In the present-day society, developing a website is a crucial move for achieving success in a small business. It forms the basis that enables you to establish a digital presence and expand your business.
If you can acquire visitors for your website, you have the opportunity to gain insights about them and potentially convert them into advocates, partners, or clients through the use of appropriate tools. Any of these outcomes would be considered a success. So, what strategies can be implemented to attract visitors to your website?
To learn how to increase website traffic, attempt the following strategies.
1. Optimize your content with keywords
The process known as search engine optimization (SEO) occurs when you optimize your content with keywords that are relevant to your business. After someone enters a word or phrase into a search engine to find a website, many business relationships are formed. By knowing the search terms that people use to find your website, it becomes easier to attract more visitors. These search terms can be specific to your business, like a brand or product name, or they can highlight attributes or benefits that set you apart, such as “all-natural” or “free delivery.”
In Google Analytics, you have the ability to see the search terms that your website visitors have used to locate you previously and utilize those keywords to enhance your website content. It is also advisable to examine the terms used by your competitors on their websites, social media, or emails.
You can use Google Search Console, a free tool, to observe the frequency of your website’s appearance in search results, identify the search terms that generate the most visitors, and track the number of clicks your site receives in search results.
By considering the following steps, you can optimize your SEO efforts to their fullest potential.
- Make your website findable. Ensure your site has thorough descriptions of your offerings and their benefits so that search engines like Google and Bing can surface them. Also, create a descriptive SEO title for your website to allow more people to find you. An SEO title can be added as you build your website.
- Leverage your website content. Blog posts, articles, audience testimonials, and other content helps improve your search rankings and brings visitors to your website.
- Optimize your visuals. While search engines are much better at indexing words than visual elements, images and videos can help boost your Google ranking if they’re optimized for mobile devices. If you’re incorporating images to your website, make sure every image includes short alt text describing the picture or graphic to give the search engine a text alternative to interpret.
2. Create targeted landing pages
Using website analytics, you can direct a visitor to a dedicated landing page that showcases the specific content they are interested in. This strategy ensures that the visitor engages with both your website and your business. For example, this could involve offering a special promotion based on the articles they have been reading or providing updates on new features of a product they have been researching.
You can incorporate this customized messaging into your continuous marketing efforts by creating tags for your contacts. Tags are labels assigned to contacts that can help determine the appropriate content to serve them when they visit, ensuring its relevance.
3. Craft engaging, high-quality content
If you want to increase the number of visitors to your website, a good strategy is to create interesting and reliable content that addresses a question or offers a solution to a particular problem. By doing this, you can establish your website’s credibility and establish your business as a dominant figure in the industry.
If you create unique, interesting, and helpful content, it can also benefit your SEO efforts. The higher number of site visits you receive and the more you optimize your content, the better your search engine ranking will be. Additionally, posting informative content that provides value can increase the chances of repeat visitors as readers will trust the reliability and helpfulness of your content.
When creating content, ensure that it is easily readable and comprehensible. For instance, incorporating subheadings on a website assists the reader in swiftly locating the desired information.
4. Use digital ads to promote your site
Digital or banner ads, which can be seen all over the internet, are used to promote various products or services. Their primary purpose is to direct traffic to a specific website or campaign landing page. These ads are effective as they can be displayed on websites or blogs that cater to a particular audience, such as individuals interested in home projects or outdoor activities.
Digital ads on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram allow for precise targeting based on characteristics like age, gender, interests, or education level. By utilizing data gathered from visitor activity on your website, such as which pages or products they viewed and when, you can efficiently create and handle ads that cater to individuals who are actively seeking something similar to what you provide.
If you think about it step by step, you might consider working with a consultant or agency to create a paid media strategy, decide where to put your ads, and determine the duration of their run. Additionally, seeking the guidance of an experienced professional in this field can offer valuable insight regarding expected campaign outcomes and suggestions for enhancing their effectiveness as time goes on.
