If you run a website that uses the European alphabet a huge portion of your traffic comes from Google. People normally like to throw in statistics at this point to back up obvious points. Instead I’ll just share my common sense.

Most of My Traffic Comes from Google

If you have a look at Google Analytics or whatever software you are using you’ll probably find similar results. First place is Google, then some random spam sites like rank-checker, followed by Facebook or your other preferred social media.

Now comes the big assumption that most people running an online website make: “If I’m ranking first in Google I get most of the traffic.”

Ok. This is true. There are plenty of statistics, like this case study on MOZ, to back this up. The thing is you could increase the amount of traffic you are receiving. I want to help you solve that problem so you get more visitors to your site, generate sales and share whatever it is you share on your site.

Triple Your Conversions

Google has a lot of useful tools it provides to website owners. However, the company doesn’t do a very good job of advertising these tools. One of the most essential is Google Webmaster Tools. You’ll need to set this up first in order to take implement the changes I’m about to share with you.

I’m not going to tell you how to setup Google Webmaster Tools as that’s an article in itself. I would suggest visiting the Google page that tells you how to setup Webmaster Tools, but the person who wrote it assumed everyone is a programmer. If you haven’t setup Google Webmaster Tools on your site I recommend reading this article on SERPS.

Once you’ve setup GWT you then do nothing for about a week. So bookmark this page and come back to it when you’re ready.

All Set to Go?

Cool.

The reason you needed to wait was that GWT lets you track your search results on Google and see the number of impressions your getting. To do this it needs to populate the date, which when it’s ready will look something like this.

Holy Cows Batman! Is that Really a 5% Click Through Rate?

The first thing you’ll think when you see your results is ‘holy shit.’ Is it really that bad? It’s a nice wakeup call, because now you have all this data you can start to do something about those poor terrible conversion rates.

Making the changes to your articles to improve your click through rates is pretty simple. First choose a term that you are ranking really well for with a terrible conversion rate and search for it on Google (use the Incognito browser on Google Chrome or Firefox).

When you find your site check out the SERP results. What you’ll probably find is that your SERP result has no relation to the one that you specified using Yoast or some other SEO tool.

Damn you Yoast. You told me it was Green!

The reason for this is that the Google bot only uses the SERP you specified when it thinks that it’s relevant. So to help improve the results and show that your content is valuable to people using Google you’ll need to give the search engine a little hand.

Make small changes to the paragraph to increase conversions.

After you’ve seen what the SERP is in Google for your article, head over to your site and find the relevant sentence. Then you’ll want to change the sentence and those around it to make it relevant to the search engine. You want to do is create a custom SERP focused around that sentence. You do not need to change the whole article!

Click ‘Add/ Test Sitemap’ and then enter ‘site map.xml’ into the input field.

To make the updates you just made on your site appear in Google you will need to update your websites xml sitemap. This is very easy to do. Go to the dashboard, press sitemaps and in the top right hand corner is a button named ‘add/test sitemap.’ Just click this and enter the ‘sitemap.xml’ into the input field and press submit.

That’s it. If you have a big site you might well spend a few hours making these kinds of changes. However, it is worth doing as this is simply the easiest way to get more traffic to your website as it’s based on increasing conversions from your existing rankings. Implement it on your site and see the results.

Have you used Google Webmaster Tools Before? Do you have any SEO tips people might find useful? Share your thoughts in the comments below.