3 ultra-short tips to improve your website [Vol. 2]

Ok, so last Thursday I sent you something rather lengthy (if you missed it, here's the "How good is your homepage?" quiz from last week).

Which means, this week it's time for some ultra-short tips. To preserve the balance in the universe, you know.

Here it goes.

1. How to get more organic traffic within a week (without writing new content).

If you are in the UK, you may have heard of Danny Richman, an SEO consultant who runs Seotraininglondon.org and offers bespoke SEO training. He doesn't share much content, but when he does, it's usually something nobody else is telling you.

I picked up this quick trick about half a year ago, and I owe many additional organic visitors solely to this info (because I stalk Danny on Twitter, and he once shared some slides of his conference presentation).

Here's what it's about.

There is a free add-on to Google Sheets that connects to your Google Search Console and automatically pulls your ranking data together with impressions, clicks and positions into a nice spreadsheet.

You can then copy-paste this data into Excel (or a similar tool) and, by following Danny's instructions, find some low hanging SEO fruit within 5 minutes (literally).

Namely, you'll discover pages that already rank well (have many impressions) but people still don't click on them (few clicks).

So, if you improve the meta title and / or the meta description on those pages and get more people to click on it, you'll get more organic traffic.

Click here to view the presentation slides. The real magic starts on page #26, but if you need some context, do read the slides from the very beginning.

I do this at least once a month and just went through it again to prepare this newsletter. Improved the metas for 4 posts. Yay to more organic traffic!

2. Don't chase after delightful website design.

Have you ever found yourself spending hours "beautifying your website" implementing that cool feature or installing a hip new theme?

Well, you may have wasted your time.

According to John Saito from DropBox, delightful design is dangerous. And although John's article is rather about the app design, I think the logic applies to the websites as well.

Delightful design:

• gets in the way
• has a shelf life
• is subjective
• doesn't scale.

You know what doesn't get in the way? White space. Dark font on (very) light background. Clear words.

Are you trying to delight your website visitors with your design? Now you know that you don't have to.

3. How to write a clear sentence every (freaking) time.

Do you sometimes struggle to express your ideas clearly? You know, when you are writing and rewriting a sentence, and it still feels long and tangled.

Here's how you can "untangle" every sentence and make it short and to the point in 3 easy steps:

1. Write your sentence using as many words as you need to make your idea clear.
2. Underline the main words - the ones that carry your ideas on their imaginary shoulders.
3. Edit your sentence around the main words removing weak words that don't carry enough meaning or rephrasing things to say the same using fewer words.

It sounds simple, but it's very effective, also because it dissects the process of coming up with a succinct sentence in a few clear and manageable steps.

I learned this trick from Hennek Duistermaat and her article "How to Sculpt Concise Sentences (So Your Message Becomes Clear and Strong). Do check it out for some great examples of how effective this method actually is.

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This would be all from me for this week.

Warm greetings from I-cant-stand-this-weather Germany,

Gill

P.S. Missed the short tips from two weeks ago? Click here to catch up: "3 ultra-short tips to improve your website [Vol. 1]".