Finding the right words to focus on when optimizing your site for searchability is an essential step to increasing your visibility.  However, with the variety of words available to us, it can be hard to get started. Luckily, there are a few steps we can take to begin finding keywords that will define our business and help us begin our SEO strategies.

Defining Keywords

Keywords are the words that your audience use when searching for specific products or services. Depending on what you are offering, who your audience is, and what industry you are in, which words attract people to your business can vary. Finding the words you want to focus on is essential to SEO since these words will be used in your content, titles, URLs and so forth.

Finding Words that Benefit your Company

One thing to note is that we must research which words we should be using thoroughly. While we could try to use any word that seems related to our services, it could detract from more important words as well as bring unwanted traffic to our site. Even using words that are popular in your industry can be pointless since those words are already heavily associated with other companies.

In the end, the keywords you decide to focus on should be a mix well-known words in your industry alongside niche vocabulary that relates to your target audience and specific expertise.

Steps to Get Started

Understand your Business

Before beginning keyword research, it is important to have solidified idea of who your company is. Knowing your products and services is the first step, followed by defining the “why” behind them. Why did you choose to sell these products and services? What is your mission or goal? Realistically, our offerings will have substitutes to compete with, so establishing what our “niche” is, what makes us different from other companies, is a key part of figuring out which words we will want to use to describe ourselves.

Note: Look for the Gaps

We can find our niche by looking for what gap we are filling in our industry. What is your company providing that other companies are not? This gap can be found within our products, target audience, work methods, history, mission, and so forth.

Know your Audience

Knowing our audience is essential to finding good keywords. We need to understand what words and phrases they are searching for in search engines so that we can use them in our content. By matching our content with our audience’s words, we will be more likely to show up in their search results. To do this, we need to first identify who our target audience is. What do they want? What pain points are they trying to solve? By looking at your products through the customer perspective, we can better define what keywords we should use.

Research your Competitors

The last thing we should keep in mind when beginning keyword research is our competitors. Our selection of words will be heavily based on the industries we are in, but we also want to make sure we stand a fighting chance to rank in the keywords we choose. Conducting searches of words you are interested in and seeing which competitors come up can help us figure out if the word is worth investing in. Consider the size and influence of the businesses that come up as well as the type of company they are. Sometimes, we will find that the word is heavily associated with a specific business, or that the companies that show up in certain results are not relevant to your own offerings.

At the same time, continue looking for gaps as you research your competitors. Are there words that your industry is not using that could be relevant? By looking for gaps, we can find opportunities to make strong associations with keywords that other companies have not used.

Want to Learn more about SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is a continuous process, moving beyond just keywords. Explore our SEO blogs to learn more tips and tricks to improve your ranking! If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

In previous blogs, we have explored Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in many contexts. From its benefits to the ways we can create SEO friendly websites and content, bringing people to our site via search engines is a broad topic. Another important aspect to consider when optimizing our sites for searchability is maintaining the hard work we have accomplished.

As our businesses grow and our needs and goals change, we may have to change the platform that we are hosting our online shop on. Such a major change can impact our current SEO ranking drastically. However, there are some key factors we can keep in mind while migrating our websites that can help us maintain our current SEO score.

Why is SEO Important to Think About when Re-Platforming a Site?

Major changes to our site can impact our online shop’s functionality and quality, but also our sites visibility. When we re-design a page or add new content or features to our site, search engines such as Google notice these changes and review them. Sometimes, big changes can lead to re-indexing by Google, meaning that Google will re-evaluate your page’s SEO rank.

Many times, our changes are aimed to positively impact our SEO rank, but changes can do the opposite as well. When migrating a site, not only could your SEO score change, but your site could lose its previous SEO score all together. Your SEO history is attached to your domain, and so changing your domain can result in total re-evaluation. Keeping this in mind when migrating your website, which will inevitably involve changes, is very important for us to keep our current traffic.

What should I keep in mind for an SEO friendly migration?

Before Migration, Document Your Current Site

Before migrating your site, benchmarking your website both in terms of functionality and in terms of SEO is an important step to take. Knowing where your site stands now is key to identifying any changes that may occur once you have migrated your site.

