You have built your website and there is hardly anyone visiting it. You have probably told a few friends about it and put up links on Facebook, LinkedIn and all other social media handles you own.  You have shared links, printed them on your business cards, done this done that but you still wake up to the days of very low or no website traffic at all! This can all be very frustrating but no worries there are search engine optimization methods that can be employed to organically boost your website traffic!

The most likely reason for your low traffic volume is a poorly optimized website. Most Internet users find websites using search. You can’t bank on users knowing the name of your domain of head or to keep checking when you update your sites. You need to optimize your site for search.  When most entrepreneurs employ developers, they disregard the need to hire a traffic specialist and think the site will magically go viral. To understand this point better, here is a brief history of Internet Search.

In the early days when the internet was a few hundred websites and links were manually added to an index by individuals in Yahoo who were creating an easily searchable directory for the rest of the world. The Internet now hosts over 4.62 billion web pages on over 1 billion websites. Over 380 websites are created every minute and this created a huge problem for creators of the web index or web directory.

  • For such huge volumes, it becomes impractical to have humans do the indexing work.
  • Earlier when web creators were still innocent, Yahoo would trust the website owners to tell them what the website was about in order to properly categorize it, a feature that was terribly abused. This meant these website indexing companies had to actually read the site content to determine what it was about.
  • With so many pages out there with information about the same subject, Indexers had to figure out a way of ranking pages according to relevance.

New methods algorithms had to be built to handle these herculean tasks. Google LLC an American multinational company found great fortunes when they found a better way of scouting all new sites and categorically sorting them for display by relevance. They created the first programs called search engine spiders that crawl the internet to find new information and updated pages and create entries for the search engine index. With the huge size of data contained already in the index, getting your website to appear on the first page requires knowledge of how these search engine spiders work and the ranking algorithms they employ.

The process of optimizing a website to achieve better page ranking on the google index is called Search Engine Optimization

Ranking on the first page should be a priority for businesses that operate online or advertise their business and products using their website. This makes your business more visible online. 93% of online purchases come from online searches.

Here are four considerations why your website ranking on Google is important

Appearing on the first page of google search

Did you know that 75% of people do not go past the first page of search engines out of 3 billion searches that happen every month? In fact, according to google search, 91% of google’s traffic comes from the first page, with 4.8% accounting for the second page and 1.1 % of the traffic accounting for the third page. A website with good search engine optimization must always place your website on the first page of the search results listings. This will drive more traffic to your business and build more business opportunities for your business online. As one marketer put it, the second page is the best place to hide a dead body!

Position on the First Page.

If you have successfully managed to appear on the first page that is a plus for your business since your website link and metadata will most definitely be viewed by the thousands or possibly millions of users who could be searching for your business and the services that you offer. While this is definitely a great thing it would also be a huge milestone to rank number one on the search list in a given location. Appearing number one on the first page of gets you 32.5% of the traffic, the number 2 gets 17.6% and number 3 at 11.4% of the traffic, so your company would always gain more by visibility and possibly more clients.

Keyword Ranking

Trending keywords and relevant keywords searches related to your company are very important and relevant to the growth of your business when it comes to potential clients who take off their time to browse the internet for your services. If your company is an engineering company and your potential client is searching for engineering services. If your company’s name doesn’t come up among the first few searches you are probably missing out on the 91% that will not go past the first page and the 32.5% of users that do focus their attention on the first result on the search and the entire 60% of users that put a lot of emphasis on the first three search results on the first page. Your keyword ranking will always have a major impact on your website's traffic. A higher keyword ranking will lead to more lead generation and higher conversion rates of your potential clients into customers that generate revenue for your business.

Local Search ranking.

The local search listing of your website in a particular country or location is also important for your website traffic. If your company is based in a country like Uganda using a Ugandan TLD like .ug or .co.ug could improve your search listing for users who are searching for Ugandan organizations. This would definitely increase your brands visibility and lead to more client generation from your website online.

With all the considerations that we have listed above getting on the first page gives your website more consideration since your search ranking will give you a better pedigree than your competition in business. Aiming for a better search ranking on google will provide your business with more opportunities for growth and sales and more visibility in seeking to provide what your potential clients might be searching for.