How we achieved 83% traffic growth in the age of A.I.
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| Chart showing organic traffic to encomputers.com from August 2019 to August 2024. |
The rad content editor that I work with for E-N Computers, Samantha Christensen, shared some great news with me today. The company’s organic website traffic increased from 1,450 visits/day two years ago to 4,875 visits/day today. That’s an annual growth rate of 83%. For fun, she asked ChatGPT and Claude to provide insight on what that means and how we compare to the average. Here’s a combination of the two answers:
“Your 83.30% annual growth rate significantly outperforms average expectations which suggests highly effective SEO practices, strong content, and other strategic improvements.”
Now that’s some hype! What have we been up to that has driven this kind of growth?
Writing quality blog content. Many of the blog posts I write for E-N Computers are based on interviews with staff. We’re not simply regurgitating what’s already on the web. Instead, we’re highlighting the team’s knowledge and experience. And we’re doing it in a customer-oriented way: answer the questions they’re likely to have using the words they’re likely to use.
Re-writing copy for web pages. Many of the old pages were generic slop written by people who didn’t know the business. They sounded like every other webpage you’ve ever read about IT managed services. Our new pages are more specific, home in on the services we provide and how we provide them, and link to blog posts with more information.
Eliminating underperforming pages. We had pages that were practically duplicates, pages for services we don’t offer, a completely overwhelming mega menu. We’ve removed many of these pages and simplified the menu. This lets people find relevant pages more easily and increases traffic to our core service pages that might otherwise have suffered from ‘keyword cannibalization’.
Sticking to SEO basics. People still think there are all sorts of tricks you need to use to improve your search engine optimization. We don’t do tricks. Here’s what we do:
Using headings properly. There should only be one H1 on a page. We mostly use H2 elements, with an occasional H3 underneath.
Write effective meta descriptions. Also called “SEO descriptions”, these are like an elevator pitch for your post or page. They show up as the small blurb underneath each page link in search results. If you don’t write one, your content management system (CMS) or the search engine will pick one for you.
Using words our customers use. Choosing keywords and search terms to target really comes down to using the words your customers use. When you pick a search term to target, it’s good to use that term in your title, meta description, and naturally throughout the post or page. Trying to cram it in unnaturally can hurt your ranking.
You can use similar techniques to grow organic traffic to your website. Put in steady effort over time. Think like a customer and then answer their questions. You can still grow your traffic and increase your chances of getting leads, even in the age of A.I.