Traffic is visibility. It’s also awareness and interaction. And how much traffic your website drives, affects how much sales you will make. If traffic is a KPI that you’re having trouble with, maybe it’s time to fix it and use these ten ways to drive more traffic to your website.
1. On-Page SEO
On-page optimization is the first step in ranking for a higher position on a search engine results page. Creating high-quality content, improving navigation, including meta descriptions and alt tags all improve the visitor experience and makes it easier for crawlers to evaluate your website. Following the latest SEO trends doesn’t hurt either.
2. List Your Business
Listing your business on online directories and review sites is another way to boost traffic. For the most part, creating a listing on Google My Business or TripAdvisor, for example, is a great way to target a local audience and get a backlink to your website. All you need to do is update it, so the information remains fresh.
3. Create Landing Pages
Landing pages include a specific offer you aim to target directly at leads. And while it’s most effective at driving conversion, combining a landing page with PPC and other paid advertising can drive traffic. Also, you might want to consider promoting customer incentives like free guides, e-books, discount codes and free trials, which drive traffic organically.
4. Use Paid Ads
Online advertising is one of the best attention grabbers in digital marketing. From social media and paid search to banner advertising, all of these PPC ads skip time-consuming organic strategies and boost both visibility and traffic for a daily budget that you determine.
5. Use Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords rank better than general terms. That’s why this is a best practice adopted by both paid advertising and off-site SEO strategies. The low competition also means it’s much cheaper to use than a broader term, and it drives higher quality traffic because it’s so specific.
6. Include #Hashtags on Social Media
Social media hashtags are king. Using them in posts, paid or organic, is the only way to gain the most out of each piece of content you publish. And since other people use hashtags on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn to search for things, it’s likely they will find you and visit your website.
7. Drive Traffic via Email
Using email marketing to send regular newsletters drives traffic to your site via email. Even if you have a small mailing list, you can still send out monthly emails to promote special offers, conduct customer surveys or share news customers will appreciate.
8. Consider Guest Blogging
Leveraging authority in your niche industry is best used for guest blogging. Posting blogs on another site is a great way to create links which lead visitors to your site and position you as an influencer. Or, you can have influencers create blog posts for your website and bring their audience to you. Either way, it’s a win-win.
9. Be Active Online
Go beyond your channels to influence others to come to visit yours. Connecting with industry leaders, retweeting interesting observation, commenting on other blogs, participating in niche discussions on Quora or specialized groups on Facebook, can all drive traffic to your website.
10. Analyze, Evaluate, Test, Repeat
Use website analytics and tracking tools to see the success rate of your efforts and figure out what’s working for your website. Knowing where most of your traffic comes from allows you to focus more resources into those channels. It also means you need to use techniques like A/B testing to improve those that don’t work. It’s all about being methodical.
BONUS: Grow Your Business
Use a full-service marketing solution to leverage all available power of marketing to grow and scale your business. After all, a more substantial business means a broader audience and more traffic coming to your site.