Ask any business owner or savvy online marketer on what they’d want more than anything in the world. Most will give you a clear and straightforward answer – ‘More business’. Next in line would be ‘better conversion rates’.
Everybody knows that conversions directly translates into revenue. Before that can happen though, people need to know or at the very least, be able to find your website first. This is where improving your website traffic comes in.
Why Website Traffic is Important?
The battle for getting traffic to your website is a tale as old as time. What every business owner wants is to have a significant amount of traffic coming into their website. Website traffic is crucial to any business growth.
After all, higher website traffic = higher conversion = higher revenue. (It’s especially true when you are running an affiliate marketing site) To achieve this, you’ll need to drive quality traffic to your website the right way.
Website traffic can also be used as a measuring parameter to check how well your marketing programs are doing. You can also gather insightful information on your audience demographics from your website traffic.
It can also help improve your SEO and search engine’s credibility. Higher website traffic could mean more leads, more conversions and more customers.
You also would want to ensure that any increase in traffic is associated with an increase in engagement. Because if your traffic increases but your conversion rates are decreasing, something isn’t right. In short, you’re not bringing in the right traffic.
How to Improve your Website Traffic?
Here are some ways you can implement to help improve your website traffic:
Pay Attention to Your SEO
Some of the strategies mentioned above automatically helps your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Improving your SEO, such as keyword research, will help draw in more relevant traffic from organic search results. This is a great way to generate leads and traffic, as no matter what, users usually start with a Google search.
Based on the above chart, 85% of consumers turn to Google to help them find information before they make purchases.
Once you have covered your high-intent keyword and popular keyword bases, you’ll need to target long-tail keywords as part of your SEO effort. Long-tail keywords do account for a majority of the web searches. Optimizing your content for search engines is still a worthwhile practice. It doesn’t take long to do so and it could help boost your organic traffic.
Ensure Your Website is Fast
Most people expect web pages to load within 2 seconds. If your website takes forever to load, your bounce rate will sky rocket. Speed is exceptionally crucial if you want to engage the visitors and retain them. Your web pages also need to be as technically optimized as possible.
It is highly recommended that you engage with a good and reliable web hosting service provider. Online tools such as BuiltWidth and WHSR Tool are useful if you want to find out the technology used by a website such as hosting information and even the use of CDN like Cloudflare.
Make sure to go for one that provides you with high bandwidth as the speed of the network, connections and applications running on a hosting server increases when the bandwidth increases. Also, get one that assures you of a high uptime so that your website has no downtime and is always available whenever a user wants to access it.
All these have a profound impact on the website’s overall performance and thus the user experience as well.
Google included page load times as one of the factors to be considered when ranking search engine results. This means that website pages that are slow to load will not rank high in search engine results.
So, if your website takes forever to load, you won’t rank high, thus compromising your website traffic. Simply put, the faster your website loads, the better for your website traffic.
Fully Utilize Your Email Listings
While some of you may groan at such a traditional approach, especially with so many available new content marketing strategies, we cannot deny the fact that email marketing is essential as part of your advertising foundation.
After all, for years, email marketing has withstood the test of time. During the recent Covid-19 pandemic, you’ll see that email engagement rates managed to stabilize and remain strong even after a spike in Covid19 was detected.
Email marketing remains as one of the most profitable marketing strategies as they are generally inexpensive and thus provide a higher ROI per dollar spent. An averagely successful email blast can result in a significant surge in traffic.
You can also encourage your email subscribers to share your content with their friends and family in order to drive more traffic to your website. Some email marketing software allows you to track and analyze your email campaigns efficiently. Use this analytics capability to your advantage.
Social Media Presence
In this day and age, any business owner would be foolish to ignore social media. It’s not enough to be able to produce great content and hope that people find it. You need to be proactive. One great way to increase your website traffic is to use Social Media Channels to promote your content and business.
Social media has what it takes to create a huge impact on your traffic. The number of users on social media platforms in 2018 grew to an estimated 2.6 billion and the number is expected to climb to 3 billion by 2021. It is estimated that these numbers cover 72% of all Internet users.
Social media usage across the globe has been increasing at a rapid rate for the past decade.
It is insufficient to have your presence in Facebook alone, you’ll need to get onboard other platforms as well. Twitter is ideal for short and catchy links. Google+ can help your website appear in personalized search results, which seems effective in B2B. If you’re into B2C, you might find image-heavy social sites like Pinterest and Instagram especially useful.
Make sure you consistently post updates, preferably on a daily basis. You need to always have new and engaging content. Your objective is to rope in more followers. Post your website links on your social pages to drive traffic to your website. Constantly do this to increase the chances of getting more clicks and traffic.
Advertisement
This is a no-brainer. Paid search, social media advertising, video and display advertising are all effective ways of attracting visitors and building your brand. Be careful to adjust your paid strategies to suit your business goals.
If you’re looking into increasing more traffic to convert to more sales, you’ll need high commercial intent keywords as part of your paid search strategies.
In general, people prefer to see than read. That’s why most marketers produce video content online.
It is rather inexpensive to produce video content and easy to create and edit your videos in-house. You can then add these videos to your emails and social media pages. Embedding video links into your blogs help heaps too.
Ensure Your Website is Responsive
Nowadays, more and more are using mobile devices to access the Internet. You need to ensure that your website is compatible not only for the traditional PC users but also for these smart device users.
The rule of the thumb is to ensure that your website always has high uptime and is easily accessible and comfortably viewable across all devices. Never force your visitors to pinch and scroll their way up and down and around your website. You might as well tell them to go elsewhere.
Blogging
Start blogging. You’ll need to have a blog for your website. No matter the nature of your business, blogging is excellent to help drive website traffic and generate new leads. You’ll need to schedule a fixed time to update your blog so that people will have a reason to keep coming back.
Blogs help improve your SEO thus generate more organic leads. Simply put, the more often you post, the more traffic and leads you’ll get.
You could also mix things up by emailing your new blog post to your subscribers and posting about it on social media. With this, you’re able to generate new leads and get more traffic from multiple sources with just one good blog post.
Consider guest blogging on other websites too. By securing a guest post on other reputable sites can also help increase traffic to your website. In addition to posting content to other blogs, you can also invite people to blog on your own website.
They’re likely to share and link to their guest articles, which could bring new readers to your website. Proceed with caution though. Standards for guest blogging have changed radically recently. Spammy links could result in stiff penalties.
Participate in Quora
Quora is essentially a ‘Questions and Answers’ site where you login to read, contribute and vote on answers. The questions can basically range from A to Z. You’ll find quite a wealth of information there. In Quora, you’re more connected with the Influencers. If you do approach them rightly, it can help take your website traffic to the next level.
To make an impact on Quora, you’ll need to produce truly inspiring, thought-provoking and helpful content. These can engage your audience’s interests and keep them following you.
Conclusion
Website traffic is pertinent to any business growth. After all, higher website traffic increases conversions which ultimately translates to higher revenue. In a nutshell, you’ll need to drive quality traffic to your website the right way.
The above listed strategies are proven to be effective to help drive traffic to any website. So, start the ball rolling today. You’ll see improved traffic which encourages sales.