Documenting all of your existing content is also important in maintaining your current SEO score. Every URL should be noted, even if they are not your top pages. While doing so, also note any broken pages as they can be fixed during migration.

When Migrating your Site, Save Changes for Later

While we may have ideas to improve out sites during migration, it is best to save those plans for later. In order to ensure that we maintain our current SEO score and can troubleshoot SEO problem later, we must keep changes minimal. During migration, your new site should reflect your old site as much as possible. This includes content and structure. Wait to remove pages you plan to discontinue or new features you want to incorporate in your future site. Document your changes for future use.

Consistency is key to maintain your SEO score, so we must pay close attention to every part of our site. This includes transferring over things like page titles, meta descriptions, robot.txt files, sitemaps, and more. Anything that can be seen by Google’s crawlers is important to keep consistent in your new site.

Note: Migrate in Sections

One method we can use during migration is to migrate our site piece by piece rather than all at once. We can start with less important sections of our site and see what changes occur. Migrating in sections helps us see what we may need to adjust in our migration strategy as well as gives us some practice for when we migrate more critical parts of our online shops.

Redirect Every Page

When migrating your pages to your new platform, make sure that you redirect your old pages to your new pages. This will not only ensure that users trying to use your old URLs will be able to reach your new site, but also will help inform search engines that your pages have moved. This includes changing any existing redirects to lead users to the correct content.

When redirecting pages, it is best to use a one-to-one method. This means that each page is recreated on your new platform and is redirected to it. While it may be tempting to do many-to-one redirects, such as guiding users on older product pages to a page with a collection of products, it can negatively impact your SEO score.

Monitor Duplicate Content & Errors

During migration, you will run into the issue of duplicate content since you are duplicating your website. Duplicate content can negatively impact our SEO scores. However, there are a few things we can do to avoid our score dropping due to page creation:

• Use ‘noindex’ tags – During migration, we will inevitably run into the issue of having duplicates of every page of our site. To avoid impacts to SEO, make sure to use ‘noindex’ tags on your new pages. This tag will tell Google’s bots to not index this page, which will keep search engines from noticing the duplicates for the moment. Note that these tags must be removed once we want to go live on our new platform.
• Keep in mind HTTP to HTTPS changes – During migration, you may want to enhance your sites safety and reputation by securing your site with HTTPS as suggested by Google’s Search Essentials. However, keep in mind that HTTP and HTTPS pages are considered two different pages and may result in duplicate content. Make sure to redirect HTTP pages to your HTTPS pages to avoid impacts to SEO.
• Use canonical URLs – Canonical URLs are a way that we can tell search engines what page we would want them to send users to if there is duplicate content. By using canonical URLs, we can tell Google that we prefer that users be led to our original content while we are working on our new pages.

Keep Mobile in Mind as you Migrate

While we want to keep changes minimal while we migrate our site to a new platform, we should be paying close attention to how our new site runs on mobile. Search engines like Google have taken to indexing mobile sites first, which can impact our SEO score if we are not careful. This means that we need to make sure that our mobile site is optimized. It should feel fast and adjust to smaller screens to be readable and easy to use.

Note: Avoid hidden content

Some developers hide content in mobile view that would be visible on desktop in order to increase readability and speed. However, hidden content is noticeable by crawlers and can negatively impact our SEO scores. When optimizing your site for mobile, avoid hiding content and instead adjust the content to suit mobile use.

Document any Tools or Services that you have currently Incorporated into your Site

Besides migrating pages, we will want to document all the tools we may use on our site as well. These could be analytics tools, crawlers, or plug-ins that we are currently using. Create list of these features and take a look at their documentation if they have guides for migrating the tool itself and the data it has collected. For tools that are not compatible with your new platforms, consider looking for a substitute to incorporate during post-migration.

Create a Post Migration plan for SEO

After migration, you will want to have a plan to analyze and troubleshoot your new site. This includes keeping an eye on your logs and analytics for changes in traffic and rank. With minimal changes to your site, finding the source of these changes should be easier.

