Getting traffic is one of the major challenges that each website or blog owner faces. Whether you are somebody who runs your own business or an experienced SEO, you have knowledge of that there are fluctuations in your website traffic. The most important reason behind the success or failure of an online business is getting traffic to their website so that the conversion can take place. Huge traffic to your website can increase your sales exponentially. Website traffic refers to the web users who visit a website. Website traffic is calculated in visits, often known as “sessions,” and is a very general method to determine online business effectiveness at attracting an audience.
It can help out you to:
- See how adequately your marketing is going
- Gather insight about your visitors to make decisions
- Increase your SEO and search engine credibility
- Increase conversions, generate more leads and get more customers
Why it is important:
Website traffic or the number of visitors to your website is significant for the reason that the number of visitors equals the number of possibilities you have to put in new customers. So, website number of visitors turns into the number of opportunities your business has to share its brand, to give an impression and to make the relationship. The increased traffic to your website, the more chances you have to generate qualified leads, to nurture and help solve their problem and eventually sell your service or product, gain a new client or customer and continue to develop your business.
This is not just about making money. More website traffic, in the long run, can enable you to grow your business (not just your profits), hire more employees, expand your product lines, open new locations, invest in research and develop more marvelous services and products…the opportunities are there! If you have no traffic, no one is finding your business, let alone giving you money. That’s why it’s important to utilize several strategies to bring new visitors to your website while keeping old visitors engaged and more likely to come back.
There are lots of ways that can drive more traffic to your website. With some of the correct strategies, you can bring significant traffic to your website and it is not really difficult as people might think.
Let’s take a look at some of the traffic driving strategies that will help you to increase your website traffic:
Invest in Promotion To Build Backlinks
Generally, besides checking emails several people use the internet for searches. Actually, 93% of online experiences start on a search engine. Therefore, improving your search rankings is one of the most excellent ways to boost traffic to your website.
According to a recent Moz survey on ranking factors, when it comes to rank websites in the search results, search engines care about the “backlinks”. In fact, the most important ranking factors were related to linking.
As a result, to get more visitors to your website, rather than creating new content, it would be a much better idea to focus on building links to the content you previously have. In fact, it is a better idea to spend more time promoting your content than creating it.
- Ask Other People to Link to You
Quality beats quantity when it comes to building backlinks. Even thousands of spam links would not move your website up in the rankings and will actually hurt you more than help you.
There are many different link building strategies, as well as tapping into little-known backlinks sources. One of the most promising, although most time consuming, is reaching out to relevant websites in your niche via email.
If you could get backlinks from influencers in your trade it can do wonders for your search engine rankings and organic traffic. Not to mention, traffic from the link itself. There are several good tools for finding influencers. You probably have a lot of names in your mind of people you would love to link back to your website.
Though, while you can just go and request for a link out of the blue, that type of cold calling generally does not get too many results. An additional promising approach is to help yourself by helping them.
One cool way to do so is finding broken links on other people’s websites and asks them to replace them with your own.
- Promote Yourself with Blog Comments
One more way to reach out is to leave comments on other people’s blogs. While that does not bring you any link juice, it can still lead important amounts of visitors back to your website.
However, no one likes someone who goes “Thank you for the information. Cheers, http://abc.com.” That’s what hundreds of spammers out there do and no one likes it. As an alternative, the key is to be useful and add to the discussion.
Set up Google alerts for relevant topics to get started. Then, when new articles or blogs appear that are appealing to the audience you want to attract, hop right on over. If you leave a perceptive comment that adds value to everybody involved, others will be more than happy to click on your profile link and see what you have to provide on your own website.
Update Your Existing Content
There is no secret that Google loves content that is up to date. Though, up to date does not have to mean new or fresh. It could also mean an updated version of an old piece of content. You can give it a bump in the search results by adding up information such as a new introduction, new data, extra image material or anything else that improves your existing content.
You may even slap “[Updated + year]” to the title to allow visitors know that this content has several new insights. In addition, if you transform the publishing date, the post in the query will move back up to the top of your blog and also update the date in the search results.
- Regularly Re-Publish Old Posts
Whenever you do update an older content, do not forget to share it once more on your social media channels. In fact, you must do that anyhow. Regularly sharing previous blog posts helps keep them in turning round and allows you to attract more visitors with stuff you do not have to create from scratch.
You can do so manually or use a plugin that will mechanically republish older articles or blogs on social media such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.
- Update Content With Long-Tail Keywords
Finally, to boost the performance of your older content, you can update it with extra keywords. For that, all you have to do is go to Google Search Console and go to Search Traffic > Search Analytics.
This will show the search phrases visitors are typing in for which you previously show up in Google search. Now all you have to do is edit your existing articles or blogs and comprise the long-tail keywords found in the list. Two or three times is adequate. By performing this on regular bases, eventually, you can potentially double your website traffic without creating any new articles or blogs.
