Opinion holder entrepreneur Contributors are their own.
Traffic is the lifeblood of any online business. And without it it is difficult to achieve success. No matter how much time, effort, and money you put into building your website, if you don’t get any traffic, your site is worthless. And that’s bad for business.
Torgarto | Getty Images
RELATED: 3 Super Simple Pinterest Strategies to Quickly Increase Website Traffic
Given that increasing traffic to your site increases your chances of success in your online business, here’s what you need to know.
Based on my time building and growing dozens of websites, here are 6 proven techniques I’ve found to drive traffic to your website.
1. Recognize that content is king.
You won’t see results overnight, but a strong content marketing strategy is one of the best ways to increase traffic to your website in the long run.
In the past, this could have meant stuffing your pages with keywords to artificially boost your search engine results page (SERP) ranking. However, Google now clearly advises against this. While it’s still important to create SEO-friendly content (Wordstream has a helpful guide on how to do this), Google’s increasingly sophisticated search algorithms are constantly trying to “sniff” quality rather than do a good job
shortcut, Things like keyword stuffing to outsmart Google’s algorithms and boost your page’s rankings are not only ineffective, they can actually get your site penalized by Google, warns Kissmetrics. . Plus, high-quality content is much more likely to be shared, resulting in more backlinks to your website. Backlinks not only drive more organic traffic, but they also improve your SERP rankings.
According to SearchEngineWatch, Google’s first page results receive 92% of all traffic. Organic traffic drops off sharply from there. Creating quality content and improving organic search results is one of the best ways to increase traffic to your site.
Related: 50 Easy Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Website
2. Be social.
Being active on social media is one of the best ways to stay engaged with your audience and drive traffic back to your website. Hosting giant GoDaddy found her Facebook page attached to his 61% of high-traffic sites. Having a Facebook page and Twitter account is considered a must for online businesses today, but don’t ignore unestablished platforms.
For example, let’s say your business is primarily B2B. In that case, LinkedIn could be a gold mine for leads. Does your business sell products with a strong visual identity? On Instagram, your photos say a thousand words. Digiday says it’s getting harder and harder to achieve organic reach on Facebook. As such, expanding your social media footprint is one of the best and most cost-effective ways to reach your customers.
3. Optimize for mobile.
In May 2015, Google announced that search volume on mobile devices surpassed desktop searches for the first time. This trend continues and there is no reason to think it will go away any time soon as mobile devices become faster and more sophisticated. Unsurprisingly, Google now factors a website’s mobile-friendliness into his SERP rating. We also offer free tools to check your website’s mobile friendliness.
Mobile readiness not only affects a website’s SERP ranking, but it can also affect consumer confidence in your business and the likelihood that people will recommend it. A Google study found that 89% of people are more likely to recommend a brand after feeling good about the brand experience on mobile. Even in this digital age, word of mouth is a powerful tool for driving traffic to your website.
4. Optimize for speed.
Page speed is another factor that greatly affects usability as well as SERP rankings. No one is sitting around waiting for a page to load. According to Kissmetrics, 40% of people abandon websites that take him more than 3 seconds to load. One of the most common causes of slow page load times is image size.
Free tools like ImageOptim make it easy to compress images before publishing them on your website. Depending on the platform your website is built for, a plugin like Smush for WordPress allows you to retroactively optimize all your images. If your website makes extensive use of images, this can significantly improve performance.
Again, Google offers free tools that give you an idea of how your website’s speed is measured.
5. Email Marketing.
Email marketing will exist as long as email exists. It has become so ubiquitous that observers have sometimes predicted its demise. Cold email may be deadly due to spam filter efficiency and regulations like GDPR, but marketing to a list of avid subscribers is still the most efficient way to drive traffic to your website. is one of
What better way to communicate new products, services, or content than by sending your subscribers timely, relevant, and personalized emails?
If you have an ecommerce business, using an automated email marketing tool like MageMail can significantly increase your sales. These solutions let you retarget customers who browse your site or add items to their cart without completing a purchase. Abandoned cart emails have a staggering average open rate of 40% if sent within 3 hours of being abandoned. Business Insider.
6. Pay-Per-Click and Social Media Advertising.
Organic search can improve your business’s ROI in the long run, while paid search can deliver results faster. A well thought out and executed Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign via Google Adwords can lead to a dramatic increase in traffic.
But be sure to do your research. PPC campaigns can quickly become expensive if poorly planned and targeted. Google’s Keyword Planner is an invaluable tool, but it’s not the only one. Ahrefs helps you pinpoint exactly what your competitors are doing with their paid search campaigns. SEMrush can show you your competitors’ budgets, best keywords, and most profitable ad copy. With this knowledge, he can adjust and improve his PPC campaigns accordingly.
We’ve already talked about the importance of having a strong social media strategy to drive traffic to your website. But simply creating and sharing quality content on social media channels is no longer enough.
This is especially true for Facebook. A recent newsfeed change called “Facebook Zero” makes it even harder to reach your followers organically. Enter Facebook Ads. With Facebook’s vast store of customer data, you can really drill down into your target audience and serve ads only to the demographics you define.
RELATED: How to Increase Online Sales on a Low-Traffic Website
final thoughts
It’s hard to argue that starting an online business has never been easier. One result of this is that it has never been more difficult to stand out from the crowd. Use the six proven traffic-building strategies outlined above for your online business today. Search engine results tell the story.
