If you’re a business owner looking for more web traffic, read on. Not too long ago, the go-to resource for business information was the yellow pages. Or, if you were looking for a local business, you’d have to head to the main shopping street in town. Nowadays, of course, everything happens online. We’re so used to searching for things online that we usually turn to a search engine like Google first. This means that if you’re running a business, your potential customers are already searching for products or services like the ones you offer. So it doesn’t matter if you’re a startup or an established business—you need these people to be able to find your website.More and more businesses are trying to get traffic online, so it’s becoming very competitive. It has become a race to see who can get the most traffic. The business with the best offer and the most traffic wins. So if you want your business to grow, you need to make sure you’re getting more traffic than your competitors.
How to Get Traffic to Your Website
As marketers, we love it when more people are looking at our brand. More eyes mean more attention. And the best way to get that attention is to increase website traffic. Generally speaking, more qualified traffic leads to more customers and more revenue.
- Audience Insights
knowing your audience let’s you better communicate with them about the things they are struggling with and what interests them. You can make content that is more relatable to them, which in turn gets more clicks and views.
So how do you get deep insights into your audience? There are a number of tools and tactics that are helpful, including:
- Market research – Analyze search and social data, dive into competitor analytics, conduct interviews, work with focus groups, or work with market research consultants.
- Survey current customers – Ask your customers to tell you both how you help them and ways you could improve.
- Context-specific surveys and polls – Use contextually relevant surveys/polls on different pages of your website to get real-time information about what your customers need help with.
- Chat with your support team – Your customer support team is on the front lines of helping customers. They can give you valuable information about the problems your audience is dealing with.
- Talk with sales – Ask your sales team what solutions and features your audience is asking for. Uncover any initial objections prospective customers tend to raise, as well as your sales team’s messaging for overcoming those objections.
- Use Google Analytics – Look at the pages that already get website traffic and replicate their success. Are they ecommerce pages or blog posts? Do visitors come from Google or social networks?
- Map the customer journey
In order to get more traffic to your site, understand your customers’ journey through the decision funnel. This includes everything from when they become aware of an opportunity or problem, to when they decide to purchase from you.
Mapping out the customer journey can help you to create content that is more likely to convert buyers. By understanding the steps that your customers take from start to finish, you can create targeted content that speaks to their needs at each stage. This Content will then guide them through the conversion funnel, making it more likely that they will take the desired action.
For example, say you sell running shoes. A person who just started running probably doesn’t know what kind of shoes they want. You can create guides, videos, and articles that help them understand the different types of running shoes.
Upon gaining a comprehensive understanding of everything that goes into a running shoe, provide them with high-quality content and tools that compare different options and enable them to pick the best pair for their feet, running style, and goals.
- Target the right keywords to increase website traffic
One of the most effective ways to get traffic to your website is through SEO. Compared to paid traffic, SEO traffic is 5.3 times more effective in terms of ROI.
Keyword research
What this means is that customers will use different keywords depending on what stage of the decision-making process they are in. Searches done early on, when customers are just beginning to consider their options, are usually more general than searches done later, when customers are closer to making a purchase.
For example, if someone is in the awareness stage, they might just be searching for running shoes in general, because they’re not familiar with any brands or products yet.
A person who is in the consideration phase of the purchasing process will be more specific in their search. So, they might search for the best trail running shoes for men.
Someone later on in the process might search Google for a comparison of Nike Air Zoom Tempo against Hoka Challenger ATR 6, or for reviews of Nike Air Zoom Tempo.
The person is about to purchase the product and is looking for a Nike Air Zoom Tempo with free shipping.
What are some keywords my customers might use during each stage of their journey? Use a tool like Ahrefs Keyword Explorer or Google Trends to identify valuable long-tail keyword variations, too.
As you look at the keywords, consider:
- Search volume
- Search intent
- Keyword difficulty
- Your website’s organic search performance on related keywords
- Number of linking root domains you may need to reach page one
- Domain Authority or Domain Rating of the website ranking on page one
Build topic clusters and pillar pages
Once you have found the best keywords for your website, it is important to group them into different topics. This will help you to target different areas of your website more effectively.
Content clusters are a way of organizing your content into groups of related topics. You create a main page on a topic, called a pillar page, which links to pages with more specific information on related subtopics. Topic clusters are a great way to increase traffic to your website at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
- Answer valuable questions to increase traffic to website pages
Answering potential customer questions is one of the best ways to grow website traffic. This is because providing thorough answers will increase the amount of time visitors stay on your site, and decrease the bounce rate.
If you have a well-crafted website, you have a chance of being featured in the organic search results, which can generate a lot of traffic. For example, the beauty website Byrdie often appears in the featured snippet section.
There are a number of tools that can help you identify the specific questions your audience is asking online, including:
- Answer the Public lets you type in a keyword and then it will spit out a long list of related questions.
- BuzzSumo allows you to search millions of forum posts like those found on Quora and Reddit to find real questions people are asking.
- Question Hub is a new tool by Google that reveals all the unanswered questions people search for on the web.
To improve your website, you should focus on finding the right questions to answer, and then working hard to provide answers to those questions on your website.