Aside from troubleshooting, starting a new platform means we have new opportunities to explore. While during migration we suggest keeping changes to a minimum, after migration we can continue optimizing our site for user experience, quality of service, and SEO. Optimizing searchability is a continuous process, so create an SEO plan for your future online shop to push your site further!

Want to Learn more about SEO?

For your post-migration plan, there are many ways that we can optimize our websites for both SEO and improved user experience. Explore our SEO blogs to learn more tips and tricks to improve your ranking! If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

In previous articles, we have explored some of the benefits of Google Analytics 4 (GA4). As an analytics service, GA4 allows us to see how users experience our websites and what makes visitors become customers. One of GA4’s key features is its ability to show traffic both in real-time and over specific periods of time. However, what do we do if we open GA4 to see that suddenly, our traffic has dropped?

First, Are you New to GA4?

While the question may sound silly, the switch from Universal Analytics to GA4 can lead to visually less traffic. This is not because your traffic truly dropped, but because GA4 collects data differently from its predecessor.

 In Universal Analytics, users couldn’t be identified specifically, which means that if they were a reoccurring user, their interactions counted as different users visiting your site. In GA4, users are tracked more efficiently. If a user, for example, visited your page online, and then on their phone, they would still count as one user. Thus, your traffic may appear to drop if you are still getting used to GA4.

Next, Check if the Data is Accurate

Technical Difficulties & GA4 Settings

While seeing a sudden drop in traffic can cause panic, the drop could be inaccurate. These inaccuracies could be cause by incorrect settings in GA4, as well as outside difficulties with technology. Check that your pages are live and running. If it’s not a technical issue, review your date settings in the right-hand corner of your “Report Snapshot” page. If the date is inaccurate, such as spanning to days that haven’t occurred, your data may just be incorrect.

The Day and Date

Another thing to check before diving further into diagnosing your loss of traffic is to note the day. Is it the weekend? A holiday? A drop a traffic could be a normal occurrence in context. One way to check this is to compare your current data to past data. This can be done by clicking the “Add Comparison” option located under the title of your “Report Snapshot” page.

Unexpected Events

The drop in traffic could also be due to something completely out of your control. For example, if you get the majority of your users from a specific region and your traffic drops in that region suddenly, it could have to do with a real-life event. A special holiday, a natural disaster, a power outage, or even shifting political climate could affect people’s access to your website.

Using GA4, we can visit the “Demographics” tab under “Users” to analyze where our traffic comes from in terms of place of origin. “Demographics Overview” shows us the top countries that our users reside in, as well as offers more granular data, such as top cities. More data can be found in “Demographic Details.”

We can use these tabs to see if certain countries have suddenly dropped in traffic. If so, checking the news or the state of your website for those countries can help identify if something beyond your website has impacted your user activity or not.

Using GA4 to Diagnose your Traffic

If your change in traffic is still unclear after initial diagnostics, we can use GA4 to explore more internal issues that may be affecting our website. We can start this by looking into the reports under the “Acquisition” Tab.

“Acquisition Overview”, “User Acquisition”, and “Traffic Acquisition” can help us understand where users are coming from over time by specific categories. The default categories GA4 illustrates are Organic Search, Direct, Organic Social, and Referral. A drop in traffic within one of these categories can help guide us to what we should do next to improve site engagement.

Diagnostics & Types of Traffic

Organic Search Traffic

Organic Search traffic are users who arrived at your site from search engines such as Google. Techniques like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) directly impact this category of traffic, and thus a drop in Organic Search may have something to do with SEO.

While you can find some data about the keywords you are using to bring people to your site as well as your actual ranking in search queries by using GA4 or Google Search Console, it can be hard to track SEO related information. Your drop in traffic could be something as serious as a Google Penalty to something more organic such as a shift in audience preference. Your users could have started using different terms to search your products and services, or even be looking for something entirely different now. More internal, your SEO titles or descriptions concerning your pages in search queries may be irrelevant or inaccurate, causing users to click less on your pages.

