increased, or remained static over time. You can also create custom reports measuring average engagement time, new versus returning users, demographics, location, etc.
Your Site’s Speed And User-Friendliness
A good website should load in three seconds or less. With a slow website, you’re at risk of losing your leads and customers and also of Google deprioritizing your site in the search results.
A free tool to test your website speed is Google’s PageSpeed Insights. You should diagnose both the mobile and desktop versions of your website.
PageSpeed Insights provides you with multiple scores covering the below metrics (they have different weightages):
• Accessibility (cumulative).
• SEO (cumulative).
These are measured against “Lighthouse factors”, which show whether your website ranks well in search engines.
Analyze Your Organic Search Performance
If you love data and want more of it, you can also see organic website traffic in Google Search Console, one of the best tools out there.
It tells us precisely the keywords that are driving traffic and performance, at how your website is ranking, and how much traffic has changed at a given time.
The search results report is my favorite because it gives a clear and straightforward view of your organic impressions, clicks, and keywords. You can then filter by your top or lowest organic pages and start deciding what pages need to be optimized.
For a more Comprehensive SEO Audit, I created the checklist below. You can access (and copy) the Google Doc version here for free.
A comprehensive audit should take about 3 hours. (3 Hours well spent, I might add!)
If you need help, I will launch a highly competitive SEO Audit package on my website in the coming days, where, for pocket change, you can have my specialized team member run the audit for you! Stay tuned!
If you want to do the comprehensive audit in-house, find the additional Tools you need for a Comprehensive Audit below.
- Environment Setup: Download or get access to these tools:
- Redirect Path Chrome Extension – Free
- Google Tag Assistant Chrome Extension – Free
- Ahrefs – Paid (Other options: SEMRush, Open Site Explorer, or Majestic)
2. I recommend a free onsite SEO tool, Screaming Frog, to test on-page elements. This website crawler helps you improve onsite SEO by extracting data and auditing common SEO issues.
3. To test if your site contains latent Semantic Index keywords, input your primary keyword in the LSI keyword generator.
4. To test if your page is free of broken links, use the Broken Link Checker.
5. To see if the pages have enough crawlable content and is accessible to the search engine, open Browseo and input the page URL
6. To check if your page is indexed, open Google.com, type ‘site:’ followed by the page URL in the search box, and hit enter. If your page is indexed, it will show up in the results.
7. To see if the page is mobile-friendly/responsive, open Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and input the page URL.
8. To see if the page URL is free of redirect issues, type the exact URL of the page in Chrome, load it, and click on the Redirect Path Chrome Extension.
9. To check if Google Analytics is properly tracking sessions on the page, open the page URL using Google Chrome and click on the Google Tag Assistant Chrome Extension.
10. For the off-page optimization audit, use either Ahrefs – Paid (or other options: SEMRush, Open Site Explorer, or Majestic) to find and analyze backlinks.
Next week, I will detail over 30 most common ways you can optimize your website after your audit, and skyrocket your organic traffic.