What Are the Most Effective Ways of Increasing Traffic to Your Website?

When it comes to increasing traffic to your website, there are two primary ways to do so. The first way is free and consists of: search engine optimization, creating a blog, using social media, acquiring backlinks, and using other free tools to get more customers to land on your website. Another way of bringing more traffic to your website is by paid ads. For a successful marketing plan and for the best outcome, you should consider both ways. Below you can read about the process of getting more customers to your website.

Reasons for Bringing More Traffic

Before we get to the primary ways of bringing the traffic, let’s explore why it is that the traffic to your website so vital. It’s not a surprise that, nowadays, when it comes to internet marketing, the competition is incredibly high. There over 1.5 billion web pages available online. And no matter what products or services you are selling, you are part of an unbelievable competition. You might be thinking: you design and create a website, write about your services and products, publish it, and the job is done – but you couldn’t be more wrong. Although we applaud you for creating a stunning design, if you don’t invest your time in search engine optimization and ways of getting traffic, then your potential clients will not have a chance to look at your page at all. Instead, they are going to land on the websites of your competitors. And guess what? If your potential clients do not see your website online, then you are losing consumers and the time invested in creating a website is wasted. According to the eCommerce Foundation, 88% of consumers will research product information before they make a purchase online or in the store. Your goal should be to appear in relevant search results in order to get more clients.

1.   SEO – Search Engine Optimization

The more traffic you have, the better your page ranks; the better your web page ranks, the more traffic you get. Rank is referred to as a website’s position in search results, and numerous factors affect your performance in search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization is a process of optimizing your web page so that it ranks better in desired queries – requests for information. The reason you want to rank high is that, when your customers search for the products and services you offer, you want them to land on your website, and that’s how you can establish a relationship with them. As we said, if your website doesn’t appear in the search results, you are losing your potential clients who could be checking out your products and services right now. That is why we think SEO is the most crucial step in increasing traffic.

On-Page SEO

When you adjust and take measures directly on your website and optimize to rank higher, it’s called On-Page SEO. On-Page SEO starts with the content on your website because it’s the most crucial element of your page. Content is among the major factors by which Google ranks pages. Relevant and high-quality content is going to keep your customers on your web page longer, meaning they find the relevant information and that might positively affect your ranking.

For organizing websites from the most relevant to the least relevant content, search engines use special algorithms. Although the exact formulas for those algorithms stay unrevealed to the public, there are some primary factors that you must keep in mind when optimizing a website.

Keywords

Keywords are crucial in the process of optimizing your site, and they enable you to choose on which searches your website appears. Having keywords allows users to find your content online using words and phrases in their queries. To select the right keywords, you should determine what your clients are going to search online to find your products. Each keyword has a number of searches in a particular time frame, and this is called Keyword Search Volume. Keyword Search Volume is usually analyzed within specific time frames to allow SEO experts and marketers to see how a keyword can drive traffic over time. If you target the right keywords, then the chances of getting relevant traffic are higher. Knowing Keyword Search Volume will help to target keywords that will bring more customers. There are numerous free keyword search tools you can try for analyzing desired keywords like SEM Rush, SearchVolume.io, KWfinder, and others.

There are two different types of keywords: Short-tail keywords contain one or two words and long-tail keywords that consist of three to five or even more words. Long-tail keywords are primarily used for more specific results.

Page Speed

After successfully targeting the desired keywords, you should remember that loading your page will be your clients’ first impression of your business. Clicking a website is just a step in the process, and if your site takes forever to load, your clients are just a click away from going back to the search results. And by ‘forever,’ we mean everything that takes more than 5 seconds to load. Statistics published on Think with Google in 2017 and updated in 2018, shows that if a page is taking up to 5 seconds to load, the probability of bounce increases by 90%. It also shows that 53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Bounce rate is the percentage of users leaving a website without spending an amount of time that is considered as significant to a search engine. There is no point in appearing in a search result if users are going to abandon your website. Also, page speed is among the few ranking factors that Google confirmed twice in 2010 and 2018. After the algorithm update in 2018, many sites that were considered slow disappeared from the search results. Page speed has been a ranking factor since 2010, but it was only for desktop searches. Since 2018, page speed has become a ranking factor for mobile searches, too. What this means is that, if you want to appear in the search results, you should take into account that Google and other search engines are going to check the website speed before offering it to users. Because, as we saw from the statistics, there is no point in ranking a website if it’s slow.

