Top 12 Tips on How to Drive Traffic to your Website

At some point every entrepreneur with a website will ask themselves “How do I drive more traffic to my website?”  Whether you are trying to get your first customers or you’re looking to expand your customer base, getting more traffic to your website is an integral part of growing your business.

There are effectively two ways that you can drive traffic to your website. The first way is free and involves; search engine optimisation (SEO), setting up a blog, social media marketing and many more. The other way is paid, everyone knows that paid ads can drive traffic to a website, but this strategy can get costly.

The most important thing to consider is the quality of traffic.  An advert on Facebook might produce a lot of click-throughs, but if that traffic doesn’t convert to sales then it’s not much use.  You want high quality traffic that will drive revenue and lead to a better return on investment (ROI).

Use a tool like Google Analytics to establish where your traffic is coming from and what it does once on your website.  You can also use its Campaign URL Builder to label the URLs with their source and medium so that when you get traffic from adverts you can see where it came from.

Paid Methods

  1. Run a Paid Social Media Campaign

Online ads can instantly generate hundreds, if not thousands, of clicks to your website.  With paid social media ads, you can create highly targeted campaigns that serve tailor-made ads to the customers who are most likely to click through and purchase your products.

Facebook – With 2.7 billion monthly active users in 2020, Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world. Facebook is filled with opportunities for you to reach new customers and drive them to your online store. Its robust advertising platform lets you target users based on their interests, behaviour, location, and more. Using Facebook Dynamic Ads allows you to target customers who have previously visited your site with automatically generated adverts featuring the products they had looked at or placed in their cart.  These powerful ads can bring traffic back to your website aiding conversions.

Instagram – Instagram is an incredibly popular platform, with more than one-billion active users worldwide, with 90% of accounts following a business according to Instagram.

Using hashtags, creating videos or images for marketing are just a few of the Instagram tools to grow your following.

Pinterest – Pinterest is extremely popular among niche groups like home decorating, renovating, landscaping, and DIY crafts and is ideal for businesses hoping to make inroads with these markets.  Pinterest is home to Promoted Pins, a form of paid advertising that pushes your Pins to the top of your customers’ search results, helping you stand out from your competitors.

LinkedIn – If you are a B2B business, LinkedIn might be your best option.  According to LinkedIn, 4 out of 5 LinkedIn members can influence business decisions in their company.  LinkedIn also accounts for more than 60% of all traffic from social media sites to company websites.

  1. Advertise on Google

Unlike social media advertising platforms, Google Ads offer a unique opportunity to advertise your products and services directly to people actively searching for them.  On average 35% of users purchase a product within five days of searching for it.  Google gives you the option to put your ad in front of users on the world’s two largest search engines: Google and YouTube. Although the platform gives you the ability to increase web traffic and sales, on the downside, it’s a complex platform to navigate for beginners, and you can risk spending a lot of money advertising to the wrong audience.

  1. Engage in Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a great way to get your message out to millions of people without having your own large audience. You can leverage influencers on Twitter, Instagram and any number of other social networks. Find people who are entrenched in your niche or industry and reach out to them. This won’t be cheap, but it could potentially bring you lots of customers and sales in the short term.

Organic Methods

  1. Get Blogging

Write regular blog posts for your website.  But don’t just write about your business, choose topics that will be useful for your audience and provide them with information and expertise.  Use a keyword tool like Ubbersuggests to target long-tail keywords relevant to your business and create blog posts around the most searched for queries.  Create interesting headlines that will grab attention and make your blogs share-worthy.

Guest blogging on other websites is a good way to drive traffic back to yours and create backlinks which are good for search engine optimisation.

Furthermore, a blog will work to increase your brand’s reach. To maximize its reach, it is important to incorporate the best SEO practices, which can be easily achieved with the help of SEO experts like https://paulgordonseo.co.uk/seo-best-practices/. Following along with expert advice will help you boost your search engine ranking, which will help your business be more discoverable. Thus, you will attain more customers and therefore, more sales.