Re-Purpose Content in New Forms
When talking about existing content, the articles and blogs on your website can often be easily re-purposed by converting them into other forms such as:
- Slideshare presentations
- Infographics
- Video presentations
- Ebooks
- Podcasts
- Templates
- Checklists and more many more
After all, why begin from scratch when you previously have all the information set up in a structured way. Actually, the individuals over at Convince and Convert often turn one piece of content into eight. In addition, you can merge this approach with updating existing content by using your lately re-purposed content as an update for an existing post.
Create Resource Page
Another easy way to breathe new life into older content is a resource page. It’s as easy as creating a page wherever you link to several of your vital stuff. Think of it as a custom archive page.
For instance, you can create a beginner page that will provide people an overview of what your website is all about and link to it from the navigation menu with Start here.
- Turn Category Archives Into Resource Pages
For this, all you need to do is write an exclusive introduction for each of your category pages as unique content for Google.
As it may look a bit silly, this approach can really bring in very decent traffic. In fact, it’s how WPBeginner manages to rank first place for the keyword “best WordPress plugins”.
Category descriptions can easily be added under Posts > Categories. Just click on a category and insert a description.
On the other hand, you need to ensure your theme really displays category descriptions. If yours does not, you can simply add them manually, thus no worries.
- Display Last Year’s Best Content
Another difference of this is a summary of the most winning content of the previous year. In case you do not know which content that was, Google Analytics will let you know. Just go to your account and alter the time frame at the top to your preferred window.
Then, under Behavior > Site content > All pages you can see which pages were most visited throughout that time. Merge them all into one page or post, add excerpts or write a custom description.
Leverage Social Media
Another great way to increase website traffic without creating extra content is Social media. After all, the user numbers on social platforms are amazing. Facebook alone has more than one and a half billion users, followed by Instagram at 400 million and Twitter with 300 million.
If you are able to make use of only a few of those, it can bring a major increase in traffic to your website. Let’s look at some significant notes to increase your chances of doing so:
- Fill out your profile as completely as possible
- Concentrate on value for your followers
- Set up a regular posting schedule
Send Out a Newsletter
Several of the above approaches will also give up main material for newsletters. You have a newsletter sign-up form on your website, right? If not, now is the time to execute one. Email newsletters are a marketing tool with one of the highest return on investments (ROI’s) out there. Newsletter subscribers are more expected to come back to your website than anyone else.
After all, they trusted you with their email address, did they not? If that is not a sign of interest, I don’t know what is.
However, do not just send a newsletter to get them to come to your website. Ensure your email is chock full of helpful content, even if it is curated or repurposed. Thus far, simultaneously, be sure to provide a link back to your own website.
Perform an SEO Audit for Your Website
In the search for website traffic, sometimes we are our own worst enemy without even knowing it. If your website has search engine optimization issues, it will keep your organic traffic from rising no matter how much high-quality content you publish.
So, in place of writing a new blog or article post, it would be a better idea to perform an SEO audit as an alternative. At the least look into the following points to do so:
- Check Google Search Console to beware of problems like 404s, crawl errors, sitemap issues, and blocked pages. Fix every issue you can find.
- Run a speed test and input your website into Google’s PageSpeed Insights and attempt to implement as much of the feedback as you can.
- Look at your analytics to check pages per session, user flow and bounce rate. Find out is there a method to improve your website structure to serve your visitors better?
- Optimize website images that can bring in loads of new visitors from Google image search. Check at least the images in your most significant content.
- Run mobile friendliness tests to see how your website works for mobile devices. Mobile traffic continues to grow in significance and a website that is not mobile-friendly will get banned from mobile search results.
- Listen to your SEO plugin – If you use an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO, check for posts with a not good SEO score and see how they could be improved. Also, consult the content analysis segment of your older posts to see if they can be improved.
In a nutshell, we can say that there are several ways to drive more traffic to your website. It’s really common that the main goal of every site owner is to get more visitors to increase website traffic. In recent years, to attain this, the recommendation has always been to “create more quality content”.
However, doing so is a good idea but it is not the only way to get more visitors onto your website and certainly not the most time-friendly.
If you like several others are struggling to churn out website content on a regular basis, the tactics in this blog offer many other alternative approaches to building an audience.
Let’s rapidly sum up what they are:
- Focus on promotion and building backlinks
- Update old content
- Re-purpose existing content in new forms
- Create a “best of” list or resource page
- Send out a newsletter to pull subscribers back in
- Leverage social media to attract visitors to your website
- Perform an SEO audit to boost organic traffic
While the above is adequate give your website traffic a grave bump. Apart from these, there are several more ways that can help you to drive more traffic. Finally, if you want more organic traffic to your website, you have to work for it. That means giving your finest effort each time, going after chances your competitors have missed, guest blogging strategically, being consistent, and staying on Google’s good side.