How To Double Your Traffic From Google In The Next 6 Months

Build it and they will come is a philosophy we here in Dubai are all used to. While it has proven very effective for the city we call home, to expect a similar result from the same philosophy applied to our homes on the web is a sorry mistake. In order to attract hoards of traffic from search engines like Google, you will require a well-built website, but beyond that you’ll need to apply some smart promotion and a few optimisation tricks.

Here are four tactics that can collectively double your traffic from Google in the next six months:

Use Google Suggest To Show Up For More Searches

Expected Traffic Increase: +30%
Investment: Just your time

Your website is probably getting upwards of 50 per cent of its search engine visits from long tail searches. The term long tail describes a very specific search containing three or more words like “best corporate lawyer Dubai.” With such a high proportion of your potential website visitors coming from long tail searches like this, you would be crazy not to optimise your site for more long tail keywords.

To identify long tail keywords to target you first need to identify one or two word keywords that are driving the most traffic to your site. This information is available inside your site’s Google Analytics, assuming you have linked it to Google’s Webmaster Tools. Take one of the keyword phrases you find, type that in to Google and see what other phrases it suggests.

As you can see Google suggests “lawyers in Dubai United Arab Emirates” as another popular phrase. If this were your site you could optimise the page showing up in Google for the term “lawyers Dubai” by including in your text the words “lawyers in Dubai United Arab Emirates” and other similar phrases.

Get Faster Website Hosting and Climb The Rankings

Expected Traffic Increase: +15%
Investment: Dhs500 per month

Google uses a multitude of factors to determine a site’s ranking in the search results, over 200 in fact. Most of these factors relate to the content on the website, such as the text, its url, the title, or factors relating to the authority of the site, like the age of the domain or the number and quality of other websites linking to it. However, since 2010 one more factor Google have considered heavily is a website’s load speed.

Site’s that take many seconds to load in a browser create a bad experience for users, and because of that Google demotes in it’s results any website that is slow loading. One of the easiest ways you can increase your website’s load speed, and therefore it’s ranking is to get faster website hosting. If you have a sub Dhs200 per month hosting bill you are not paying enough to host your site. To get top of page 1 rankings, you need performance hosting such as a dedicated server (approximately Dhs500 per month) or better still a specialised hosting provider like WP Engine for WordPress.

Add More Pages To Your Site To Appear More Often

Expected Traffic Increase: +25%
Investment: Just your time

Each page added to your site is another opportunity to be listed in Google’s index. The more pages of relevant content your website has the better, as with each page added, you increase the chances of your website showing up for related search queries.

But creating informative and engaging content is easier said than done. Well at least it is without the “they ask, you answer” method. This approach describes a process whereby you write down every question a prospect or customer has ever asked you, and then you answer those questions as blog posts on your website. This content is extremely useful to prospects as they are the exact questions swimming around in their mind, and also relevant to Google as its content they can return in the search results when people search terms relating to your blog posts.

Claim Your Google Authorship and Increase Your Clicks

Expected Traffic Increase: +25%
Investment: Just your time

As you add more content to your website you want to claim your Google Authorship profile. Claiming Google Authorship ties your website’s content to your Google+ profile and adds your profile photo next to your website when it is listed in search results.

Having your Google Authorship photo displayed in search results can increase the rate at which your listing gets clicked by as much as 40 per cent. To further extend the benefits of Google Authorship I recommend you spend time building your Google+ following. Your Google+ connections, along with their connections will be shown your content higher in the results, because by connection, you are deemed more relevant to them. This is a part of personalised search.

James Reynolds is the founder of Veravo, a Dubai search engine marketing company comprising of divisions devoted to SEO and Google Adwords Pay-Per-Click advertising. James posts regular search engine optimisation and website traffic tips from his company website Veravo.com.