If you have imagined setting up your own website, with high-quality content ready to be shared, then you know that attracting an audience is crucial. After uploading your content, you decide to wait a few days for your website to become popular. However, you soon realize that your website has not gained any traction. So what exactly went wrong? Why did people not visit your website despite the high-quality content? If these concerns have been weighing on you, you will find all the answers you need below. The following topics will be covered: the importance of website traffic and strategies for generating traffic.
Why is Traffic Important?
Web traffic is the measurement of the number of users who have visited a specific website. Each user’s visit is recorded as a session or visit, with a beginning and ending time, thanks to the interactions between the user’s device and the website. Additionally, web traffic is calculated separately for each page on the website, meaning that the traffic for one page is not affected by the traffic of other pages.
To demonstrate the significance of traffic, the following reasons can be considered:
- You get higher revenue due to conversions and sales
- Your brand awareness and website exposure increases
- You can also earn through sponsored posts and ads
Understanding how to increase the traffic coming to your website is the only challenge, as traffic is beneficial for your website and there are no secret methods involved.
How to Get Traffic to Your Website?
1. Paid Advertising
In order to build your brand and reach the appropriate audience, utilizing search ads, social media advertising, and display advertising can be effective. By tailoring your strategies to meet your specific needs, such as increasing website traffic or improving conversions, you can determine the most suitable approach. Let’s explore the various types of ads that are available for utilization.
- Search Ads
- Social Media Advertising
- Display Ads
Search Ads
When a user searches for specific keywords, the advertisements that correspond to those keywords are shown on search engine result pages, or SERPs.
Social Media Advertising
By producing diverse types of content for multiple social media platforms, Social Media Marketing contributes to the rise in website traffic, engagement, brand recognition, and achievement of other marketing objectives.
Display Ads
The process includes the creation of ads using text, image, rich media, and video formats, and placing them in various sections of a website.
2. Promoting Your Website
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter are popular tools for marketing that can be utilized to drive website traffic and promote content. These platforms have the potential to convert an audience into website visitors and attract traffic from their networks.
3. Guest Blogging
If you are interested in learning about the top trends, you can check out the article on the top trends in 2020. Influencers in the industry can promote your content to their audience, driving traffic through organic search. This not only exposes your content to a wider audience but also adds variety to your content and showcases your active visitors in the field.
There are several advantages to consider when it comes to influencers. While most influencers require payment, they can also promote your company without any cost.
- It exposes your brand to a highly targeted audience
- It helps expand your network
- Helps you rank your page on Search Engine Result Pages
- It helps grow your social media following
- Improves your online authority
- It improves your backlink score
- Groves brand awareness
- You can get qualified leads
4. Interviewing Industry Thought Leaders
Step 1: Send out interview requests to industry thought leaders. Step 2: Publish the interviews on the blog. Step 3: This process enhances credibility, boosts website traffic, and improves visibility. Step 4: Additionally, the interviewee may share the content, expanding your reach to their connections and thus a wider audience.
5. Making Sure Your Website is Responsive
Given the widespread usage of smartphones for accessing websites, it is imperative to ensure that your website is easily accessible and viewable on different devices.
To ensure this, several factors can be taken into consideration:
- Content is arranged based on its importance
- Your website is tested on different browsers and devices
- All text, images, and content are aligned
- Revise device/ browser combinations
- Fonts are checked across multiple devices and operating systems to ensure that you maintain consistency
- Ensure users can navigate your website with ease
- Make sure website popups are responsive
- Your website shouldn’t take too long to render
6. Build a Brand Community
One benefit of creating a brand community is that it enables the enhancement of brand recognition. By engaging in conversations related to the industry, providing answers on forums, and engaging with followers on social media, you can contribute to the growth of your community. Consequently, this can lead to several advantages for your brand community.
- It helps promote brand loyalty and evangelism
- It can bring feedback, loyalty, and ideas
- Content obtained from users (User-generated content) can help with future marketing strategies
- It also provides PR opportunities like guerilla marketing campaigns and having your users contribute to a charitable cause
7. Be Active in the Comment Section
By leaving insightful and thought-provoking comments on blogs and sites, you can use this opportunity to promote your brand and enhance your reputation, leading to an eventual increase in website traffic.
8. Perform SEO
SEO can assist in improving your website’s ranking in SERPs and driving more traffic to your website. There are several benefits associated with SEO, such as:
- You can gain traffic through organic searches
- Helping build trust and credibility with your audience
- Increased engagement and traffic
- Users have improved UX
- The audience is highly targeted and of high quality
Using tools such as Moz, ahrefs, and Semrush makes it possible to rephrase the text step by step without adding or removing any information.
9. Build Backlinks
A backlink is a link from your website to another website, which can lead users from different websites to yours and expand your site’s audience. This results in quality traffic being directed to your site. Greater numbers of backlinks lead to Google taking notice of them more, thereby increasing Google’s confidence in your brand and improving your website’s rankings in the SERPs. Additionally, there are other benefits to having backlinks.
