Ever notice that some businesses get online traffic quickly, and even though you’re doing everything you know how to put your product or service in the best light online, it just doesn’t compete? Knowing how to drive website traffic is essential to building a business. After all, the more traffic you have, the more leads you can get.
Build a Good Site, then Drive Website Traffic
Having a decent functional website is like having an employee who out performs the others because he or she works 24/7. Moreover, it’s a representation of the brand and generates leads that turn into conversions for your business. However, it’s no good if the website is not yielding the number of visitors you’re hoping for.
8 Proven Ways to Drive Website Traffic and Get More Sales
Here are some of the best-proven tactics to make your website work for you.
Optimize Your Site for Mobile
Right now more than a billion people connect to the web from their mobile devices, and around 80% of these people are internet users who also own a smartphone. It only makes sense that you receive most of your online traffic from people who use mobile devices.
You cannot ignore the importance of having a mobile-optimized website. It improves your viewer’s experience when they land on your site, and it also gives your site better SEO, which ultimately gives you an edge over competitors. One great example of this is when Walmart in Canada saw a 98% increase in its mobile orders with its mobile site.
What You Can Do: Work with your team to pick out SEO practices that work for your business. Look for keywords that are being used by your competitors and include link building in your SEO strategy, so your content and posts get a lot more exposure.
Working with Good Content
You might have heard it plenty of times before, and that’s only because it really matters – generating and marketing quality content makes a whole lot of difference to your website traffic.
People are always looking for meaningful content that can help boost their knowledge with necessary information. Now the trick is to mix this content with SEO.
When you write about your product or service, you get to create brand awareness and educate your potential clients. This is also what lets you create a relationship with audiences and establish yourself as an industry leader.
Furthermore, people prefer to seek information in articles and consider it a more viable source than advertisements, making this outlet one way to make conversions easy.
What You Can Do: Think about the pain-points for your target audience and create credible content accordingly. Remember, it’s better to produce one well-written and well-researched piece in one week than to churn out seven that offer nothing to the reader! Other than written content, customers also respond well to how-to videos, because these provide a lot of information in a short time.
Lower Loading Time for Your Website
When your site takes a lot of time to load, it may just be the thing that puts off visitors from even bothering. This is one reason you should optimize your site’s page load time to see a difference in your conversion rates.
Also, when visitors have had a slow experience with a site, in many instances they tend not to revisit it, but that’s not all. Search engines have now begun to appoint ranking according to loading time as well.
The good news is that there’s a definite way around this. For example, all you have to do is invest in link building. This is a service that can boost your site’s search engine visibility to ensure that more and more people visit the page. Therefore, it is crucial that you work towards minimizing website load time – and maximizing website traffic.
What You Can Do: Avoid using a lot of heavy graphics for your website, as this is usually what makes a site’s loading time slower. Other practices such as reducing the server response time and minimizing HTTP requests also affects the load time positively.
The Right Meta Tags
Optimizing meta tags is a super-simple process that’s often overlooked. However, if one does it with tremendous care through keyword research, it brings proven results, mostly by boosting your visibility on search engines organically.
There’s a lot of debate on whether Google makes use of a page’s meta tags for indexing. However, there’s confirmation that when you optimize meta tags, the webpage ranks better on search engines and also gets increased traffic. The best way around it is simple – you have to stick a few meta tags on every page on the website.
What You Can Do: Research the best-suited keywords for each of your website’s pages and make sure the tags are simple, but get the word through. Pay particular attention to your title tags, as these show up above your website’s URL on search engines, and are instantly read and recognized by the target audience.
Email Marketing Helps
Many small businesses are always busy using novelty strategies to get new customers. In doing so, they forget some useful methods like email marketing. To this day, email marketing has proven to be very powerful.
A good email blast can bring a significant increase in traffic. As a matter of fact, many stats have shown us that email marketing is a very fruitful method for getting out the word. All you have to do is ensure that you don’t bombard all the people in the email list. You must be strategic in how you send personalized reminders about new services and products.
What You Can Do: Talk about promotions, discounts, and any new products you may be offering. Learn about how you can attract the reader from the get-go so you can create catchy subject lines and content. Remember, email marketing doesn’t have to be boring and dull – think creatively and get your juices flowing so the customer takes action after reading your email.
Advertising
When you’re looking to increase traffic, never be afraid to go through the conventional approach. Paid advertising is still a handy way of getting traffic to your website. You might think it’s too heavy on the budget, but if you do manage to target the right people on social media, you can get the word out for your site better and with less money. However, remember that before deciding on what platform you want to use, look into the advantages and disadvantages of each so that you’re able to stick to your primary aim before you start spending money on online ads.
What You Can Do: Mix traditional and online marketing and advertising together, so you get to enjoy the benefits of both worlds. Advertising techniques such as billboards do a lot for your business, and while they may cost a little at first, you can benefit from them for a long time.
Content Discovery
These platforms provide a different sort of advertising service for you. They work like a lot of other advertising outlets with advertisers and publishers. The only thing unique about content discovery is that it works by promoting content inside content. Some great tools to help you with this include Outbrain and Taboola. Make them a part of your website traffic generating strategy.
What You Can Do: Use apps and online tools to “boost” your content and make it more recognizable to your target audience. Though it may take you some time to get the reason behind the content discovery, you’ll be addicted to the tools once you get the hang of it.
Keep an Eye on Your Competitors
You can get an advantage if you keep yourself in the loop about what your competitors are up to. There are plenty of tools that you can use to help you with this, like Buzz Sumo, that helps you observe your site’s competition and also enables you to analyze the content. This will also give you a good idea about topics that resonate well with readers. You can always use these insights to make content that is viral-worthy.
What You Can Do: Always be up-to-date on what your competitors are up to. When you use tools that help in monitoring competition, you aren’t just keeping an eye on the kind of keywords and content they use, you’re also finding out about their progress and shortcomings. This gives you the chance to grab an opportunity your competitors might be oblivious to, and get the benefits that come with it.
The Goal is to Drive Website Traffic
We all want more traffic, because increased traffic means a higher conversion rate and higher sales. Driving website traffic is an ongoing effort, and it’s also a reachable goal. Work on a sound strategy to amalgamate the 8 tried-and-true methods above so you can strengthen your website. In a fast-pacedworld where everyone uses online media more than the conventional kind, it helps to tap that too, to get to your audience.
Been looking to drive website traffic to your business? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments!
