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?

Jednoduchý. 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

Začněme.

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. 

Ano. 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.

Housekeeping

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. ale jak?

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 existing site to the new https:// address.

Do effective keyword phrase Research

This may be one of the biggest factors for our SEO success in 2018. We had never invested any money in a proper keyword phrase research tool. I’ve tried so many different free ones and up until the end of 2017 I assumed I was getting all of the data I needed. Man, was I wrong.

Free SEO tools usually use different data that the paid ones. but some of the paid ones are extremely expensive. Ahrefs for example, takes their keyword phrase data from Clickstream and it is very accurate, but its prices start at $99 / month.

KeySearch takes data directly from Google, but it organizes it in a way that even a beginner user can draw valuable data at first glance.

KeySearch is the tool we use and it’s basically changed the way we think about our keywords. At first we were overwhelmed by all of the different tabs, screens and features of the tool, but over time we’ve mastered every single thing that this tool can do.

Super valuable keyword phrase research data from KeySearch is just small part of what this tool can do

From basic keyword phrase research and difficulty checks to page analyzing and SERP word count, this program gives you all the data you need to rank page 1 on Google. I’m not sponsored by KeySearch by the way. I know that’s usually implied these days when a blogger speaks this highly of a product. Prostě to miluju.

I have been recommending it to all of my students in my courses for months now. I do have an affiliate link for them however. If you Click here and use the coupon code “GOAT20” at checkout, you’ll get 20% off the price of this tool. I get a small kickback, so I appreciate your support, but really I recommend it because it’s amazingly useful.

They key with KeySearch (pun intended) is to find keywords that have high search volume and low competition. A lot of people use the free Google keyword phrase Planner as their keyword phrase research tool (I did in the past as well). While this data is accurate, it doesn’t give you enough of it! keyword phrase Planner has a “Difficulty” number, but this is commonly mistaken as difficulty to rank, when actually it only pertains to the cost of ads against the term.

KeySearch’s difficulty ranking is very accurate. It gathers information from websites on the first page of Google like their domain Authority (DA), page Authority (PA), backlinks, internal links, keyword phrase placements, word count and so much more and gives you an easy to visualize, color-coded number between 1-100 to tell you how difficult it will be to rank for the chosen keyword.

When utilizing the keyword phrase research data properly, and all of the other tools in KeySearch together, you can explode your traffic quickly by writing new posts that will actually rank page 1 in Google. We got so good at maximizing KeySearch data for our SEO content writing that we’ve been able to rank page 1 for relatively difficult terms just weeks after hitting publish.

Above is a screenshot of our analytics for one article we published on September 30th 2018. The initial spike is from our newsletter, social media and regular followers. The second spike is just over 2 weeks after the post was published when it went to page one in Google and started bringing in as much as 700 page views per day.

That is the power of proper keyword phrase research and the potential power of KeySearch done right.

?Pro Tip: Even though KeySearch is technically a keyword phrase research tool, there’s even more data found on other tabs within this tool. Make sure you utilize Explorer, rank tracking and content assistant within the tool as well.

Writing better Content

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