Everyone wants more traffic but more importantly they want more sales. It’s easy to get blindsided by large increases of traffic but when looking at your data a little closer you can often find that these increases are doing little for your sales.

There are a number of things you can do to increase traffic but more importantly ensure its quality converting traffic.

1. Identify Low Hanging Fruit

Identifying low hanging fruit or easy wins will ensure you aren’t wasting time on keywords that might not convert. Easy wins should be keywords that you can move onto the first page of Google in the shortest time possible. This will differ from niche to niche but the time scales can range from a few weeks to a few months.

To identify the easy wins you want to do the proper keyword research using something like Google’s adwords tool to see what people are actually searching for around your niche and then figure out where you are currently ranking within Google for that term. If you are ranking anywhere from 11th to 60th naturally (meaning you have never done any kind of link building to that page etc.) then you can assume it is an easy win.

Get as many of these keywords on to the first page of Google as possible by improving the on-page elements such as the copy, URL structure and the Meta data as well as the off-page targeting via link building.

The idea here is that you are targeting specific keywords that are easy picking as opposed to targeting keywords that might take a bigger investment to rank.

2. Analyse Top Performers

Once you have your first few targeted phrases onto the first page of the SERPs you want to begin analysing what is actually driving in new business. To do this go to product performance within your analytics and see which keywords are driving the sales. If you have one particular keyword that is driving the majority of the sales – be it is ranking in 5th position within Google – we know it’s worth the investment to get it up a few places and increase its visibility.

Driving more traffic through a top converting keyword is a safe bet. You can do this on any type of website it just depends on your goals. If it’s not an ecommerce site then set up goals through our contact page or whatever it is you are trying to achieve. Again, look at the keywords driving the conversions and act on them.

3. Work On Referrals

We have briefly mentioned link building to improve a page’s visibility but don’t just build any old links, ensure they are the best they can possibly be. These will yield the best results in the long run but they they will also generate fantastic referral traffic – the more relevant to your site they are.

Referral traffic is usually minute compared to organic search traffic but it also converts much better, too. So make sure your articles get in front of the right audiences on the right websites.

Craig is an online marketing consultant working for 9xb in Harrogate, UK. He's also a dog lover and gym-junkie.

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