Most businesses’ online strategies revolve around a well-managed website. On their own websites, businesses are afforded more control and functionality than elsewhere on the net. They can attract leads, close sales, and establish their brand.
With well over a billion websites in existence, however, getting yours to stand out can be a challenge.
There’s no one trick to increase website traffic. It involves efforts on different fronts, which involve a variety of skills. But don’t let this discourage you—it also means that each step you take will bring you closer to your ultimate goal of getting your website to stand out and draw people in.
What follows is an overview of the basic techniques for attracting more website visitors. They’re not the only options, but they’re a good place to start. Go through each of them (one step at a time, if needed) and you’ll see steady uptick in your site visits.
Stick To Your Strategy
Before getting people to go to your website, you need to ensure there’s quality content waiting for them. The best way to ensure this is to have a well-developed content strategy.
Using cornerstone content is one reliable way to organize your website. Cornerstone content, sometimes called pillar pages, provides the foundation on which the rest of your content builds. These pages usually provide information relevant to your brand’s main service or products.
Once you have at least one cornerstone piece, you can start building a campaign or funnel around it. Consider how each piece of content on your site pushes your readers toward doing business with you. Some should provide information on problems they might have; others should suggest solutions; and some should ultimately try to make a sale.
If you follow a content strategy, you’ll get the most out of the traffic to your website, even if it’s not a lot to start with. Since any page that a person stumbles upon has a purpose, not a single visit will be wasted.
Search Engine Optimization
When people think of increasing web traffic, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the first things that come to mind. There are around 3 billion online searches a day on Google alone, which means that if your site isn’t optimized for search, you’re missing a lot of opportunities.
There are two main types of SEO: on-page and off-page.
On-page SEO refers to factors within your website that you can change. These include page titles, meta descriptions, and various aspects of content (e.g. presence of keywords, words per page, headlines). The main objective of on-page SEO is to make your site easier to understand—easy for the “spiders” that Google uses to classify websites and assign them to search results, and easier for the users who’ll stumble upon these.
Off-page SEO involves building your site’s authority, which is how trustworthy or informative Google perceives your site as being. The usual way of doing this is by getting more inbound links to your website; this means having other websites link to yours more frequently.
The most reliable way to earn authority is to have high quality content. Pillar pages are especially good for this. You can take a more active approach, however, by guest blogging or purchasing sponsored content on other sites.
Content Promotion
Content promotion refers to how you get your content to reach more people. If you promote your content effectively, you can get a lot of value out of even relatively low volumes of content.
Two common forms of content promotion are guest blogging and social media marketing.
Guest blogging is creating content for other websites in order to develop your reputation and draw in more readers. Most websites don’t accept contributions that haven’t been published before, so this usually involves either creating or repurposing content. However, most websites will allow you to link back to your own website once or twice—and that’s how you get to promote your own content.
Social media is designed to let people connect to large, targeted audiences, so it’s a natural choice for content promotion. While recent changes have made it harder to reach audiences organically, social advertising can be targeted more precisely than other ad formats. If you know your audience well, you can get a lot of traffic at little cost.
Website Optimization
Both SEO and content promotion focus on getting people to check out your website. Neither will be worth much if visitors don’t stick around long enough to either become a lead or make a purchase. And one of the easiest ways to lose a visitor is by putting them through a bad web experience.
To make sure visitors stick around, your website should be easy to use. It should be well-organized, load quickly, and be usable on any device a user accesses it with. And with more and more online activity happening on phones and tablets, that means mobile responsiveness is a necessity.
Keep the Traffic Moving
All of these aspects—from search to social media to website optimization—are subject to rapidly and constantly changing technology. In order to keep drawing traffic in, you’ll have to revisit these regularly, too.
Also, be sure to remember that traffic is only one indicator of success. Ultimately, you should be pursuing leads, sales, and loyal customers. Whenever you make a decision that involves increasing traffic, weigh it against the other aspects of your online business strategy.
Want to learn what strategy would best suit your business? Contact us—we’d be happy to help!
