Web traffic is critical for your brand’s success. It informs you of how many people identify with your mission and are interested in the products or services you offer. It means your identity as a company resonates with people. But getting more traffic on any given website can be a huge challenge.
How can you increase website traffic in an age in which every brand has an enormous digital presence? Start by leveraging these strategies.
Why Is It Important to Increase Website Traffic?
Website traffic is an important metric in gauging the success of initiatives and your overall business strategy. You can find out if specific efforts and campaigns are working and which ones are performing the best. You can learn about your audience to target your marketing strategy accordingly. You’ll also be able to pinpoint areas that require improvement.
Increasing website traffic means you’re getting the word out and that your brand is gaining visibility. This isn’t important just for making sales (and attracting investors if you’re a startup) but also for developing an excellent reputation.
How to Increase Website Traffic
Study Marketing Analytics
You can leverage the data coming from marketing analytics like those provided by Google to inform your website strategy. Before you work on improving it, you need to establish your baseline. Examine key metrics like the number of unique visitors you get on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, click-through rates, and the type of content that attracts the most viewers.
This information is critical to learn about your current and prospective audience and what will drive them to your website.
SEO-Optimize
Your overall website and each individual page must be easily searchable. In other words, your pages should be ranking high in search results when people are looking for terms that match the nature of your business and the services you offer.
SEO isn’t about packing your site with keywords. Search engines like Google have become sophisticated, and you must adjust your SEO strategy frequently to account for changes. Bringing in an expert can help you craft a plan to improve your rankings.
Leverage Your Social Media Accounts
Social media can do a great job of driving traffic to your website and promoting your brand. Your social media strategy will be more comprehensive than the short blurb here, but there are many types of posts that can engage your user base, from purely promotional to engaging, content-based posts that give users incentive to visit your website.
Depending on the nature of your business, you might create a presence on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and other platforms. Your social media or marketing specialist can help you craft copy and graphics and select the best links to promote.
Routinely Add New Content
Keeping your content fresh is one of the best ways to improve your rankings. Not only should you overhaul your web copy routinely, but you should also add compelling content, such as videos, images, and blog posts to attract users to your website.
The content you add should align with your brand and business strategy, appealing to the right target audience. It should also be SEO-optimized to ensure it ranks well in a search.
Clean up Old Content
Part of keeping your content fresh also means ensuring your older content isn’t outdated. Instead of getting rid of this content completely, consider combing through it and revitalizing it with SEO best practices in mind. This is a better strategy than deleting it completely because that would create broken links if you’ve interlinked within your site or anyone else has referenced it.
Turn to Email Marketing
More and more brands are leveraging email marketing to inform customers about their news and goings-on, promote products, and generally keep their name out there. This is also a way of driving users to your website. Including links to your latest blog post or the listing for your newest product or project will give people a reason to visit your website and learn more about what’s happening at your company.
Engage Influencers or Thought Leaders
Unfortunately, your word only goes so far. But when you give users a voice they admire and respect, whether it’s a celebrity or a leader in their field, they’ll be more willing to trust your brand and more likely to engage with it. Consider, for example, asking a thought leader to write a guest blog. Or, hire an influencer to appear in a targeted campaign. You could also post a video interview with a respected voice in your field.
Create Backlinks
Backlinks (links to your website from external websites) will not only increase traffic because your site will be more visible but also because your Google rankings will climb. That’s because backlinks indicate you’re a trustworthy and credible resource in your area of expertise.
But you can’t just post backlinks at random and expect your SEO rankings to improve. They should be referenced on other high-traffic sites that have earned credibility.
Advertise
It’s not free, and it’s often not cheap. But advertising via Google Ads and social media platforms like Facebook will allow you to target your message to the people you want to see your brand and products and increase the number of visitors who head over to your site.
Digital advertising requires planning and expertise, so you’ll need to do some research to figure out the best platform, content, and methodology for your business.
Build a Community
Your website is more than just a marketing tool. It’s also a means to build a community — one that will look to your brand as a resource and authority.
In order to build a community, you should be actively engaging with other websites and posting on social media. You should also answer questions relating to your field in public forums, such as Quora or Reddit, and interact with your target audience. Additionally, you could construct boards and forums on your own site to allow visitors to engage with you. Just be sure to respond frequently.
Interlink
You want to keep visitors on your website for as long as possible. One way to do that is to incorporate internal links throughout your pages. That way, rather than abandoning your site, they’ll be engaged with a related blog post, a similar service that might interest them, and so on.
Make It Accessible
Is your website fully accessible to people with a wide range of abilities? Employ a user interface (UI) expert to ensure that, for instance, people with visual impairments can still experience the message and content your site offers. In today’s day and age, this is a must for keeping you relevant and ensuring that you’re not leaving anyone out. You should also make your website accessible across different platforms and devices.
See What Your Competitors Are Up to
Conducting an analysis of your competitors will allow you to identify the trends in your industry and get new ideas. Think of it as a tool for inspiration. Not only should you go through competitors’ websites, but you should also comb their social media accounts to see the kind of content they’re promoting.
As we enter a new age of business and commerce, your website will prove a pivotal marketing, engagement, and community-building tool. These methods will help you drive traffic to your site and give your business a boost in the process.
If you enjoyed this, be sure to check out our other web development articles.
