You can be a serious entrepreneur who invests in a great website and content and still feels like something is not right. The higher conversion rates you were hoping for aren’t coming your way. You have pegged a lot of hope on your website to bring in dollars from the online market, but your hopes have been frustrated at every turn. You need to go back to the basics and figure out how to drive more website traffic. There can never be any conversion rates without online users finding your website. Even if you have a world-class website, nobody will see it if you don’t focus your efforts on increasing online traffic.
If you’re looking to increase website traffic with both organic and paid ways, here are 5 methods that are proven to yield results.
What is website traffic?
Web traffic is the number of web users who travel to any given website. Each person who logs on to a website is recorded as a visit or session, with a starting and ending point, thanks to behind-the-scenes communications between a user’s device and the website itself.
Web traffic is specific to each page of your website as well, so whether you have a one-page site or a 50-page site, each of those pages’ traffic is configured independently of all other pages.
How do you measure website traffic?
There are numerous ways to measure website traffic, they include:
1. Session numbers: this involves looking at the number of visits the website receives across a fixed period (one week, one month, etc.), to assess how effective traffic-building initiatives (SEO, PPC, etc.) have been since implementation.
2. Purchase percentage: online businesses selling products through their websites depend on purchases to succeed. Identifying the number of visitors making a purchase reveals how effective the site is in encouraging people to buy.
3. Channels: another way to measure website traffic is to find out which channels it comes through, such as email, organic search, email, etc.
4. Bounce rate: measuring bounce rates shows the number of visitors who leave after viewing one page only these should be as low as possible.
However, here are keys to increasing your online traffic;
1. Optimize your website for search: When you’re starting out, focus on finding keywords that represent your niche on to base your blog content and store pages. Typically, you’ll choose to focus on one or two main keywords per webpage. You can use SEO tools like Keywords Everywhere to help you find relevant keywords. In the beginning, focus on keywords that have a search volume of under 10,000 searches a month. After a few months of creating blog content and optimizing product pages, you can then focus on going after higher volume keywords. The trick to getting website traffic is to build a strong foundation of relevant keywords first. Be sure to take advantage of the blog on your online store as it can have the biggest impact on driving organic traffic to your website.
2. Focus on evergreen topics: While news and trending topics can give you a traffic boost in the short term, they’re not worth the time and effort. Create content around topics that will always be of interest to your audience. These evergreen posts will accumulate traffic and links over time, especially if you refresh them regularly.
3. Incorporate video: Text-based content is all well and good, but video can attract more visitors and keep them engaged. Here are some ways to use video to get more website traffic:
– Embed videos into your blog posts so they can appear in video search results.
– Do YouTube SEO to rank higher on YouTube, then add links to your website in the video description.
– Add call-to-action buttons directly in your video that send people to your site.
4. Create memorable content: It’s not enough just to post content; you need to create content that’s memorable and cuts through the noise. In fact, useful and memorable content is one of the top ways to increase website traffic. People use Google to find specific, thorough, and accurate answers to their questions, and your content should be there to provide those answers. In fact, websites featuring blog content generate 434% more search engine-indexed pages than those without it.
5. Send email newsletters: promoting content through email newsletters is an effective way to increase website traffic. Here are a few email marketing best practices:
– Include enticing information from the content in the subject line and in the body of the email.
– Insert a link or button that subscribers can click to read more of the content.
– Make sure emails are mobile-friendly. Links should be easy to see since 46% of all email opens are done on mobile devices.
– Employ personalization tactics by including the name of the subscriber.
– Make the email visually appealing with the use of well-designed templates.
– Conduct A/B testing to see which versions of emails receive more opens and clicks.
