Top 5 Free SEO Tools to Improve Website Traffic
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Optimising your website is an ongoing work in progress once launched. There should be a level of ongoing SEO maintenance. Regular updates will improve website traffic and improve website search engine rankings.
This is to ensure that you are getting good visibility in search engine results pages (SERP).
By optimising your website, you can improve search results. Therefore, increasing search traffic to your site can improve your rankings for keywords. This will hopefully lead to a click-through to your site. In markets where Google is the top search engine, follow the SEO rules. Ensure you have an SEO compliant website to support search listings.
Fall foul of the Google rules, and your website performance may deteriorate. Therefore, this leads to web pages appearing less in search results, leading to fewer business leads or online sales.
Onwards and Up would always recommend working on what you can on SEO to improve your website performance. Before investing in paid advertising, make sure your website foundation is solid. Book a free 30-minute consultation to discuss your current website performance and identify quick wins. Both work hand in hand, but paid advertising cannot make up for poorly optimised or a lack of content, unoptimised images, which can also affect your website’s SEO performance.
SEO Topic Quick Links
Some Questions To Consider When Looking At How To Improve Your Website SEO
Compare the website traffic channels that are driving the most and the least amount of traffic to the website. Direct traffic, organic search traffic, social media and external referrals? Find the weak areas and work to optimise these to increase your website traffic.
How long are people staying on your website (bounce rate, check your Google Analytics)? What pages are they viewing, and what is their exit point from the site?
Review your website pages that are the most viewed. Analyse the reasons behind this and take some of the learnings from your website. Therefore, to improve page SEO and increase search traffic.
Struggling to understand your website data? Our Website SEO Reports service includes a full analysis of your site performance with actionable recommendations you can implement yourself.
Consider your website layout to improve your SEO performance. Ensure that relevant content is optimised and not buried in the deepest depths.
If your website has many levels of navigation, this can affect how search engines crawl your website. The deeper search engines have to crawl, the less likely the content is to be ranked in search engines.
A good website layout will increase your SEO and improve your website exposure, and improve site rankings.
Key Things To Understand About SEO and Your Website Traffic
- Your on-page content is key to getting indexed and improving search engine rankings. If you do not like writing much, sadly, search engines have not yet developed the technology to scan images. However, search engines can understand words, contexts and phrases (exact and broad). They can sort your content into suitable search classifications and index it accordingly.
- Content is also very important for optimising your website. SEO tools can measure the length of time people spend on your website pages to measure the level of relevance that page has (is it doing what it says on the tin?). The longer people stay on the page, the lower the bounce rate. This is a contributing factor to a higher page authority score, which will improve your search engine ranking over time.
Need help creating SEO-friendly content? Read our guide on How to Write Creative Blog Post Outlines That Drive Online Traffic
- Stop with the waffle and flowery language and be precise about what you are talking about. Most importantly, make sure you optimise your content, which contains keywords.
- I have seen sites that have a lot of content on them, but are not being picked up or indexed by search engines. This is because there is not an ounce of a keyword on them. Without relevant keywords and phrases, it is hard for search engines to index your website and rank your pages properly. This will lead to lower visibility in organic search results.
- If you do ladies’ scarves, then say. If you do 9ct gold handmade fine jewellery, then somewhere in your page title or Header 1, SAY IT! Search engines are not psychic. If it’s not written down, then the meaning and context are lost. All these words and phrases could make up potential keywords and increase your search engine ranking.
- The only way people will find you is by typing your site in directly, or by appearing on the first page of search engines. If you are not ranking for page 1, at push page 2, then you may not be found in search results.
Don’t know where to start with keywords and content? Check out how we helped Illicia London improve their website SEO and increase organic traffic by 150%.
Keywords = People’s intentions – what kinds of things are people typing into search engines when looking for your products or services?
- To address the above points, Onwards and Up, to help you increase your web presence. With the top 5 free SEO tools to help you improve your SEO traffic, in the simplest form. You don’t need to be tech-savvy to use or understand these free website traffic tools. Just some common sense and thinking more about how your customer navigates and searches for your products, rather than thinking about how YOU engage with it.
- These free SEO tools will help you identify the hiccups in why your site traffic is low and SEO analytics to improve performance. It can also help to optimise your business keywords to improve your search engine rankings.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free SEO tool for website traffic. It can help you monitor and maintain your website’s presence and performance in Google search engine results pages (SERP).
It is made up of a variety of tasks geared towards improving the usability, usefulness and popularity of a website. This SEO performance tool enables you to act and work on these SEO measures to improve your website performance and influence the rankings. The tool also supports the analysis of potential business keywords, country performance, page website traffic and impressions through to the devices the site is accessed on.