On-Page SEO elements also include Page titles, headers, meta descriptions, and internal linking. If you want to find out more about On-Page SEO, consider reading The Ultimate Guide to On-Page SEO in 2020 by HubSpot.

Off-page SEO

Off-Page SEO involves techniques you use to rank better in search results outside the boundaries of your website.

Backlinks

Backlinks are an essential part of off-site SEO. When reliable and relatable websites link back to your site, search engines consider your web page trustworthy and you are going to rank better. There are different types of links: Natural links, Manually Built links, and Self-created links.

• Natural links are the ones given with no involvement of a page owner. For example, we linked to HubSpot in this article to provide you with the Ultimate Guide to On-Page SEO in 2020.
• Manually built links are those acquired by activities like asking customers to link to your website, getting influencers to link to your content, or even reaching to different pages to share your content.
• Self-created links are obtained through commenting on blogs, form signatures, and guest posts, and are primarily used to trick search engines. Google devalues and even penalizes these types of links, so we don’t suggest using them.

2. Increasing Traffic through Voice Search

Voice search is something we should all keep in mind when increasing traffic to a website. Statistics predict 50% of searches will be by voice in 2020. Optimizing for a voice search might be different as the users tend to search for things differently when speaking to a device. The language people use with voice search is much closer to the natural language humans use in daily life. That is why you should target long-tail keywords. Besides, LSI Keywords – words and phrases associated with the main keyword – come in very handy with voice search. Google analyzes pages not only by the number of specific keywords, but also by the presence of LSI keywords. Having words associated with the main keyword gives Google the signal that the page is related to the search. And Page Speed, as we already have discussed, is a crucial factor in ranking – so make sure to speed your site up for all kinds of searches.

3. Social Media

Social media is among the most essential online marketing tools, and it should be part of your off-page SEO strategy. Social media is a great place to raise awareness of your products and services. It is going to help with positive engagement with your business. Social media also helps you build authority and use backlinks.

“By focusing on building an engaged network of social media followers, your content has more relevant places to live. And the more relevant places it lives in, the more authority you gain. For instance, if you create content about Yoga and get backlinks from blogs that specifically write about Yoga, you get more brownie points from Google and other search engines. They’ll know that you’re publishing content that is reaching a relevant audience.” – Writes Lyfe Marketing.

SEO is the most crucial element in bringing more traffic to your website. However, optimizing a website takes a long time, and sometimes, it requires months or even years to get top positions. SEO, unlike advertising, can be free, but it needs an investment of time. Also, if you are not capable of performing optimization yourself, you will have to pay for SEO services.

4. Creating a Blog

Creating a blog is among the most effective ways to bring traffic to your website. Having a blog allows you to write about topics relevant to your products and services. When your potential clients search for information, most of the time, they search for a solution. Many users, especially millennials, want to solve problems themselves, by the information available online. But they solve problems until they cannot, and when it comes to purchasing a product or finding a service, they are going to trust the website that has been providing them with useful information. Besides, by having a blog, you keep your site updated and fresh. Search engines avoid outdated information, so when your website is continuously updated, it’s like a signal that your page has new content. Additionally, a blog is an excellent way of using internal links pointing from one page of your site to another. It also helps you get backlinks from outside sources.

5. Google Ads

And finally, advertisements help in getting more traffic. Unlike SEO, you will have to pay either for each click or per view. When people search for a keyword, there is a result above free results with an ‘Ad’ icon, and it indicates that the website owner paid for an advertisement. This is a fast and effective way to catch a user’s eye. This model is called PPC, and the name stands for pay-per-click. The results of PPC are instant, and as opposed to optimization, you don’t have to wait for desired results. However, PPC does not help with ranking. If you stop paying for the ad, the ad will disappear and the traffic gained through the advertisement will stop. If you try to compare PPC with SEO, we are going to tell you straight away: There is no point in doing so. To get the best results, you might want to consider both. As SEO takes a long time to get desired results, while you are optimizing a website, you can use PPC to gain traffic. Using PPC without optimizing a website will not be beneficial, as once users click on the site, you will still need to provide an excellent user experience for them to stay and have an interest in your products.

Need Help Increasing Site Traffic? Let’s Talk.

Your team of experts at Internet Marketing Geeks is here to help. Whether you need a consultation for advice, a diagnosis of why your tactics are not picking up traffic, or a full-on strategy and implementation, Internet Marketing Geeks is here to help. Reach out today. We’d love to meet you!