Your website is the gateway to your online business. No matter how good your website looks, if there isn’t a steady stream of quality traffic coming your way, then there’s no way for your company to become an online success.
Website traffic is vital for all online businesses, but what are the best ways to increase website traffic to your site? We’ll examine some of the most common and prosperous ways to bring not only traffic to your site but traffic designed to convert and improve your revenue.
Watch as your site visitors grow, and your bottom line grow with it.
Table of Contents
Increase Website Traffic with Search Engine Optimization
When searchers want information about a subject or business, the first thing they do is head for a search engine. Google handles most search queries, but don’t discount other engines like Bing and Yahoo. Search engine optimization is anything you do to improve your rankings on these search engines and thus bring in traffic.
Many websites get their highest traffic amounts from organic search, so investing in these methods can dramatically increase the traffic to your website.
SEO starts with choosing the right set of keywords that you want to rank for on Google. There has been much debate about keywords and their importance in SEO given the advancement of search engine algorithms.
If there are people using search queries, keywords are important. Create a list of keywords that have a high search volume and low competitiveness and place them on your site on webpages and blog posts. In fact, you can create specific keyword lists for individual blog posts.
When people search for these keywords, your website is ranked with potentially millions of others. You want to be on the first search page, but that can be difficult given your competitors use SEO as well. It takes time.
Don’t expect immediate results from SEO but watch as you get more website traffic as the days and weeks go by. You can use platforms such as Google Analytics to see your traffic patterns from month to month and where they’re coming from.
SEO causes traffic from organic sources such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing to improve. You can also use third-party software to check your rankings for various keywords and how they change over time.
Online Advertising Costs Money but Brings Traffic
SEO takes weeks or even months to bring significant traffic changes, but if you want immediate traffic then PPC advertising is for you. Google ads is the most robust platform with search ads that place above search results pages, video ads for YouTube, display ads on websites, and shopping ads that appear across the top of search results pages.
There are also advertising options on several social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
PPC advertising can be difficult to master and it does cost money. You create an advertising campaign and various ads. Search ads are all text and look like a search result. Display ads can be pictures or text and video ads are videos.
When you create the ad, you choose sets of keywords that you want that ad to show. You also create a monthly budget and set a bid for the keywords. When someone uses that keyword in a query, you go into a bidding war with other businesses that also chose that keyword.
The company with the highest bid price wins and is placed on the search page or website. The key to a successful ad campaign is planning. Many people don’t think about the impact of what the ad says and the keywords chosen have on success.
Businesses watch their budget decrease to nothing with little to show for it. The biggest benefit of targeted ads is they provide immediate access to additional traffic. Once the campaign is finished, it can show up on websites and search engines.
It also brings qualified traffic because people who click on the ad are interested in your product or service.
Creating Amazing Content Brings Traffic
We talked about the importance of keywords, but without great content to put those keywords into, you’re handicapping your success. Google is a business and wants to provide the best product to the searchers.
It created a complex algorithm that considers more than 100 factors for ranking. Google wants websites that have expertise, authority, and trustworthiness to rank highest in the search results. Blog posts and other forms of long content show those characteristics.
Websites often hire professional writers to create the content since they are familiar with Google’s requirements and create great content. In many ways, it’s like you buy website traffic because you’re paying the expert writers to create content that brings in traffic.
Once you create the content, get it in front of as many eyes as possible. Share it on your social media sites and see if other similar websites will link back to your post. It takes Google a little time to index the new pages and provide a good ranking.
Focus on Review and Business Listing Sites
There are many review sites on the Internet including Yelp and Google My Business. Many businesses pay no attention and let negative reviews take traffic away from their sites. It’s important to identify review and business listings sites and claim your listings.
This lets you fill out the listing with information, which makes it look better to searchers, and correct any wrong information. It also lets you reply to reviews. Replying professionally and courteously to negative reviews can help bring traffic to your site because it shows you care about how your customers feel about their experience.
While business listings don’t have reviews, they do rank well on search engines and include information about your business. If the listing isn’t claimed, they get information from third party sources, which is often incorrect.
It can have an incorrect address, website, hours of operation, and more. Claim them and fill out the information correctly.
Send High-Quality Traffic to Your Site
Websites live and die by traffic. If you can increase website traffic, then you can increase your revenues and overall conversions. Your competitors are following these rules and so should you.
If you want to learn more about the importance of website traffic, then please explore our site.