Increasing website traffic is a vital tool to driving business. Yet, many managers and business owners struggle to exploit the opportunities that improved traffic to your traffic offers. ‘But how?’ you might ask yourself. With the overwhelming abundance of information available on driving website traffic, it can be hard to figure out where to start. This article highlights some the most important steps and ways to use the tools that are available to you to help your business grow.
But before we jump into the ‘how to improve’ part, it’s important to consider the ‘what’ we are improving. Without properly analysing your website’s current generated traffic, there’s no way of telling how you are currently doing. By using tools such as Google Analytics, you can get insight into visitor numbers, pages visited and duration of visits. Doing so will not only give you that benchmark you want to compare against, but it will also help to show the areas of your website where you will need to make improvements.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
The key concept to understand is that increased website traffic is an important driver of increased visibility. Not only do you have a bigger chance of increasing and converting your leads when people visit your website, but increased traffic also helps to improve your SEO rank. In turn, this will then increase the number of visits to your website and vice versa.
To make sure you have a higher chance of generating quality traffic, your website should include topics, articles and web pages with content that target relevant keywords. Using tools such as Google Analytics, you can determine which keywords are currently driving traffic to your website. The more you focus on the keywords that are important to your audience, the better your chances of driving quality traffic. Doing research on the keywords that matter to your audience can get you a long way towards achieving your SEO goals. Alongside choosing the correct keywords, making sure your website has an appropriate URL and concise Meta Description are important for improving visibility and ranking.
Online and Social media
While improving the content of your website is an important start to generating traffic, social media platforms offer a free and valuable tool to driving people to actually visit your website. However, don’t rely solely on Facebook or LinkedIn to get your visitors. Rather, think about creating a broad online presence that targets popular platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn as well as the less common platforms like Pinterest, Reddit and Tumblr. Once again, doing research on the demographic of each of the platforms will be helpful to determine which platform best suits your business.
In the spirit of driving traffic, you can use these platforms to promote the content on your website. For example, posting a snippet of a blog, article or resource with a link to the web page will help to improve the visibility of your website and generate interest. While sharing content goes a long way, engaging with your audience is often overlooked when using social media. Regularly asking and answering questions, testing your audience’s knowledge through quizzes and inviting them to tag or share posts and content with others will help to stand out. Additionally, think about using relevant hashtags to enable your posts to reach beyond your followers and become discovered by others.
Email marketing
Email marketing is another great way of attracting traffic to your website. Like social media, emails can be used to promote your website’s content and invite people to visit your website. While emails often have low numbers of click-troughs, they can still be helpful in generating traffic as it is an easy means of directly targeting a large portion of your target audience. To start building a database, you can think of using social media to promote opting in to in receiving emails, thus ensuring you have a targeted audience.
However, while you want to regularly send emails, you want to prevent your email blasts from becoming spam. To make sure emails stay relevant to the reader, think about segmenting the subscribers list so people receive content that is tailored to them. In general, think of timely topics, carefully considered subject lines and appealing layouts for your emails to keep subscribers interested.
Like the website, using tools to analyse email traffic, open rate and click through rate can provide insights into possible improvements for future email blasts. Using email analysis can also help you to segment your audience, which in turn could increase the number of opens, click throughs and thus website visits.
Guest blogging
Why only rely on content that you created? Guest blogging is a great way of generating organic traffic to your website through referral. As guest bloggers are followed by an audience of their own, posting their content on your website will attract new visitors and give your website more content variety.
Alternatively, you could find bloggers or influencers who would be willing to share your content or mention your business in their articles. Whilst considered harder to achieve, it is seen as an efficient way of increasing traffic to your website. Despite the advice of many to use websites that focus on bloggers with a willingness to share your content, you are likely better of approaching websites and influencers that don’t necessarily advertise guest blogging. Getting them to accept you as a guest blogger helps you to stand out against competition.
Paid advertising
Paid advertising is perhaps the most effective method for increasing website traffic. However, as the name indicates, this method will require you to have a budget and you should thus consider coming up with a clear strategy based on target audience research. For most industries, the use of Google Ads is seen as the number one platform to increase website traffic. Alongside Google, other commonly used platforms include Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and industry-specific websites. In today’s influencer-driven society, paying to get a ‘shout out’’ or mention in social media posts could perhaps be the most powerful tool in driving website traffic.
Conclusion
Increasing website traffic can boost your company’s visibility and generate new business. Analysing your website and determining what’s currently driving visits as well as what isn’t could give you a valuable insight into achieving those goals. While SEO can help to determine which content would work best for your audience, using social media and emails can be great tools for promoting your website. As Mari Smith said: ‘’Content is King but engagement is Queen and the lady rules the house.’’ It is therefore that successfully generating website traffic not only means increasing your online presence, it also requires proactiveness and engagement on your part to create interest. Actively using social media and considering having others share your name and content can be a great boost to the number of visits to your website and the creating of new business opportunities.
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