Two of the largest components of our business are website development and search engine optimization (SEO). Optimally, these two pieces of business work together and sites are developed with a keen eye on generating high traffic. Consequently, about 75% of the websites we develop are built using WordPress. Following is a summary of one of the main reasons we like WordPress and how it can help your website SEO and traffic.
WordPress for Traffic and SEO
We have other articles covering why we love WordPress because it makes a very nice CMS Website so we’re not going to spend much time on that here. Our focus here is on how WordPress helps grow traffic and improve the performance of your website in search. Rather than telling you about it, we’re going to show you examples from an actual site we recently built for an established client who wanted to increase the traffic of his under-performing website. Here is some background on the project.
- New WordPress site replaced an established site
- Established site was table-based HTML with 2 years of history and traffic
- No new content was created for the launch. Existing content was redistributed.
- New WordPress site was launched January 3, 2012
Result: Immediate Traffic Growth
One month after the launch of the new WordPress site, we captured some snapshots to illustrate the impact of converting the old site to WordPress. The early results were extremely positive and included a website traffic increase of 79.35% in the first 30 days! Following are a few basic measurements from Google Analytics that help illustrate some positive indicators.
Dashboard – Old Site
Dashboard – New WordPress Site
Visitors – Old Site
Visitors – New WordPress Site
Traffic Sources – Old Site
Traffic Sources – New WordPress Site
Website Growth Trends Summary
We’ve no desire to crush you under the weight of too many numbers but there are a few that just jump out at you. Here’s a quick summary of some of the measures we considered particularly enlightening.
- Site traffic (Visits) grew nearly 80%
- Page Views increased by more than 52%
- Unique Page Views increased by 71%
- % of new visits increased by 13.7%
- Bounce rate actually dropped by 7.5%
- % of traffic coming from Search increased by 32.4%
- # of Google Indexed Pages increased by 284.8%
Maintaining the Growth Momentum
As we mentioned earlier, the traffic on the old site was very low to begin with, but this is often the case with small business clients. It should also be noted, again, that these are only one month results but the second month has shown similar growth trends. Provided the client continues to maintain the site and provide new and updated content, there is every reason to expect the growth to continue. Since the client has now been given both the knowledge (some basic WordPress training) and the motivation (really strong results) to keep up the good work, we’d be shocked if the site doesn’t continue to thrive.
