Increasing traffic to your website isn’t something restricted to the job description of a digital marketer. Every business owner wants ‘traffic’ flocking to their website and come out the other end as successful ‘customers’. Traffic defines the success of a business at the end of the day. Higher traffic gives greater opportunities to increase sales and ad revenue. It even works for charity organizations that are looking to raise money for a good cause – in short, traffic is the one thing that will keep your business floating. Let’s discuss these 10 easy steps that could bring business to your website.
1) Quality content
Don’t just rehash what is already out there in bland words and sentences. Instead, contribute to actual content by focusing on quality. This is especially true if you want to gain natural backlinks, stir up social media shares, and improve the user experience on your website. Even if you manage to use SEO to get a higher rank on search engines, if the content itself is lackluster, visitors will simply ‘bounce’ off your website and go to a competitor’s page.
2) Blogging about your business’s problems
This step is particularly true if you have an online business that has become successful enough for visitors to become curious. If you get a lot of questions from clients, it is a good idea to collate them in one place and provide answers. If your website offers only content, people will still have questions that need answering. This helps you save time by not having to give short replies every time you get asked a question.
So why is this good? Because people type these questions on Google, and if your website already has the answers, then it will show up on the first page. This is a great way of increasing organic traffic.
3) Contribute to reputable sites in the industry
A great way of promoting your website is to become a contributor on popular websites from your industry. Be shameless in promoting your blog, but be careful not to overdo it. If you’re writing a big blog, simply provide a link that adds actual value to the content you are providing.
This way you kill two birds with one stone, getting your website across an established community and creating good backlinks. You should, however, be careful about guest blogging on websites that don’t have a high enough quality on Google yet as that could have a negative impact on your website.
4) Backlinks – between the good and the bad
The power of backlinks could not be more undervalued by SEO experts. Not helping its cause are the rumors that Google will decrease the ‘value’ of backlinks in the future. However, many experts claim this isn’t the case and links will remain a major ranking factor for several years to come.
It is true that you can still gain traffic with just a few links. It’s naive to think you could compete against more authoritative sites in your niche without earning quality backlinks. If you want your blog to become successful, you will have to take into account both backlinks, the good ones and the bad. Not all backlinks are created equally – it really isn’t a race when it comes to cluttering your blog with links that don’t make any sense.
You should analyze the backlinks being used on our site and compare them using a suitable metric.
Here are few tips you could use to make a good backlink:
- It should come from a relevant website in your niche
- Links should be contextual – not plugged in just for the sake of it
- Links should be taken from long, detailed articles
- The backlinks should be ‘gofollow’, which means it allows Google to follow them and reach a website.
- The link is taken from a website that has a high domain authority
5) Writing catchy headlines
Many people frown upon catchy headlines, calling them ‘click-bait’ titles that deliver nothing but failed promises. But without a headline that grips the audience’s attention, how do you expect them to click on your website at all? It is a good idea to invest a significant portion of your time in writing a masterful headline that has the power to pull in audiences.
6) Meta data research
Meta data details are the ‘windows’ through which Google looks at a website. This makes it all the more important to fill relevant keywords that are compatible with the meta data in the first paragraph of the blog. Your website will have a strong chance of ranking higher if the meta data contains information related to queries commonly asked on Google.
7) Doing keyword research
Keyword research is arguably THE most important part of your search engine optimization journey. It alerts you about the exact words and phrases your blog needs in order to rank higher on Google. Before writing a new blog post, you should check about the most popular keywords, but don’t pick them only by the search volume. Long tail keywords are just as valuable and allow your website to rank faster.
8) Focusing on an internal linking system
Think of a good internal linking system as an easy way to create backlinks to your blogs. Providing internal links to relevant high-quality posts is a great way of increasing your SEO ranking and has been proven to increase average visitor time on your website.
9) Asking readers to link to your website
If you are struggling with natural backlinks, you can always ask your existing reader base to link back to your websites. This can be done by placing a small widget at the bottom of your posts. Embedded linking widgets work exactly like social media sharing links, and they increase your chances of getting more backlinks. Be careful not to appear ‘forceful’. Remember, your goal is to make the content easy to access on your website.
10) Monitoring your views
Once you begin acquiring traffic to your website, you should identify where they are coming from. Your existing SEO solution needs to continuously evolve if it wants to remain optimized with search engines that constantly update their algorithms. Analyze what keywords are working best, and perform an analysis of your backlinks.