Whether it’s to increase your number of conversions or simply secure more leads, it all comes down to increasing traffic to your website. You can’t convince a visitor to do anything unless and until they come onto your website.
However, with the amount of information on the internet competing for users’ ever-shrinking attention, directing people’s interest to your website can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Nevertheless, it’s not impossible. You just need to know the right tricks and strategies for catching people’s attention and increasing website traffic.
Keep reading to find out what they are.
But First, Is All Traffic the Same?
Hold on, though. Before you jump into employing various strategies to increase traffic to your website, you have to think about the kind of traffic you’re directing. If you really want higher conversions or better leads, you need high-quality and targeted traffic.
100 targeted visitors will be better for you than 1000 random visitors. This targeted traffic will be already interested in what you are offering, so there are higher chances of them converting into customers.
As a result, you will benefit from a higher return on investment (ROI). Otherwise, even if you get 5000 visitors on your website, it won’t really matter as it will just be a vanity metric without any meaningful effects on your business or website objectives.
Besides that, there are also different sources of traffic, such as social media traffic, email traffic, direct traffic, referral traffic, and so on. Depending on your business model and the industry you are in, different sources of traffic will be more beneficial for you.
How to Increase Traffic to Your Website?
Now that you know the kind of traffic you need to be focusing on, the question is, how do you drive that traffic to your website? Here are a few ideas.
1. Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the best thing you could do to drive traffic to your website. It’s one of the most effective ways to get your website ranked high on search engines and maintain a steady stream of organic visitors to your website.
In fact, it’s not just recommended but mandatory at this point. The internet is full of information as well as misinformation that can make it hard for you to reach your target audiences. Therefore, what you need to rise above all the noise is authority, and that will only come when you have the trust of search engines like Google. This won’t exactly happen overnight either.
It takes time to build authority, but once you do, you will be able to enjoy increased traffic to your website, which you can then use to your advantage. Here are some of the SEO strategies you can employ.
➜ Choose Topics Your Visitors Are Interested In
One of the very fundamental rules of good SEO is that you choose topics your visitors are interested in. This is a common mistake that many budding entrepreneurs tend to make. They tend to focus on topics and content that they themselves are interested in or want others to be interested in, rather than focusing on what their potential customers or target audience wants.
This ties back to how you need targeted traffic on your website instead of just random traffic. If a visitor is already interested in the kind of content you are putting out, half of your work is already done.
They are already showing interest in that particular topic and, therefore, won’t hesitate to visit your website for potential solutions or related content. Once you get them there on your website, it will also be easier to convert them into a customer if you’ve got the right products and services.
➜ Target the Right Keywords
Keyword research and using the right phrases and keywords is also a big part of a strong SEO strategy. It’s also the place where there is the most competition. Everyone will want to get ranked on search engines for that particular keyword, so they will all be using it in their content, URLs, meta details, and what not to ensure that users are directed to their website when they search for that keyword.
So then, with all that competition, how do you drive traffic to your website? You use the right keywords, and in this case, those are long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are simply longer phrases that users enter in search engines when they are looking for something.
For instance, searching for ‘authentic European inspired lounging chair’ instead of just searching ‘furniture.’ Long-tail keywords are an excellent SEO tactic. Almost three-quarters of all web searches consist of long-tail keywords, and these keywords have an average conversion rate of 36%.
Needless to say, they are pretty important. However, you need to utilize them effectively to really benefit from them. You can use various tools like SEMrush to search for specific long-tail keywords that have a decent search and web traffic as well as low competition.
➜ Build a Good Landing Page
Once you have your visitors at your digital storefront, you really want to impress them to make them stay, browse and hopefully even buy something. For that, you need a great landing page. A lot of businesses tend to make this mistake of simply directing their visitors to a homepage which they then quickly bounce from.
A well-designed and SEO-optimized landing page can do wonders for not just your traffic but also for your leads and conversions. The more landing pages you create for your visitors, the more targeted traffic you invite to your website.
Ideally, a good landing page should have a smooth flow and navigation to ensure visitors keep scrolling, content that is valuable and relevant to their interests, and an appropriate call-to-action (CTA) button so that they know what to do next.