You don’t have to sign up for Search Console for your site to be included in Google’s search engine results. Doing so can help you understand how Google drives search traffic to your website and how to get your site to the top of Google.
Setting up Google Search Console can feel overwhelming. Our 10 Point Digital Action Plan includes step-by-step guidance on configuring these essential tools correctly.
The SEO Support That Google Search Console Provides
- How to improve search functionality. How does Google see your web pages? What information does it crawl to drive website search traffic?
- Compare website traffic for search engines to analyse website traffic.
- Who is linking to your website? Learn who has created backlinks to your site and which external links are driving more traffic.
- Tell Google about your site, ie the on-page content of your site, so it is able to crawl and index effectively. Submit site maps.
- Review the process that Google uses to index your pages to appear in the search engine.
- Receive notification of errors on your site performance and structure for you to then fix.
- Disavow bad links to your site that may impact site rankings and have no relevance or relation to what you do
- Analyse data, see how many people found your site in search engine ranking performance results and how many clicked on it
- Scheme markup completed for rich snippets. Are your product prices, company contact info, or events highlighted in rich search results?
- What keywords are you ranking for, and which words and phrases can you improve on, and on which pages?
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web SEO analytics tool. This great tool measures your website traffic flow. For most businesses, your website serves as a hub for all of your online traffic. If you are running any marketing activities, such as search paid ads or social media ads, your users are most likely going to visit your website somewhere along their user journey.
Given that your website is the central hub of your digital presence, the SEO tool Google Analytics is the best way to get a holistic view of your website traffic. Therefore, the effectiveness of all the campaigns you are running to promote your product/services online. Google Analytics can help you track your digital marketing effectiveness and improve website traffic.
But my website platform already gives me performance data on people visiting my website.
Yes, if you are using one of the many website building then you will have in-built free SEO analytics tools. However, the data is usually topline and not very in-depth as customer journey and behaviour on your site. Therefore, it does not give data on how to improve the SEO of a website.
Want to understand the difference between basic website stats and comprehensive analytics? See how we helped Bermuda Born use data to drive better business decisions.
Your website platform also counts you as part of the visitors and sessions, which in the Google Analytics tool, you are able to block out IP addresses that you regularly access the website.
Google Analytics SEO tool provides detailed customer navigation through your site, time spent on pages, page performance, and mobile vs desktop functionality. All this and more can be tracked through the website traffic free tool.
What to look for in Google Analytics?
Google Analytics can help to optimise your website for the following:
- Analysis of unique visitors and page views. Where are users coming from to help identify new website traffic and customers?
- Referrers and keywords (limited data), to improve your search engine rankings.
- Entry pages. See which pages bring the most traffic to your website. Find high-traffic pages that gain the most visits.
- Exit pages and bounce rate. Understand where the user leaves the website, and how long they stay on those pages. Identify areas that can be improved to reduce the bounce rate.
Test My Site
Another free Google website traffic tool is Test My Site with Google. A free SEO page test tool that analyses the load speed of your website. This is very important as this is potentially where many customers can be lost.
With ever more consumers using mobile phones to browse the web, it is important that your site meets the relevant operating specifications to keep those customers engaged and not off chasing another website.
Just load your website address into the site, and the free Google SEO tool will do the rest of the work. It usually takes about a minute for it to analyse your website performance and then give you a page load speed SEO score and a brief overview.
Sign up and get a free website traffic report of your website’s performance for free. The recommendations report will clearly lay out for you and your website developer to implement.
In your Google Analytics, you can also get a further breakdown of your website SEO page speeds. Follow, Behaviour>Speed>Suggestions. This will tell you what the page load speed score is and what you need to address to improve SEO performance across their loading times for mobile and desktop.
Test my site with Google is a great free traffic SEO tool. Check the website traffic of other websites and competitors in your industry. Compare, identify their weaknesses and get ahead.
Mobile optimisation is critical for SEO success. Read our Free Mobile SEO Guide to ensure your site performs perfectly on all devices.
Top 5 Website Issues That Affect Page Load Speeds To Drive SEO Traffic
- The size of your images. If they are too big, you should compress them so that the page can load quickly. Page size should not be bigger than 800 KB in total, fully loaded.
I know it can be a challenge, especially with optimising your homepage. The website homepage tends to be the largest page on your site due to the number of images and URL requests.
- Plugins and website app functionality. As your site becomes more complex and adds additional functionality and features, this can sometimes slow down the load speed of your pages.