Next Step: Improve SEO

There are many avenues that you can take to improve SEO. From technical SEO to on-page SEO, there is a lot of ways you can optimize your site’s searchability. Key factors that determine your rank are your keywords, content quality, and overall user experience. Keeping up to date with the keywords in your industry, creating relevant and readable content, and maintaining the health of your website are all beneficial to increasing SEO.

Direct Traffic

Direct Traffic contains users that arrive to your site by directly using the URLs of your pages. These are users who may be reoccurring visitors who are already interested in your products and services. When Direct Traffic drops, it is time to check on your website’s health as well as your competitors.

Direct traffic may drop when there are issues with your pages. Perhaps a page is broken and unreachable. The content of that page could also be less relevant to your audience. Noting recent changes to your site can also lead you towards the source of the problem. Besides changes to your website, changes in the industry can also affect Direct Traffic. Is there a new competitor in the market that has gain popularity? Has a rival come out with a new and improved service or product? Keeping up to date with your industry can help diagnose sudden changes in your users.

Next Step: Improve Website

Addressing broken pages or links is essential to maintaining your current flow of Direct Traffic. Beyond general maintenance and keeping content up to date, improving your content will also help keep your site attractive and relevant. The more useful and easier to use your site is, the more likely users will enjoy spending time on it. You can’t go wrong with improvements that will benefit user experience.

Organic Social Traffic

Organic Social Traffic considers users that arrive to your site via your social media outlets. Shifts in this traffic could suggest issues with your social media page, a lack of activity from your business, or a change in your audience.

When Organic Social Traffic drops, make sure your social media pages are running smoothly and check out your most recent content. Is your page up to date? How have your recent posts been doing? Does your audience seem to be getting bored? All of these can affect the draw of users from your social media outlets.

Next Step: Optimize your Social Media Channel

One way to draw more clicks from your social media channels is to improve your page and posts. Make sure your information is up to date and that you are active on your platforms. Social media is a place where users can ask questions and share opinions about your products. Such information can be beneficial in terms of improving your brand. Asking and answering questions from users can help create a better understanding of your products and your audience’s needs. The more you know about your users, the better you can produce content that will keep them interested and coming back.

Referral Traffic

Referral Traffic stands out as different from other forms of traffic. This category contains users that arrive to your site from sources that are not under your control. Your social media outlets or search engine results would be excluded form this category. Instead, this type of traffic is created when a different site entirely links your page to their own.

Referral traffic can come from “Top 10” like articles as well as explanatory pages that link your content to theirs for the sake of education. In a way, these pages reflect how others rate the quality of your content. For your blogs or products to be considered useful enough for another website to link to is a complement on its own. A drop in this kind of traffic would suggest that a better source has come out for your type of content.

Next Step: Improve Website Content & Network with Others

While this traffic is usually smaller compared to other sources of users, it can say a lot about what you are doing right. Using GA4, identify where your referral traffic is coming from and for which of your pages. Note the content of those pages and keep it in mind when improving and adding new content to your website. Checking out what other websites they linked to may also help in deciding what content you want to pursue in the future.

If you want to pursue more referral traffic, reach out to the website that brought users to you already. Connect with them, or maybe link to them in your own content. Networking can be beneficial in continuing to receive referrals from other sources.

Want more Tips and Tricks for Improving Your Website?

Optimizing your website to not only bring in traffic, but to build a reoccurring relationship with customers can be hard. There are many avenues that can be worked on to increase the conversion rate of your website. At BCSE, we can help! Contact us to discuss how we can improve your online shop.

Want to learn more about what you can do on your own to improve your eCommerce endeavors? Join the waitlist today for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, you will learn the tools and techniques you can use to bring more traffic to your business.

In previous articles, we explored how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can bring more traffic to your site. With SEO, search engines like Google can better serve your website to relevant customers. The goal of this process is to increase your rank in searches where your products are services could be the answer.

One of the main ways people perform SEO is through the use of key words and phrases. These dialogues are determined by the words your audience use to search your line of work. However, keywords alone cannot fully improve your visibility.