  1. Pay attention to technical SEO

There are a number of technical requirements for good Search Engine Optimisation:

  • You need to make sure your website has clear and simple navigation so that users can find the content they are looking for and search engines can index it.
  • Websites should load quickly as slow loading sites frustrate users and cause them to leave, which can hurt your website rankings.
  • Websites should also be mobile responsive so that they can be viewed and accessed easily on multiple devices and different browsers.
  • Avoid having too many advertisements on your site or having an excessive number of pop-ups.
  • Include clear, keyword-rich titles of less than 160 characters for each page, these help Google to index your website
  • Meta descriptions tell search engines a little bit more about what each page is about. They are the text that appears in search engine results pages (SERPs) underneath the page title.
  • Use sub-headings to help users and search engines navigate your site
  • Label images with the image name and alt tag.
  • Make sure there are no technical errors that stop a search engine from indexing your website.
  • Use a ‘robot.txt’ file to label pages that you don’t want crawled for search engine results – for instance checkout pages or contact pages.

If this all sounds too complicated, employ a specialist agency like Koreti to help you.

  1. Have a link-building strategy

In your blog posts include links to other content on your site.  Add a related articles section to your blog template, or simply add links in the body text to other related content on your site.  Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites.

Ideally you want to achieve a few backlinks, these are links to your content from other sites.  Content that has a lot of backlinks is taken more seriously by search engines as it indicates that the content has good authority.  Listing your business in directories, getting articles published, commenting on other blogs and having a reciprocal agreement with a partner or competitor are all ways to achieve this.

  1. Pay Attention to Local SEO

If you are running a business that attracts local customers make sure you have your local SEO in place.  Create an account with Google My Business which will enable your website to appear in local searches on Google.  Ensure your address and phone number appear on every page of your website, in the header or footer, and have page headings that locate where you are.

  1. Email Marketing

Sending out regular newsletters and promoting offers through email is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and can also help to get traffic to your website. Provide useful information and links to pages on your website where they can learn more, such as through blog posts and landing pages for particular offers.  Just make sure that you don`t continually bombard your readers with emails or your customers will either disengage with, delete, or unsubscribe from your emails.

  1. Get Active on Social Media

It’s not enough to just share content through social channels – you need to actively participate in the community, too. Got a Twitter account? Then join in group discussions with relevant hashtags. Is your audience leaving comments on your Facebook posts? Answer questions and engage with your readers. Nothing turns people off quicker than using social media for self-promotion – use social media as it was intended and actually interact with your audience.

LinkedIn has become much more than a means of finding another job. The world’s largest professional social network is now a valuable publishing platform in its own right, which means you should be posting content to LinkedIn on a regular basis. Doing so can boost traffic to your site, as well as increase your profile within your industry – especially if you have a moderate to large following.

  1.  Include Video Content on your Website

Text-based content is all well and good, but video can be a valuable asset in both attracting new visitors and making your site more engaging.  Video content consistently outperforms blogs and other text-based content. Pinterest boards now generate more revenue for retailers than tweets or Facebook posts. So, videos are a great way to get your audience’s attention and drive traffic to your website.

  1.  Host Webinars

Everyone loves to learn, hosting a webinar is a great way to educate your audience and drive traffic to your website.  Upload your webinar to YouTube and share it on social media.  Email your prospects and customers to inform them of the webinar.  If viewers have to register to watch it, that will give you more contacts to add to your CRM system.

  1.  Answer Questions on Quora

Quora is a great medium for driving traffic to your site. Answer questions on this platform and link the right keywords to anchor content on your site or blog. However, don’t use this platform to spam. Ensure that your answers are detailed and that you know what you’re talking about.

There are many ways to drive more traffic to your website, here I have outlined a few, both paid and free.  The paid options including advertising on social media and Google, are guaranteed to bring you more visitors.  However, they can be expensive and still require an element of skill in order to target the right audience.  The free methods do work but require time and effort rather than money, and you may not see the results straight away.  SEO and content marketing take time to generate results but are worth it in the end.

Bio

Written by Caroline Grey, a Content Writer with a wide variety of experience across a number of different industry sectors.

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