5. Audience insights
By understanding your audience, you can effectively tailor your communication to align with their interests, desires, objectives, struggles, and pain points. This enables you to produce content that resonates with potential customers, resulting in increased engagement on search results and social media.
There are several tools and tactics that can assist in obtaining profound insights into your audience.
- Market research – Analyze search and social data, dive into competitor analytics, conduct interviews, work with focus groups, or work with market research consultants.
- Survey current customers – Ask your customers to tell you both how you help them and ways you could improve.
- Context-specific surveys and polls – Use contextually relevant surveys/polls on different pages of your website to get real-time information about what your customers need help with.
- Chat with your support team – Your customer support team is on the front lines of helping customers. They can give you valuable information about the problems your audience is dealing with.
- Talk with sales – Ask your sales team what solutions and features your audience is asking for. Uncover any initial objections prospective customers tend to raise, as well as your sales team’s messaging for overcoming those objections.
- Use Google Analytics – Look at the pages that already get website traffic and replicate their success. Are they ecommerce pages or blog posts? Do visitors come from Google or social networks?
6. Map the customer journey
To increase the traffic to your website, it is important to have a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey throughout the decision-making process. This encompasses the period starting from when they initially discover an opportunity or issue, to the point where they make the decision to make a purchase from you.
Customer journey mapping is a useful tool for producing content that guides buyers through the conversion funnel.
If you sell running shoes, individuals who are new to running may be unsure about the specific type of shoes they desire. As a solution, you can provide them with guides, videos, and articles to aid their comprehension of the various kinds of running shoes.
Once individuals have acquired a comprehensive understanding of what factors to take into account when selecting a running shoe, provide them with valuable resources and helpful tools that enable them to effectively compare various options and ultimately select the most suitable pair based on their specific feet, running style, circumstances, or objectives.
7. Answer valuable questions to increase traffic to website pages
One effective method to increase website traffic is by providing answers to the questions asked by potential customers. By adequately addressing the appropriate questions, you can enhance the duration of visitors’ stay on your site and reduce bounce rate.
By thinking step by step, you have the opportunity to appear in the featured snippet on organic search results, which has the potential to attract a significant amount of traffic. Byrdie, a popular beauty website, serves as a notable example of this. They effectively control the search landscape from the top of the funnel to the bottom by providing well-written content that addresses user inquiries.
Several tools are available to assist in identifying the specific questions asked by your audience online.
- Answer the Public lets you type in a keyword and then it will spit out a long list of related questions.
- BuzzSumo allows you to search millions of forum posts like those found on Quora and Reddit to find real questions people are asking.
- Question Hub is a new tool by Google that reveals all the unanswered questions people search for on the web.
Once you have determined the appropriate questions, make a dedicated effort to provide the answers on your website.
8. Technical SEO
When considering methods to increase the traffic to your website, website architecture may not be the primary focus. However, it holds significant importance. Technical SEO aims to optimize your website for Google, ensuring that it is easily understandable by the search engine and allowing it to efficiently crawl through each URL.
To begin with, ensure that you submit an XML sitemap to aid search engines in discovering and cataloging your content. Arrange your pages in a rational structure that is straightforward and user-friendly for navigation. Strive to make all of your content accessible within three clicks, if feasible.
You can use tools such as Screaming Frog or ContentKing to identify and address crawl errors. Additionally, these tools can aid in locating and repairing broken links.
To help Google understand which pages to crawl and prevent duplication errors, use canonical tags. Implement proper 301 redirects if you have modified the URLs of your pages.
In order to optimize page load time, it is advisable to utilize web speed testing tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights, Google Lighthouse, or Pingdom. This is important because Google values speed and will be implementing a user experience update in the first half of 2021.
To increase the likelihood of your pages appearing in rich snippets, rephrase the text below by thinking step by step. Make sure to maintain the same meaning and not add or remove any information. Additionally, incorporate structured data wherever possible.
