7 Essential Methods To Increase Website Traffic

Many small businesses have one regular issue when it comes to digital marketing, the issue of website traffic. How can you increase website traffic which will make a direct impact on your sales and enquiries? We have listed 7 essential methods to expose your site to your target audience and increase traffic to your website.

Website

Start with an Audit of your website. You have many methods to do this, many of which are Free and easy to access. This phase on your way to increasing website traffic is highly investigative, exploring this data and making changes accordingly could improve traffic quickly.

Google Analytics- Tracks and reports website traffic. You can access this through your Google analytics accounts, you can also download the mobile app or add plugins/widgets on the backend of your site.

Website Audits- There are some great websites out there that can do relatively accurate audit’s, these audits will give you some important SEO and User related issues that can be fixed immediately. Wizard Creative Labs also offers a Free Website Audit. These factors are directly related to User experience, The greater time spent on a site and the higher the site is relevant to its audience, Search rankings will improve and and returning site visitors are more likely.

We would recommend SEOOptimer, its Free, simple to use and includes great recommendations.

Issues that you may find which directly relate to your web traffic-

‘Bounce Rate’- Simply put a Bounce rate is occurs when a person visits your website and leaves without interacting further with your site. Your bounce rate shows you the percentage of your visitors who bounce off the site. If your Bounce rate is over 50% then this can provide an insight into your visitors showing no interest in your content or poor load time. Investigating and making changes to your landing page which will decrease your bounce rate is a great start in improving your traffic.

‘404 error page not found’– This is a complex issue, it could be many things. URL could be incorrect, page has been deleted, and more. One common option of correction is setting a page redirect to fix this issue.

‘Slow speed’- This is directly related to SEO and User experience. A slow site will discourage website visitors and Search Engine see this as a negative Factor. Fortunately, it can be a relatively easy fix if there are simple issues. For example, on WordPress you can get some Amazing plugins such as WP Rocket, W3 total cache, Smush it and much more. These plugins will improve caching of your site, image optimization, minifying, etc. These changes will appear immediately once the plugin or your developer has made the website changes.

‘Time on site’ and ‘Pages per session’ are also user experience related data that could be used to improve traffic. Improving click-through rate is also related to these factors.

PPC

PPC is a great way of increasing traffic quickly to your site. Pay per click will have your ads displayed on search engines for the terms that your prospective website visitor is searching for. Its a great way to gain website visitors that would be interest in your product or service along with any content you may provide which is related to their search. PPC pricing can range from relatively inexpensive to expensive depending on the keywords and search terms.

Over 50% of internet traffics goes through Search Engines, this method would put your business in front of a vast amount of people and can have you ahead of your competition.

PPC can be quite complicated once you start targeting large amounts of keywords and customers. We would recommend engage with a professional PPC service that will ensure to keep your costs lower and you are getting a positive ROI.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is simply ensuring your website is optimized for search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. This is a little different from PPC as you are not directly paying for keywords and search intent. You are focused on making your website compatible and friendly to search engines and the person visiting your site, the result is your site will appear in the search results. Visitors found through search are usually defined as ‘Organic traffic’.

SEO is complicated and Google alone uses of 200 factors to assess your websites search rankings, while other search engines use other methods as well. No search engine is the same, unfortunately.

We have two great articles that can assist in improving your SEO below

How to do SEO

How to do SEO Off Page

SEO is all about getting you found on Search, its a long haul method of increasing your website traffic and vital for a Businesses digital success. For example, within 12 months some of our clients have gone from getting small amounts of visitors and organic search visits per month to a 1000%+ increase.

Great Content

Blog post and Social Media content can provide lots of relevant content to your website. Think about the questions and thoughts your customers have or mention to you. Use those questions and thoughts, address them and put some content out there.

Your blog content can address direct questions and share your expertise with website visitors. If you dont have the expertise in a particular topic, guest blogging is a great way to fill that knowledge gap along with sharing your content to a larger community who might be interested. You will now include your network and the guest bloggers network.

Social Media content can include-

• Visual graphics
• Videos
• Infographics
• Surveys

Once you have content that looks great, is informative and helpful to your audience, then get to Sharing! Share your content on Social media across various platforms, share it with your mailing lists, customers, and support networks. This will not only improve visitors clicking on your site, it will also improve your SEO. Content creation can be painful for those a little less creative or time poor, this is where you can hire a ‘content marketer’ or ‘content creator’.

If you are looking to go further than just sharing the content, you can also ‘Boost Content’ on Facebook or other platforms so that you are advertising your new content to those interested in your niche. There are many clever ways of doing this, its always best to research and define your strategy before advertising, you could also hire a specialist in (social media marketing)

Another good idea, refer your customers or potential customers to your website if they ask certain questions that you may have answered. For example, ‘Where are you located?’, ‘What are the best options?’. This won’t game increases your website traffic dramatically, however, it will increase the time spent on site and your visitors might find the information helpful and possibly share to their networks as well.

Influencers

Influencers have large networks of particular niches that if matched with your niche, the results can be quite significant. An influencer can can expose your website to a few thousand people all the way up to Hundreds of thousands of people. The downside to influencers appears in two forms, the cost of promotion can be substantial (anywhere from $30 to $3000), influencers cannot guarantee that their promotion will provide website visitors. Influencers have greater success for digital based businesses (ecommerce, courses, etc).

Networking

Use of Local Social networks (Facebook Groups, Pages, Linkedin, Reddit, etc). As well as sharing with your direct and indirect contacts, friends and family.

This method is very simple, be proud of your business and its content. Share it around personally and professionally, don’t be afraid to ask your networks to share as well. Post it in groups and social media pages related to the topic. Sending to your customer through your email marketing will also be beneficial. The more your content is put in front of potential ambassadors and supporters, the greater your traffic will increase.

Combine these methods!

Combine these methods! They are all great methods to increase your website traffic, combined, they could have a huge effect. All of the above factors are connected. As mentioned, all these factors can improve your SEO, Greater content can improve user experience and sharability, the influencer’s visitors can provide further insights through your anayltics research on more topics or questions that your audience may be interested in.

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