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Date of Publication: 15 May, 2022
How to increase website traffic?
Getting website traffic can be challenging, and you are not the only one. The 2020 study by the Content Marketing Institute indicates that 63% of content professionals have difficulty finding enough staff skilled in content strategy, one of the most critical components of website traffic.
Oftentimes, people use the same tired strategy repeatedly to attract traffic, but this does not produce positive results. A good strategy is a mix of organic and inorganic ways that suits your business and niche. There is unfortunately no fit-all strategy or a readymade toolkit. With changing dynamics of search, social media, and other aggregator platforms, there needs to be a lot of flexibility in order to get more audiences, make them stay, and get conversions.
In this guide, we will take you across a few strategies that are worth trying. But again you need to plan and execute the best strategy.
Anirban Guha
Digital Marketing Expert | Media Strategist | Entrepreneur
Table of Contents
For the beginners, it is important to understand, what is website traffic? and why is it essential? it is this undstanding that will help them to make their website successful and get more business out of it.
What is Website Traffic? Why is it essential?
Website traffic tells you how many users visit your website. Analytics tools will often tell you both the number of pageviews and the number of unique pageviews. Pageviews are the total number of times anyone has visited your site, while unique pageviews tell you how many people visited your site — some multiple times and some only once.
The idea is that the more website traffic you get, the more opportunities you have to convert users.
But you’ll often see that with more traffic comes lower conversion rates. This could be because the traffic isn’t as targeted — though more people are coming to your site, they might not all be highly qualified leads likely to purchase your products or services.
The increase of quality visitors, with improved targeting, will help you maximize the session duration. Session duration is the time a visitor spends on your website. This means you get to expose the user to more of your website content. If funneled well, it can give you better conversion and repeated visits.
let’s now check out few ways to increase website traffic.
Driving website traffic with content
To begin with, let’s first get one thing cleared. People visit websites to check out the content. They want a website that is easy to navigate and that satiates them. No strategy can work if you do not have quality content.
Start writing Blogs
to start with, your business needs a blog where you can regularly publish useful, long-form content on your site. This is a must.
According to Optimonster, Hubspot:
- Companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites.
- Businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors than businesses that don’t.
- Marketers with blogs are 13 times more likely to generate positive ROI.
To grow the traffic you need to build meaningful, lasting relationships with our visitors. Blogs help you value and empower these people to reach their goals.
You can be successful only if your visitor succeeds. This can be achieved by:
- Attract: Draw in the right people with valuable content that establish you as a trusted advisor with whom they want to engage.
- Engage: Present insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals.
- Delight: Provide help and support to empower your customers to find success.
But how do you write a good blog post that will draw in the right audience?
- Identify your buyer persona: Find out more about your target market. Understand everything from job title to pain points.
- Conduct SEO research: Learn what your audience is searching for on search engines so you can provide the best content.
- Write a draft: Begin by drafting a post that answers your audience’s questions. Use interesting angles to make your post stand out.
- Publish: Publish your post on your blog site. Use SEO tools to optimize your content.
- Promote: Promote your blog post on social media and email newsletters to generate traffic. The more traffic your post generates, the higher it will rank in search engines.
You will have more reasons for people to visit your site if you offer more value. Moreover, most of the other strategies can’t be accomplished without a blog.
Focus on evergreen topics
Trending topics and breaking news can make your site more traffic in the short term, but it’s not worth the effort. Focus on topics that will always be of interest to your audience. These evergreen posts will accumulate traffic and links over time, especially if you refresh it regularly.
Write irresistible headlines
You should pay attention to your headlines when creating your content. According to studies, effective blog headlines can drive 500% more traffic. A blog post with the most comprehensive content will not be read without a compelling headline. Learn how to write headlines that will convince readers to click on your post on the SERP.
Invite others to guest blog on your site
As a bonus, guest authors can diversify your topic and perspective, as well as give you new readers by linking to their sites and sharing the article among their networks. You should only post original, high-quality content without spammy links (lest you get punished by Google and lose traffic). Establishing a standard set of guest posting guidelines can help you maintain brand consistency.
Create awesome visuals
If you have photoshop or illustrator it’s excellent. If not as an alternative use design tools like Canva to illustrate concepts, visualize data, and recreate charts in your branding. Links back to your site will appear on other sites that use your images. Moreover, Google is showing more images in regular Search results, which gives you a better chance of ranking and increasing your Click-Through-Rate.
Incorporate video
The content you publish is fine and dandy, but video content is likely to keep visitors engaged and drive more traffic. Here are some ways to increase your website traffic using video:
- Embedding videos into your blog posts will make them appear in video search results
- Add links to your website in the video description to increase your YouTube ranking.
- Your video should include call to action buttons that direct viewers to your site.
Driving website traffic with SEO
In order to get the user to your website your first need to appear on search engine result page (SERP). According to Moz, the first page of Google captures 71% of search traffic clicks and has been reported to be as high as 92% in recent years. Second-page results are far from a close second coming in at below 6% of all website clicks. You just have 10 results appearing there. The competition is intense. With best of efforts it could take something between 3 to 6 months to feature on the 1st page.
But with right basics and understanding of search engine algorithms you can do it. (For detailed understand click to read this blog: SEO Strategy for improving your Search Results)
Driving website traffic using social media
- Social media marketing comes with several benefits—one of which is referral traffic to your website. Here are some ways to turn these massive platforms into traffic generators for your site.
