You’ve taken the time to grow your business. You’ve invested in your website and developed marketing campaigns. But for some reason, you still aren’t getting the website traffic you had hoped for, and it can be hard work figuring out where to begin to start moving in the right direction. In this post, we’ll share several easy, actionable steps you can take to help increase your web traffic and grow your customer base.
10 Tactics to Increase a Website’s Traffic
Utilize Analytic Tools
Use tools like Google Analytics to track your current website traffic. It’s helpful to have a baseline to track any increases/decreases in traffic. Analytics can help you determine where your traffic sources are (for example, organic traffic or traffic being referred from other websites), which can help you create a stronger content marketing strategy. Web analytics tools can be used to help analyze information about your website in order to optimize performance. Web Analytics help you track, measure, and analyze various forms of website data in real-time. This data can help you better understand visitor behavior and create strategies to increase conversions.
Run a Site Audit
A website audit provides insights into the speed and performance of your website. Site audits can be used to understand and address issues that often cause a decline in web traffic: poor infrastructure and technical SEO issues. The site audit can highlight any pages that aren’t performing well and provide a solution to help improve page performance.
Additionally, a site audit also analyzes the site for crawl efficiency and indexability to make sure that search engines are receiving and displaying the right information. This allows you to make sure there is nothing broken or impeding users from reaching your content.
Check Your Infrastructure
Most website owners believe the key to driving web traffic is to strictly focus first on SEO & SEM. This is often not true. Why? Poor foundations such as shared web hosting or broken themes can cause your website to load slowly. More than three seconds and you have trouble. SEO & SEM are only truly beneficial for driving traffic when a site has fast website hosting in place.
Check Your SEO
Once you’ve laid the groundwork for your website and given it a great foundation through hosting and theme, it’s time to take another look at your on-page SEO. SEO helps your website rank better in search engines. It helps to have a strong understanding of the keyword or keywords you’re trying to rank for and create high quality, relevant content around those terms to help drive traffic. Providing useful information in the headings and meta descriptions can improve your website’s appearance in the search results and can help ensure that your content is reaching its target audience and will help drive targeted traffic to your website. For a more detailed breakdown on optimizing your content, check out our post on SEO Best Practices for Your Website.
Optimize Your Content
Strongly related to optimizing for SEO you should make sure to optimize your content based on what people are searching for. Before you create content, you need to ask questions like: What are people searching for in relation to the topic I want to write about? Are they searching for it at all? What other content is out there already on this topic that’s ranking well and why? What key terms does all that content have in common? There are several tools you can use to find out the answers to these questions, one of the most important being Google Search Console.
Our course, How to Build a Remarkable Blog, delves deep into keyword research, strategic content creation, and how to better optimize your current content already getting you traffic to rank better. If that sounds like what you’ve been looking out, there’s a free lesson there for you that includes the components needed for building the best website and an outline of the rest of the course content.
Once you have decided on a topic that you know people are searching for, you can get to work making sure to hit on all the points you know it takes to rank up there with—and ultimately surpass—your competition. Don’t forget to showcase your unique perspective and experience as well. People get tired of reading the same “Top 10 Ways to Recognize a Robot” and “The Secret Answer to Becoming More Human” type posts and may pass yours over if you don’t add your own value. (Actually, those sound pretty unique, but hopefully, you get the idea.)
Target Long-Tail Keywords
If you find that keyword targeting isn’t helping, you may need to do some more keyword research to incorporate long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are more specific, meaning they are less competitive and thus easier to rank for. They are usually three to four-word phrases that are much more precise than a normal keyword such as “bicycles”. Competition for terms like this will be very intense, making it much more difficult for your website to appear in search engine results pages. However, if you target “road racing bicycles for beginners,” you are not only much more likely to increase your organic traffic, but you’ll also be much more effectively targeting the users who are truly interested in what you have to offer.
Write High-Quality Content
Using content marketing to share high-quality content could be the single most important step to driving traffic to your site. (Assuming your site runs smoothly. If it doesn’t you know what’s up now. And if you need help, just let us know.) Creating relevant blog posts can help you increase your search engine ranking which will help to generate traffic to your website. A post with great content will create interest and encourage users to stay on your site longer.
Create step-by-step guides (How to Write a Sales Email) or lists (Top 10 Best WordPress plugins). You can also use guest posts to help drive new users to your website. If you’re stuck on where to start, tools like BuzzSumo can help you analyze the content people may be interested in reading about so you can add it to your website. Be sure to update consistently with new content.
Guest Blogging
You can also consider guest blogging and team up with another writer or editor to help create great posts for your website, or write posts for their website. A guest blogger can be a helpful partner in your efforts to increase website traffic. They can help you grow your social networks with their connections and help you reach an audience you may not have been able to otherwise.
Increase Social Media Marketing
Sharing your posts on social media sites such as LinkedIn or Instagram is also helpful to increase your website traffic. Social media sites help drive traffic to your website by pushing your posts to specific groups of people that may be interested in the type of content you are posting. Make sure you mention any recent promotions or great articles you’ve recently posted to keep readers engaged with your website activity. You can also share curated content from your industry with a quick summary or your take on the piece, or company updates, stories, and other information that helps people build trust and a bond with your brand.
Pair Email Marketing & On-site Retargeting
You can also use email marketing to segment leads on your website and reach users to continually bring them back to your site. Utilize the forms or CTAs on your website’s landing pages to grow your email list.
On-site retargeting allows you to tag visitors based on actions as they move through your website, so you can make sure you send them emails that are both personalized and relevant to what they are looking for.
Final Thoughts
There are many strategies you can use to drive traffic to your website. However, increasing your website traffic won’t happen overnight. It takes hard work and dedication, and a commitment to monitoring the results of your efforts. If you have noticed a stall in the amount of traffic coming to your website, try implementing a combination of these tactics to increase website performance and visibility.