- Technical SEO
When you’re looking into how to get more traffic to your website, you might not think about website architecture. But it’s actually a pretty important factor. Technical SEO ensures that your website is as Google-friendly as possible, which means structuring your site so Google can understand it and crawl each URL efficiently.
The text is suggesting that you first submit an XML sitemap to help search engines find your content. After that, you should organize your pages in a way that is easy for users to navigate. You should also try to make all content accessible within three clicks.
A tool like Screaming Frog or ContentKing can help you detect and fix any crawl errors. It can also help you locate and fix broken links.
If you want Google to understand which pages to crawl and avoid duplication errors, use canonical tags. If you’ve changed the URLs of pages, make sure you have proper 301 redirects in place.
Google is going to be prioritizing speed in the near future, so it’s a good idea to use web speed testing tools to see where your website can improve in that area. Some good options for this are Google’s PageSpeed Insights, Google Lighthouse, and Pingdom.
Find ways to include structured data in your pages to make it more likely for them to show up as rich snippets.
- On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the process of ensuring that each page is properly optimized for maximum organic search rankings. There are a number of specific steps you should take when optimizing web pages, including:
- Map each page to a specific primary keyword.
- Use URLs that are simple, clean, easy to understand, keyword-rich, and follow a logical path.
- Include your keyword early in the title tag, and make the title as compelling and clickable as possible.
- Make your meta description compelling and descriptive so that when people read it they want to visit the page.
- Use headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to organize your content and make it more readable. Try to include the target keyword in at least one or two headings.
- For the top ranking content on Google page one for the target keyword, identify the other, related keywords for which such content is also ranking on page one. This will provide you with additional, secondary keywords that you can target.
- Optimize body copy by sprinkling in both your primary and long-tail keywords throughout.
- Use relevant internal links and external links to help search engines understand how the page relates to other pages on your site and external sites.
- Give images descriptive names and appropriate alt tags.
- Improve your Google SERP click-through rate
If your website already has a lot of content focused around keywords, you may be able to increase traffic just by improving your click-through rates from search engine results pages.
The more you improve your organic search rankings, the more clicks you will get on your website, and the more traffic you will generate.
CTR can be improved by using Google Search Console to look for keywords and pages with a high number of impressions and a low number of clicks. If the title tag is not aligned with search intent, titles and meta descriptions should be rewritten to improve keyword rankings and make them more compelling.
Use language that will appeal to users’ search intent and help them know that your page has the information they’re looking for. Try to find ways to make the messaging in your listing different from the others on the page. When it’s appropriate, use modifiers (“definitive”, “essential”, “unique”, etc.) to help you stand out in the search results pages.
- Get backlinks with off-page SEO tactics
In Google’s estimation, backlinks are a critical ranking factor. The more high-quality links a page has, the more relevant and authoritative it will appear. If you want to rank higher and increase website traffic, you should try to build as many high-quality backlinks as possible through strategic outreach.
When thinking about link building, it is important to keep in mind that not every link is created equal. The most successful links are those which are not only relevant to your website, but also have a high authority. If, for example, you sell IT services and receive a link from a local pizza place, it will not be very beneficial for your website. Google could even view it as an attempted to manipulate the system, which could lead to a penalty.
How can you acquire these types of backlinks?
- Create link-worthy content that provides massive value.
- Write guest posts on trustworthy websites.
- Get interviewed in popular publications, blogs, and on podcasts.
- Conduct unique research.
- Ask for backlinks when someone mentions your brand naturally.
- Partner with influencers, bloggers, and relevant publications.
At its heart, link building is about developing positive relationships. If you regularly give something of value to others, they’ll be happy to provide a link to your site.
What About What Google Wants?
To improve your chances of getting a high ranking on Google, they have been explicit about what they are looking for.
Here are some of the ranking factors Google is looking for:
- Speed
If you want your website to rank higher in Google searches, you need to make sure it loads quickly. Google now gives preference to websites that load quickly, so if you want to stay competitive, you need to increase the speed of your website.
Google will prefer websites that load quickly over slower ones.
- Mobile friendly
Ensure your website is mobile-friendly.
An increasing number of people are using their mobile devices to access the internet instead of desktop computers. Therefore, Google will give preference to websites that are designed to be mobile-friendly over those that are not.
- Microdata
It is important to make it easy for Google to know what your website is about.
Google uses schema microdata to better understand a website’s content. The more information Google has about a site, the more likely it is to appear in search results.
- Security
Google is slowly but surely only listing secure websites on its search engine in order to protect its users from potential hacking.
Ensure your website has SSL enabled.
- Time on site
Google’s algorithm for ranking websites takes into account how long people stay on a website. The longer people stay on a website, the more likely it is that the website is relevant and high quality.
The more time someone spends on a website, the more engaged they are with the content. The less time they spend, the less relevant the website is to them.
This is because Google recognizes that if someone stays on your website for a while, it must be because they found the content there useful. Google values websites that offer useful content, and will therefore rank them higher in search results.
Google will show your website to more people if you provide an excellent user experience, as people spending more time on your site indicates to Google that your site is worth showing.
Your website is the first step in your traffic generation strategy. Although other factors are involved in generating traffic, your website is the first port of call and deserves your attention.
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