The Issue with Key Words

While key words are still an essential part to bringing traffic to your site, search engines have become smarter over time. In the past, using a key word multiple times in your content would increase your rank in relevant searches. However, entities such as Google have broadened their scope to include the user experience when judging rank. This means that readability becomes a factor in determining your site’s placement.

When reading anything, hearing the same word over and over again can get boring if not annoying. Repetition breaks the natural flow of a piece and can cause readers to stop reading. The same applies for your content. While you could use your keywords as many times as possible on your site, it will not be attractive to your users. As with any piece of writing, the use of synonyms can help greatly with this issue.

Improving Content & SEO with Synonyms

Synonyms, words that are similar to your desired word, will not only improve the readability of your content, but also improve your SEO as a whole. Today, search engines can understand and define synonyms of your key words and phrases. Thus, using synonyms will continue to enhance the searchability of your site, if not broaden the words that users can use to find your services. At the same time, your writing will be improved as a whole, making it more palatable and interesting.

Keeping users on your page is key to create customers. In order to tell if your site is attractive as well as optimized for searchability, make sure to read your content multiple times. How does it sound? It is enjoyable? is it relevant? Being critical of your content is a simple step in optimizing your website for turning visitors into customers.

Want to Learn More?

Wondering what key words you could use to optimize your website? Interested in learning more about the many ways you can work on SEO? BCSE is always here for you! Reach out to us with any questions you may have! If you are desiring a more hands-on approach to learning more about SEO, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into SEO and other important factors that aim to optimize your website.

In previous articles, we have explored some techniques we can use to improve our site’s searchability and ranking through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). From technical SEO to on-page SEO, there are many aspects that we can work on to push our search engine ranking higher. One such method is content pruning.

An aspect of your site that search engines consider when determining your rank is content. Quality content not only is essential for good user experience, but also for the bots that crawl your website in search of its meaning. If the bots do not find value in your content, they will rank your page lesser, bringing down the ranking of your site. Thus, it is important to cut content that isn’t helping your business thrive.

Content pruning is the process of removing content that is no longer relevant. Such content could be out-of-date, low performing, or too similar to other content, bringing your search engine rank down. Any content that confuses users or causes them to leave your site should be questioned. By removing ineffective content, you bring focus to your site, improving user experience and SEO.

Bad Content Vs. Content in need of Editing

When content pruning, you may wonder what the difference is between bad content and content that just needs some improvements. The main difference between bad content and editable content is potential.

If a currently ineffective page has the potential to reach the goal you created it for, then it may be worth editing. If the page already has rich content that could be improved, it may be worth bringing it up to date. Sometimes, the problem with a page is less about the content and more about the linkage. A page could be great, but not linked in a way that is reachable by most users and bots. These kinds of pages have room to grow and still be useful.

However, pages that are completely out-of-date and no longer serve a purpose lack potential for expansion, especially if a better page already exists to replace it. Your company may have grown beyond this page, the content no longer relevant or accurate. A bad page could also be seen as useless by your users, despite its original intentions. These kinds of pages are on the chopping block for content pruning.

There are also some pages that are not bad, but do not rank well for special reasons. These pages tend to have content that is misunderstood by the bots because they are unusual in their usage. Pages that are only live for certain parts of the year, or pages that are aimed at very specific parts of your audience could fall into this realm. These are pages that should be hidden rather than removed, as they are useful to your business in certain cases.

Analyzing your Site for Content Pruning

Trying to figure out what pages need cut, edited, or left alone can be tough. The best way to determine what pages need content pruning is to illustrate the big picture of your site’s performance. What pages are performing well? What pages are lacking? Such information can be found through analytics services like Google Analyics 4 and Google Search Console. With analytics services, you can analyze data such as page views, bounce rate, and conversions to see how attractive your pages are. Internal linkage is also an important factor to look at when determining a page’s success, as well as external links, such as social media. How users arrive and respond to your page determines your page’s success.

Want to Learn more?

Carrie Saunder’s upcoming course, “The Converting Website,” will dive into SEO and other important factors that aim to optimize your website. Join the waitlist today to stay up to date on the classes release!