How To explode Your website traffic With simple (But Effective) SEO

In 2018 we were able to nearly triple the traffic to this website and more than double our income using simple but effective SEO. This has had an enormous impact on our business, how far we can spread our message, and (thanks to the added cash in the bank) our lifestyle.

But SEO didn’t always come easy to us. We have been blogging since 2012 and in the time between 2012 – 2018 we managed to grow our blog to around 100,000 users per month, which we were very happy about.

In 2018 we boosted that up to over 280,000 and today the traffic is over 350,000 users per month and growing, making it one of the most trafficked travel blogs online!

So how did we do it? What did we learn after 6 years of blogging that had such a enormous impact?

Enkel. SEO.

In November of 2017 we hired an SEO specialist team out of the UK and they did a complete audit of our website. What came back was shocking! much of the work that we had put into our website was actually hindering our progress, rather than helping us grow traffic.

We were quickly humbled and a bit embarrassed.

One Month blog traffic For Goats On The road at end of 2018
How could we have possibly missed all of this even though we’d been working on our SEO for years?

The answer is that, while there’s A ton of information online these days about how to get traffic to your website using SEO, much of it is conflicting and some of it is just flat-out wrong.

We were like so many other bloggers and webmasters out there. We were Googling everything and trying to piece together all of that information on our own and it simply wasn’t working.

In this post, I want to help shine some light on the subject of SEO so that if you have a blog, website or online business, you can easily and quickly grow your traffic.

What You’ll Learn:

What is SEO

How To get traffic using SEO

House Keeping: cleaning Up The Backend Of Your Website

How To optimize Your site load Speed

The importance of SSL

How To Do keyword phrase research (The right Way)

How To write posts That will rank On page 1 of Google

How To Market Your content To Drive traffic & help SEO

How To Interlink

How To learn how To Do all of This in video Training

La oss komme i gang.

What is SEO?

Let’s start with the really simple terms here. SEO stands for search Engine Optimization. but what it really means is Google Optimization, because Google currently claims over 81% of all search engine traffic on the web, it’s responsible for 2 trillion searches per year and its bots crawl 130 trillion web pages around the world. 

Ja. Google is boss.

So, while other search engines do drive some traffic and they’re not completely irrelevant, when marketers, webmasters, bloggers and SEO gurus talk about SEO, they’re talking about Google.

SEO is the practice of optimizing your website’s code, authority and individual pieces of content (posts and pages) in order to drive more traffic from Google.

How To get traffic To Your website With SEO

This is something all bloggers struggle with. When we were first starting out with this blog, we would check the traffic each day and we would see that hardly anyone was visiting our site. It took us years before we had an audience and years more before we had a real impact in our space.

That’s because we didn’t properly utilize SEO. 

We were Googling everything we could and it took us a long time to figure it all out. but what really helped us was hiring the expert SEO team.

They really distilled down all of the garbage information we had floating around in our heads from years of ineffective research and implementation, and gave us a concrete, actionable and impactful plan for our SEO.

Renhold

When our SEO team first went over our site, they gave us a enormous list of things we needed to fix in the backend of the site and with the content that was already up. The list was so substantial that at first we thought that we had been doing everything wrong for all of these years! but the team assured us that every single site they do this audit for has a similar sized list of errors. 

They gave us so much to fix that I’m not going to list it all in this post, but here are the things that I think had the biggest impact:

Thin Content

When we first started out, we didn’t know what we were doing, so we created some pages that just had buttons on them, some posts were only 300 words long and some were just plain terrible and not useful. Google penalizes sites for having too much “thin content”, so our team gave us the tools needed to find and fix all of this content.

Broken Links

Broken links on a site are bad for user experience and thus, bad for SEO. luckily for WordPress blogs they’re pretty easy to find and fix. The broken link Checker makes the process pretty easy, I just recommend actually viewing the page where the broken link is found to make sure it’s actually broken. In our experience, sometimes it’s not.

Orphan Pages

These are pages that stand alone on a site with no links going in or out. They’re not all that easy to find, but they hurt your Google rankings for sure. By finding these pages on your site and deleting them, you’ll show Google that your blog is one big cohesive web of terrific content.

XML Sitemap

These help Google (and your readers) to see every post and page on your website. A properly set-up sitemap will help bots to more easily crawl your website. luckily there are plugins to set these up. We’ve used simple Sitemap in the past and it worked well, you just have to make sure you go into Google search Console afterwards and verify it.

Optimize site Speed

This is a big one. starting in July of 2018, Google launched an algorithm update that changed the way it indexes the web. knowing that users of the Internet have an extremely short attention span, Google started ranking sites based on their loading speed. simply put, if your site loads slow these days, you won’t get as much traffic from Google.

Site speed has always affected traffic. If people have to wait more than a couple of seconds for each of your pages to load, they’ll leave your site. but now Google has actually started removing websites from search results for having slow load times. You need to speed up your site. men hvordan?

Optimize & Resize Images

The biggest drag on your speed (particularly for visual sites like travel blogs) is image size. You need to do two things to every image in your media library. You need to resize it and compress it.

Resizing Images: To bulk resize all of the images in your library, you can download the Imsamnity Plugin for WordPress. This plugin will allow you to resize every image currently in your library. Every theme is different, but for main images within posts, usually 900px wide is a good size, while some themes have larger images in the header or for featured images (like ours). For these, 1600px wide is a good number.

Optimizing Images: Now that your images are resized, you need to optimize them. Basically, resizing is changing the physical size of the image in pixels, while optimizing is stripping the coding and data from the image to make the file size smaller, thus helping it load faster on your site. Smush image Compression Plugin is the one that most bloggers use. When done correctly, you can compress an image by as much as 50% without losing any quality.

