If you put time and effort into building your website only to find no one even knows it exists, you need to find a way to create more traffic. Your website’s job is to improve brand awareness, generate leads, increase customer engagement, and ultimately generate revenue.
However, it’s easy to miss opportunities if you aren’t using the right SEO best practices. So here we look at the most effective ways to generate more traffic so people can find you.
Enrich Your Content
Although people will pitch all kinds of crazy SEO tactics to you, the one method that works best is creating high-quality content throughout your entire site. People often think content only relates to blogs, but it includes all the copy on your site. So, the first course of action is to review your website copy to look for opportunities to enrich your content on every single page, right down to your contact form.
Blogging
This doesn’t mean you don’t have to blog. You do, and often. Enriched content is robust with ideas, popular topics relevant to your audience, videos, infographics, images, and keywords. The more engaging your content, the longer people stay on the page and the better your site appears to search engines.
Keywords
Keywords sprinkled throughout your content help search engines quickly learn what you’re all about and determine if your content suits search queries. Your keyword research is crucial to choosing the correct terms and phrases your customers will likely use. They don’t just get used in your copy but also in your titles, headers, body copy, meta descriptions, and URLs. Make life easier using keyword tools like Google Webmaster Tools, Google AdWords Keyword Planner, and SEMRush. Also, if your customers are local, include geo-keywords to show Google where you are to attract more “near me” traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
Yes, this is SEO: search engine optimization. But how do you do this to ensure people find the content you worked so hard to create? Here’s how:
- Privacy settings: There is a chance you inadvertently did not set your privacy settings to Public, allowing search engines to index your pages and find you during searches. Check to make sure this isn’t the case and fix it if it is.
- Security: Make sure your URLs use HTTPS over HTTP, as this tells search engines your website is secure.
- Add Internal Links: Links leading to logical content on your site that enhances visitor experience helps improve engagement AKA longer time on page. Visitors will intuitively discover more information, increasing their odds of returning to your site or sharing your links. Instead of getting bored or frustrated, they will continue to delve deeper into your site. Search engine bots also love internal links as they use them for indexing, which improves your ranking.
- Add external backlinks: Backlinks from authoritative sites can improve your credibility and help build authority. This generates organic traffic from trusted websites, which can be something as simple as local industry associations, directories, or industry-related authorities. When an expert links to your site, it is a clear message to search engines you can be trusted.
- Site speed: Your web pages should load in a few seconds to impress search engines and keep visitors on the page. The longer a page takes, the more likely people will leave. If your pages load slowly, you need to have a web developer help out, as something is likely amok. Your site might need maintenance to weed out unnecessary things like plug-ins, outdated formats, or the wrong type or size images.
- Intuitive navigation: Along with external links, you want visitors to find that your site navigation is intuitive and helps improve user experience and SEO.
Google Business Profile
As mentioned, local SEO is vital to brick-and-mortar shops and companies serving a specific area. For example, search engines conduct local searches for those near me searches when someone is trying to find the best pizza in Smallville.
One of the best tools to drive traffic to your local business is Google Business, a free tool that profiles your business. You can claim your business and complete all the relevant information to ensure you appear in local searches. Some tips to optimize your Google Business profile include:
- NAP consistency: Ensure your NAP (name, address, and phone number) is consistent across all online contact pages, from your social media pages to your website and directories to your Google Business profile.
- Monitor directories: With so many directories, it’s hard to keep track of your NAP and reviews. You can use directory management tools to monitor directories that could have incorrect information about your business. You can also find opportunities on these sites to complete your business information, including your website link.
- Use location keywords: Use location search terms to help your profile stand out.
- Google Reviews: Ask customers to provide reviews, as Google uses reviews to rank local businesses in search results.
Leverage Social Media
If you’re having better luck with traffic on your social pages, leverage them to drive traffic to your website. For example, you can post links to each of your new blog posts, new product/service pages, videos, landing pages and news about recent events. Then include social channel links on your website and the option to share your blog content on social feeds.
Study Visitor Behavior
Don’t ignore essential clues about the traffic you receive. These visits are telling, providing valuable insights like time on page, bounce rates, heat maps that show the most visited pages, and other things like the links a visitor follows. You can also determine where traffic comes from, such as ads, social media posts, YouTube, or marketplaces you sell products. Visitor behavior provides an opportunity to use high-volume pages to improve the appearance and content of lower-volume pages. You can also focus your marketing efforts on the tactics that drive the most qualified traffic to your site to improve marketing spend ROI.
With these tips, you can boost traffic on your site to increase brand awareness, generate more qualified leads, or sell more products.
Do you need help with getting more traffic to your website? We’re happy to chat!.