Businesses that develop around 10 to 15 landing pages tend to experience 55% more conversions as compared to businesses that have less than ten landing pages.
➜ Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
More than half of daily searches on the web are now done on a mobile phone. As of 2020, there were around 3.6 billion smartphone users in the world. Therefore, not making your website mobile-friendly is a very big mistake, and you would be majorly missing out.
Search engines like Google itself consider a website’s mobile-friendliness in determining its ranking. This means that if your website is not compatible with a smartphone, chances are Google will not give it high rankings. And then, you can say goodbye to increasing website traffic as well.
Making your website mobile-friendly doesn’t mean that it needs to open on a smartphone. It means that the content has to be easily accessible through mobile. For instance, the content should be larger to be easily readable, and all important options such as the search bar or hamburger menu should be easily seen on the screen. The website has to be optimized for the smartphone screen.
2. Guest Blogging
Besides SEO, guest blogging is another great and effective way to increase traffic to your website. Guest blogging is basically when you publish blogs on other websites and platforms as a guest. This can be quite helpful when your own website or blog isn’t very popular yet.
So, when you publish your content on other more popular sites, you can direct referral traffic to your own blog. Often when you write on other sites, they tend to be the expert in that field, and so, by writing for them, you can get your brand and content out there among a larger audience and ultimately drive traffic to your website.
Guest blogging can also help you create more inbound links for your website, which then helps you get better rankings on search engines as well. However, all this only works when you leverage guest blogging the right way. You have to choose the right platforms within the same industry and niche.
You have to research the audience of that platform so that you know exactly who you are writing for. Moreover, you also have to come up with great content that resonates with that audience. You can’t promote your products or brand outright but have to be more subtle with it.
3. Utilize Social Media
As mentioned earlier, there are different sources of traffic. One of these is social media traffic. Social media platforms can be a powerful tool to drive traffic to your website. More importantly, as new platforms emerge and gain immense popularity within the public, such as platforms like Instagram or TikTok, not using them puts you at a big risk of missing out.
These platforms enjoy millions and millions of active users every day that could potentially be directed towards your website with the right social media strategy. So, if you are struggling to drive more traffic to your website from other sources, consider utilizing these social media platforms. There are many options to choose from, such as:
- Snapchat
- TikTok
These platforms allow you to drive organic as well as paid traffic by running sponsored ads of your website. Moreover, unlike other strategies where you are waiting for people to come to you, with social media, you can be more proactive and go where your audience is and promote your website directly.
You can repurpose old content to post on your social media channels or come up with new content. These platforms also have smart algorithms where they personalize content for their users. So, if a user is particularly interested in the products you are offering or actively follows content similar to yours, the platform is bound to push your content in their feed as well.
Importance of Increasing the Right Website Traffic
As mentioned earlier, you don’t really need all kinds of traffic on your website. What you really need is targeted traffic that actually turns into leads or sales and provides a good return on your marketing and SEO investments.
For instance, let’s say you spent $100 on running ads on social media platforms, and from those ads, you got 200 clicks to your website. If you stop right there and are satisfied that you got that many clicks from just $100, essentially, you are wasting those $100. What you need to do is analyze how many of those 200 visitors actually turned into sales.
Even if you managed to convert only 10 people out of those 200 clicks into customers who then purchased $1,000 worth of products and services, it means that you were able to make a profit of $10 on every $1 that you spent on running the ads. This is hard to accomplish without targeted traffic, as you might be getting 1000 clicks but no conversions at the end.
Wrapping Up
Especially if you are a new entrepreneur with a newly launched website, you will want to quickly double or triple your traffic so that you can make more sales and grow your business. However, the truth of the matter is that building website traffic takes time. Unfortunately, there is no shortcut to it.
You will have to continue following the right SEO practices, staying consistent with your content, and mixing it up with the strategies to build your site authority and attract passive, organic traffic to your website over the long run.
Moreover, increasing website traffic is important, but it’s not the only thing that guarantees success. There are a hundred other factors you need to consider and adopt a more holistic approach. You don’t want people to just come to your website. Rather you want them to keep coming back.
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