Cache Your Site

Caching allows your users’ browsers to store parts of your website so that your server doesn’t have to do all of the work and the pages will load faster. one of the best, free plugins for WordPress is W3 total Cache. once installed and set up correctly, this plugin can have a enormous impact on your site’s load speed. 

CDN (Content delivery Network)

CDN or content delivery Network, is basically a network that allows your site to load from a server that is to the visitor who is accessing it. Some hosts (including our favourite, Bluehost), have built in CDNs, but I recommend hooking up CloudFlare to your website. They have a free version and you can upgrade later at any time.

By setting up W3 total Cache and CDN using all of the proper settings (there are many), I was able to boost one of my new website’s speed by 300%. Yes, it works like a charm, it will help your site load faster and it will help you get more traffic.

Get SSL Certified

There are many reasons to get an SSL certificate for your site. It will allow you to take secure credit card payments down the road, it gives your site trust and authority, and it will help your SEO. When your site is SSL certified, it will have an https:// in the url rather than http://.

This tells the browsers, users and Google that your site is safe and can process and store data in a secure way. ever since 2014, SSL has been identified as a ranking signal for Google, meaning that if you don’t have it, you’re missing out on potential traffic.

To get SSL certified, the best way is to contact your host and ask them for your help. Bluehost makes it really simple with a free switch in the cPanel that only takes a second to turn on, but every host is different.

Contact your host and ask them to turn on SSL for your domain and redirect your existingsted til den nye https: // -adressen.

Gjør effektiv søkeordfraseforskning

Dette kan være en av de største faktorene for SEO -suksessen vår i 2018. Vi hadde aldri investert noen penger i et skikkelig søkeordfraseforskningsverktøy. Jeg har prøvd så mange forskjellige gratis, og frem til slutten av 2017 antok jeg at jeg fikk alle dataene jeg trengte. Mann, tok jeg feil.

Gratis SEO -verktøy bruker vanligvis forskjellige data som de betalte. Men noen av de betalte er ekstremt dyre. AHREFS tar for eksempel sine søkeordsetningsdata fra ClickStream, og det er veldig nøyaktig, men prisene starter på $ 99 / måned.

KeySearch tar data direkte fra Google, men den organiserer dem på en måte som til og med en nybegynnerbruker kan tegne verdifulle data ved første øyekast.

KeySearch er verktøyet vi bruker, og det har i utgangspunktet endret måten vi tenker på nøkkelordene våre. Først ble vi overveldet av alle de forskjellige fanene, skjermene og funksjonene i verktøyet, men over tid har vi mestret hver eneste ting som dette verktøyet kan gjøre.

Super verdifull nøkkelordfrase Forskningsdata fra KeySearch er bare liten del av hva dette verktøyet kan gjøre

Fra grunnleggende nøkkelordfraseforskning og vanskeligheter med sjekker til sideanalyse og teller av SERP -ord, dette programmet gir deg alle dataene du trenger for å rangere side 1 på Google. Jeg er ikke sponset av KeySearch forresten. Jeg vet at det vanligvis er underforstått i disse dager når en blogger snakker dette høyt om et produkt. Jeg bare elsker det.

Jeg har anbefalt det til alle studentene mine på kursene mine i flere måneder nå. Jeg har imidlertid en tilknyttet lenke for dem. Hvis du klikker her og bruker kupongkoden “Goat20” i kassen, vil du få 20% avslag på prisen på dette verktøyet. Jeg får et lite tilbakeslag, så jeg setter pris på støtten din, men egentlig anbefaler jeg det fordi det er utrolig nyttig.

De nøkkelen med KeySearch (ordspill ment) er å finne nøkkelord som har høyt søkevolum og lav konkurranse. Mange mennesker bruker gratis Google -nøkkelordfraseplanlegger som søkeordfraseforskningsverktøyet (det gjorde jeg også i det siste). Selv om disse dataene er nøyaktige, gir de deg ikke nok av det! Nøkkelordfraseplanlegger har et “vanskelighetsgrad” -nummer, men dette er ofte feil som vanskeligheter med å rangere, når det faktisk bare gjelder kostnadene for annonser mot begrepet.

KeySearchs vanskelighetsrangering er veldig nøyaktig. Den samler informasjon fra nettsteder på første side av Google som deres Domain Authority (DA), Page Authority (PA), tilbakekoblinger, interne lenker, nøkkelordfraseplasseringer, ordtelling og så mye mer og gir deg en enkel å visualisere, farge- Kodet nummer mellom 1-100 for å fortelle deg hvor vanskelig det vil være å rangere for det valgte nøkkelordet.

Når du bruker nøkkelordfrase -forskningsdataene riktig, og alle de andre verktøyene i Keysearch sammen, kan du eksplodere trafikken raskt ved å skrive nye innlegg som faktisk vil rangere side 1 i Google. Vi ble så flinke til å maksimere KeySearch -data for SEO -innholdsskrivingen at vi har vært i stand til å rangere side 1 for relativt vanskelige vilkår bare uker etter å ha truffet publiseringen.

Over er et skjermbilde av vår analyse for en artikkel vi publiserte 30. september 2018. Den første piggen er fra vårt nyhetsbrev, sosiale medier og vanlige følgere. Den andre piggen er litt over 2 uker etter at innlegget ble publisert da den gikk til side en i Google og begynte å hente inn så mye som 700 sider -visninger per dag.

Det er kraften i riktig søkeordfraseforskning og den potensielle kraften til nøkler som gjøres riktig.

? Pro tips: Selv om Keysarch teknisk sett er et nøkkelordfraseforskningsverktøy, er det enda flere data som finnes på andre faner i dette verktøyet. Make sure you utilize Explorer, rank tracking and content assistant within the tool as well.

Writing better Content

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