Promote your content on social
It’s not enough to produce great content and hope that people find it. Promote your content on the most popular social media channels for your audience. Facebook and Twitter is ideal for short, snappy (and tempting) links, whereas Google Business posts can help your site show up in local search results. If you’re a B2C product company, you might find great traction with image-heavy social sites like Pinterest and Instagram.
Not only will this drive traffic to your site, but the more eyes you get on your content, the more likely you are to get those backlinks we just talked about.
Add hashtags
When sharing your content on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other hashtag-friendly sites, include relevant hashtags to improve the reach of your posts. Keep the hashtags highly specific to the topic of the post, however, so you can get discovered by people most likely to read, share, and/or link to your content.
Tips for creating a branded hashtag on Instagram:
- Make it unique. Be specific and include your brand name
- Make it easy to remember. If a hashtag is too long and complicated your followers won’t remember or use it. (eg. #GoDigital vs #StartAdvertisingonDigitalMedia)
- Check it. Always search the hashtag to make sure it’s not already being used, or worse, used for something inappropriate or insensitive.
Target amplifiers
In Rand Fishkin’s excellent Who Will Amplify This? And Why? post, he makes the excellent point of creating content for potential amplifiers and not just potential customers. Such amplifiers include:
- Industry publications like trade journals, news sites, big-brand blogs, and social influencers.
- External sources of influence like journalists in mainstream media and social influencers outside of your field.
- Customer evangelists: the people with industry followings who use and recommend you.
- Potential evangelists: customers with big networks and followings, or well-read publications
Post native articles on platforms like Facebook & LinkedIn
Social networks are valuable publishing platforms in their own right, which means you should be posting content to these on a regular basis. Doing so can drive website traffic, more visitors to your social page/handle, and your reputation increases. And you don’t have to reinvent the wheel—write a reflection piece on a recent topic or repurpose content you’ve already written. Mirroring content with weblinks on different social handles can be effective if done wisely.
Go Live
Doing live sessions can create more engagement with your audience if the content is in sync and clear on the objective. The live session develops interest and traction which can lead to more search and direct landings on your website.
Add social share buttons
This is an easy website traffic win. Social share buttons allow readers to share the page they’re reading with their social networks in just a few clicks.
Driving website traffic using advertisement
Feature on SERP doing SEO is a tedious and hopeful thing. As I have told you before, even with a shit load of investments it takes time to garner results.
Advertising provides an easy alternative. Today SERPs have multiple strategic positions for ads. Shopping ads & search ads help you drive website traffic based on keywords, geography and demographics. Behavior and interest are secondary parameters you can set to reach your relevant audience. You can also run pay-per-click display and retargeting ads. With social media, you can run display ads or sponsored posts. Quality video ads creates interest among the target audience helps you get traffic.
Your strategy will most likely include a combination of different types of advertising like social media, display, video, shopping and search ads.
Send Newsletters
eMail newsletters is an effective way to increase website traffic. You can drive traffic as long as your customers remain subscribed. With social media sites continuously limiting your reach, email marketing is one of the only marketing channels you can have complete control over.
Building a list for email marketing can take a long time, so it’s important to start on day one. You can build, optimize and automate sending newsletters regularly through third party apps like mailchimp.
Here are a few email marketing best practices:
- Include enticing information from the content in the subject line and in the body of the email.
- Insert a link or button that subscribers can click to read more of the content.
- Make sure emails are mobile-friendly. Links should be easy to see, since 46% of all email opens are done on mobile devices.
- Employ personalization tactics by including the name of the subscriber.
- Make the email visually appealing with the use of well-designed templates.
- Conduct A/B testing to see which versions of emails receive more opens and clicks.
Influencer Outreach
Influencer outreach involves a brand collaborating with an online influencer to promote a product or service. There are other collaborations with influencers that are less tangible – brands just work with influencers to increase their brand recognition. Fans when recommended by an influencer do visit the website or at least search about it giving you a website traffic that have already been introduced to you.
However, setting the right expectation is very important.
Industry influencers are eager to share content that their followers will love. Businesses can connect with influencers in a few ways, including:
- Tag the influencer in a social media post if your piece references their content or research.
- Ask the influencer for an interview/Q&A, then tag or email the influencer when the content is posted. They’ll likely share your content with their audience.
- Do a round-up with multiple influencers (i.e. “10 Experts on making your skin glow in winters”) and tag each of the participants when promoting the post on social media.
- Pay influencers to run sponsored posts on their social media pages.
Brand Community
As discussed in a previous article (Building Brand Community), a brand community is a group of like-minded people who have been engaged with your brand and are keen to come back again and again, showcasing brand loyalty at its finest. People in your brand community are emotionally invested; they will buy from your company, digest your content, tell their friends and family about your company, and more.
These people are always looking for updates and news from you. They love reading and searching about you online. Creating such a community helps you with regular traffic and are very likely to get you desired results and conversions.
Press Releases in Top Publications
When businesses create press releases to promote themselves or their clients, they shouldn’t just place them on a press release syndication website and wait to see what happens. They need to actively push the release and send it to influential websites and publications in their industries.
When we want to announce our client’s good news, we send it to industry blogs and publications that their audience reads. As a result, we can collect dozens of new leads and boost referral traffic for the client.
If taken wisely, the above strategies can help business get more website traffic over time. While few gives you results in a jiffy others take time and patience. However, an ideal mix of all is the key to long term sustenance. Keep pushing forward by trying a variety of methods and analyzing the results.
In the next article we will talk about how we can increase conversion in your website. But first you need more traffic.
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