For example, test your site with website traffic checking tools, with and without certain apps. See if this makes a difference in load speed. Analyse and assess which plugins are important, and maybe look for an alternative for support website activity.
- The number of URL requests a website page makes can slow down page speed. Keep your URL requests below 80 per page to optimise page load speed.
- Apps such as some of the Insta-shops/reels are examples that can sometimes slow down download speed. However, 9 times out of 10 it is not the app that is causing the problem. The size of the images you are posting on Instagram is usually a key player in this fault.
Uploading 4.5mb images to your Instagram account will kill your website’s load speed. This is especially true if you have an Insta reel or images pulled through from your Instagram account that are more than 4 photos. Tried and tested!!
- Think about compressing and resizing your images to less than 100 KB before you upload them to Instagram to improve page load time.
- How old or long have you had your current website template? Have you been receiving regular updates for your website template to improve its functionality? If it is an old template, has the website developer updated this so that it is mobile responsive? If not, and you don’t have a website developer to support you with the updates, it might be time to consider shopping around and finding a new template that can improve performance.
New World Order Google Says Mobile First.
Images killing your site speed? Learn How to Take Perfect Images for Your Website that look great AND load fast.
Broken Links
Links are very important in the world of SEO. Whether it is internal links to validate web pages or improve SEO ranking or user experience, to linking to external sites to validate your information and give you credibility.
However, with constant changes to your website or external websites you are linked to, being updated, this may lead to links being broken. This leads to the dreaded 404 wrong page alerts to appear where the page has been lost. Ensure that these are managed to improve online sales.
This does not affect your search engine ranking or indexing. This may mean that you may lose potential customers and any links that were referring to that page. If you have backlinks from high-rated domains, the loss of many of these may affect your domain authority score. Websites with domain authorities above 30 are scores you want to ensure remain in place.
Whenever you are changing the content on your website, and most importantly, your URLs that are linked to other pages internally and externally. Make sure you update relevant pages and inform third parties of the updated URL details. If the page is permanently deleted, ensure you redirect the URL to an alternative page.
Sometimes website links are broken without us knowing. It is important to regularly monitor the performance of your links and address any that are broken. Use the Broken Link Checker to make sure everything is in good working order. Fix them and inform any other websites that you are linking to the page of any changes you have made.
Websites such as WordPress have free plugins. You can add that it will monitor and inform you when this arises on your site for you to fix.
Regular website audits catch these issues before they hurt your rankings. Our SEO Audit service includes a comprehensive broken link check and redirect strategy.
Hoth Keyword Researcher
The HOTH Keyword Planner free SEO tool helps find high-volume terms that relate to your primary keyword.
Enter your keywords to find out the search volume and alternatives for the keyword or phrase. With the Hoth keyword research tool, set it to the relevant country you are targeting, and it will provide you with data that is easily downloadable for you to analyse.
A useful SEO tool that works as a secondary source to compare against the Google Keyword Planner tool if you are creating Google Ads. In some instances, it will also give you the cost per click if you want to create a campaign for targeting this keyword.
Once you’ve identified your keywords, you need to use them effectively. Learn how we helped Dalliance & Noble optimise their website content to rank for competitive keywords in the luxury home goods market.
Final Notes
Improving your SEO website traffic takes time. Be patient, as updating your website is an ongoing activity. You won’t go from being ranked 50 in search to number one overnight. A selection of coordinated actions with some tweaking and testing will help to optimise your website and increase your search rankings.
Monitor your website traffic and pages over time through Google Search Console. It can take up to 6 months for updates to take effect and to see improvements to your site’s organic traffic.
Ready to Transform Your Website Performance?
Improving your SEO takes time, patience, and consistent effort. Typically, you’ll see meaningful improvements within 3-6 months of implementing these strategies.
Not sure where to start? We can help:
- Just getting started? Our 10 Point Digital Action Plan (£200) gives you clear, prioritised actions you can implement yourself.
- Need a deeper dive? Our Full SEO Audit Reports start at £550 and include personalised consultation and implementation support.
- Want to explore your options? Book a free 30-minute consultation to discuss your specific challenges and goals.
See what’s possible:
- Illicia London increased organic traffic by 150%
- Bermuda Born improved their search rankings for key product categories
- Dalliance & Noble enhanced their mobile performance and reduced bounce rate by 40%.
More Resources to Boost Your Online Presence:
- How to Build Your Social Media Platforms for Business Success
- Free Mobile SEO Guide
- How to Write Creative Blog Posts That Drive Traffic
Questions? Get in touch – we’d love to hear from you!