- Improved organic rankings
- Your sites are indexed faster by search engines
- You get referral traffic
10. Perform Internal Linking
There are several benefits of internal linking, which is a method used to connect different pages on your website. This technique ensures that visitors can easily navigate and access other pages on your site. In addition to facilitating navigation, internal linking also enhances website traffic. When visitors explore multiple pages, they are more likely to convert and develop loyalty towards your brand.
- Indexing of your website is improved
- Bounce rates are reduced
- Older posts get more traffic
- PageRank is improved
- Link juice is spread across the websites
11. Avoid Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization occurs when you focus on the same key phrase across various pages of your website.
Keyword cannibalization occurs when one page consumes the traffic of another page. This situation arises when multiple pages within your website compete for ranking on the same search query.
Tips to Fix Keyword Cannibalization
- Find out if any page is cannibalizing other traffic. You can do that by searching the “site:yourwebsite.com keyword” on Google. You can also use tools like Ahrefs for this.
- If you can, merge the content of both pages and delete the least performing one. Add 301 redirects while merging your content so you don’t lose any backlinks. If you can’t merge the pages, change the focus keyword, context, and anchor text.
- List all your website URLs and their focus keyword in a spreadsheet. Check for any duplicate values. If there are, act accordingly.
- You can also delete the page if you don’t need it on your website. If you want to keep the page but avoid cannibalization, you can de-index the pages. De-indexing will make sure that the pages will be on your site but won’t rank on SERPs.
- Use the rel = ”canonical” attribute to define a page as the main page if 2 of your pages have similar content. This will make sure that the main page will be indexed on the search engine.
12. Focus On Improving Page Speed
According to the report, it is crucial for enhancing the user experience.
- 40% of the users abandon the website that takes over 3 seconds to load, and 80% of visitors won’t return.
- Slow-loading websites cost retailers a loss of $2.6 billion every year in sales.
If users spend less time on your website, Google will reduce its rank. Less visibility will be attained for your website if its ranking is lower. Consequently, your organic traffic will be negatively impacted, making it difficult for users to locate your site.
Tips to Improve Page Speed
- Enable browser caching for faster website loading on returning visits.
- Reduce server response time up to 200ms.
- Remove any script you’re using on the page. Compress images under 100KB to use on your page.
- Reduce the size of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to under 150KB. You can use Textfixer, and Gzip for this.
- Check and improve your page loading speed and server response time for both mobile and desktop to make sure no visitor leaves your site because of sluggish speed.
- Gtmetrix and Pingdom are some of the best tools you can use to test your page load time and site speed and improve it with these steps to boost organic traffic to your site.
13. Optimize for Voice Search
In the future, voice search will dominate text searches.
The growth of voice search is being fueled by smartphones, and smart speakers such as Amazon Echo and Google Home are an additional bonus.
Finances online provides an image illustrating the progression of voice searches.
Based on the image provided, it can be concluded that currently, half of the searches are conducted using voice commands. To avoid falling behind, it is important to begin optimizing your content for voice search.
As voice search queries aim for long-tail keywords with less competition, it becomes simpler to achieve higher rankings in those areas. Numerous brands have yet to optimize their content for voice-based queries, which presents an opportunity for you to capitalize on and enhance your rankings.
By implementing voice search optimization, you have the potential to enhance organic traffic in the future. To learn how to maximize organic traffic for your website through voice search optimization, consider following these helpful tips.
Tips To Optimize for Voice Search
- Create FAQ pages on your website.
- Use schema markup best practices to help search engines understand what information your page has.
- Use tools like Answerthepublic to find questions searched by people on the topic you’re writing.
- Make your content more conversational that provide answers in the language users often speak.
- Target long-tail keywords as I said earlier.
- Get listed on Google My Business to help local users find you.
- Optimize your content for mobile since most of the voice-based searches are done by mobile devices. User brief paragraphs, lists, and bullet points, so that Google can display your content in featured snippets.
14. Build Links Cleverly
Engaging in link building is an effective approach to enhance organic traffic.
According to reports, 91% of pages do not receive organic traffic because they lack backlinks. By incorporating inbound or outbound links into your content, you can enhance the visibility of your pages. Consequently, your web pages attract a greater number of viewers.
First Page Sage states that a backlink is the 3rd most significant factor in determining rankings for Google search algorithms.
When it comes to link building, it is important to be aware of one thing. If it is not done correctly, link building can have negative effects on your website, potentially resulting in penalties or the suspension of your account. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that you are not violating any policies while constructing links for your pages.
Tips To Do A Better Link Building
- Use descriptive text to add links to make users understand which page they will be redirected to after clicking the link.
- Avoid building over 2 reciprocal links from any website.
- Check for orphaned pages on your website. These are the pages that are not linked to any other page on your website.
- Interlinking all the orphaned pages on your website.
- Make your stats and reports on your page updated with the latest and not obsolete.
- If you are giving an outbound link to a website, check if it generates genuine and credible content. And if their spam score is low enough.
- If you’re linking to a web page and you are not sure about its credibility, use rel=”nofollow” on the anchor tag to avoid passing the link juice to it.
- Use internal linking to redirect users from one page to another to increase the Average Time on your pages.
