Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Step 3: Improve User Experience
Recent updates have taught us that for the first time in search history Google is paying serious attention to how visitors interact with your website. That’s why user experience is so important. Your site should be as user-friendly as possible, encourage multiple page views per visit as well as social sharing or bookmarking.
The absolute best way to improve user experience is to increase the quality of your information, the targeting of your visitors and split-testing design elements. The better your information, the longer people will stick around to read it. Next, if you’re just publishing content to rank for the big keywords; keep in mind the visitors will be less targeted.
The bigger the search volume, the less targeted the traffic. I see this every time I start a new site. To begin with I drive referral traffic from my list as well as forums and other communities I’m a part of. The result is ridiculously high time on site and lots of page views per visit. As the site grows and it starts to rank for the big keywords; the time on site drives down as well as page views per visit.
That’s why you need to be very selective over the keywords you choose to target. Don’t target keywords because they are high search volume and low competition unless they are your ideal audience.
If you target the wrong people because of high search volume; you’ll end up with crappy statistics which will make it difficult to split-test elements on your site to improve user experience for the people who are actually going to stick around and maybe buy something from you.
You can start on the ‘landing pages’ tab of your Google Analytics. This page gives you a list of your site’s pages along with average time on site as well as page views per visit. Start with the weakest links; work on improving their content and adding more internal links.
Go through the pages on your site and improve them as much as you can in terms of content. Next work on design elements. Split-testing is very easy when you have a lot of traffic.
Lastly encourage social sharing and bookmarking, a social site is a user-friendly site.
Step 4: Publish Regular Content
Google likes fresh content, we all know this. Try to publish content at least once a week to keep your site fresh. Google does not like static websites that are set up once and forgotten about. They want active sites with active contributors.
This means regular content and an audience (readers) who comment and share. Regular content also builds site authority and Page Rank. Authority is the key metric in SEO right now. The more niche authority you have, the higher you rank for everything. As your domain authority goes up, all of your internal pages go up the rankings; even the oldest.
Step 5: Social Presence
Building a social presence is no longer an option; it’s a necessity. Since Google Plus and Author Rank have come about (learn about it here), Google has been paying a lot of attention to social signals and your site’s SOCIAL PRESENCE.
Mainly Google looks at your Google+, Facebook and Twitter (now x.com) presence. The other social networks are tiny in comparison to the big 3. The bigger your following on those three networks, the more authority you’ll have and the higher your rankings will go.
Right now you can’t rank a site with social signals alone, so they’re still very minor in the overall scheme of SEO. With that said they are a great way to ensure you have everything covered and will only increase in the ranks in future.
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →Building your social presence across the networks starts off with setting up Google Authorship. It gets boring to talk about after a while, so you can read how to set up Authorship here. The post also explains how to connect your other networks to your Google+ account.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below!
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Patricia Strano, April 19, 2013, 15:20
The ONLY BEST WAY for YOUR SUCCESS – thank you Dave’s – been with/around u guys since 10/31/11 and will never leave. My company name is Feels Right Marketing. So very appropriate – as Empower Network – FEELS RIGHT! Feeling Right is – to me – going with basic, trustable instinct. We are all born with this ability – but it is life that has often caused many to not TRUST this basic instinct – it is a proven, reliable instinct – Empower Network FEELS RIGHT – my WHY I have and will always be with Empower. Great site by the way – glad I found this!
Mustapha Barki, April 19, 2013, 16:05
hi david I want to work.
Emily Johnson, April 20, 2013, 09:15
I appreciate the emphasis on starting with something you’re passionate about. Makes a big difference.
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Building a whole section of your strategy around Google Authorship aged about as well as you’d expect.
Look, Roy’s right, and it’s not even a one-off. The ‘necessity, not an option’ framing shows up every time a platform is having a moment. The steps that survived are the boring ones: publish regularly, improve the pages people actually land on. The social presence step is the one wearing an expiration date nobody could see at the time.
There’s something instructive in watching advice age this badly — not a character flaw, just a reminder that certainty about which platform matters forever is usually overconfidence dressed as strategy. The parts of this post that ask you to actually serve the reader better held up. The parts asking you to court a specific company’s ranking signal didn’t. Worth noticing which kind of advice you’re following before you invest real time in it.
Split-testing design elements assumes traffic numbers a feed store owner in a town of four thousand is never going to see. I can’t A/B test my way to a conclusion on a handful of visitors a day. What does survive the translation is the plainer stuff — publish regularly, make the page easy to read. The social signal chase was never going to apply here anyway; my customers weren’t following me on three networks to begin with.
Lonnie, we used to say the same about response rates in small towns — the sample’s too thin to trust the curve, so you go with what’s obviously true instead of what’s statistically proven. Same instinct, different decade.