Angela Hausman, PhD April 7, 2021 You worked hard to build your website. You created a mobile-friendly website, published new content over the months and years since launch, and followed SEO best practices. Despite your best efforts, however, you now find traffic to your website stagnating. How do you drive visitors to your website? That’s our topic today.
Well, continuing to do the same things you’ve always done will generate the same results in all likelihood. You must consider making a change to your digital marketing strategy if you hope to drive more visitors to your website.
Today we’ll discuss some of my favorite tactics and strategies for increasing traffic to your website.
Drive visitors to your website
1. Advertise
Advertising is an excellent tool for driving more visitors to your website. Consider adding page search, social media advertising, or participating in the Google Display Network (GDN). Obviously, this strategy involves some capital outlay but advertising is one of the best strategies for driving visitors to your website.
Relying on SEO alone isn’t always enough to drive visitors to your website and, despite claims to the contrary, spending a little on PPC ads (Google Ads and GDN) boosts your rank in search, at least that’s been my experience. While not particularly effective in achieving conversion (at least without remarketing) pay-per-click and social advertising often help give your website traffic a boost.
Enhancing the appeal of this digital marketing strategy, digital advertising is a fairly affordable method of advertising your site with highly targeted advertising that gets better results than most traditional advertising strategies. PPC ads don’t take the place of SEO but they can be used to help you increase your traffic and improve your site’s popularity.
2. Build engagement on social platforms
Don’t be fooled that the size of your social media following has any impact in driving visitors to your website. Instead, focus on engagement. Engagement involves user involvement with your posts such as posting comments, clicking likes, or sharing your content. These actions act as endorsements of your content, making others in their social network more likely to check out your website. Engagement also amplifies your message to reach other users who are connected to the engaged user. Since commonality usually exists between members of a network, the reach of your message to your target market likely increases. The greater your reach, the more traffic you drive to your website.
Building social media engagement involves posting content users find interesting, entertaining, or valuable on a consistent basis. Building engagement also relies on developing a relationship with users by answering their questions and responding to their comments quickly.
Building engagement isn’t an easy task. Hence, using automation tools that help schedule content so you publish on a consistent basis and listening tools to monitor and respond to brand mentions make sure task much easier.
3. Publish New Content
Regularly publishing new content is essential for SEO and it is this content you use to drive visitors to your website. Think about what your audience is looking for using tools like Google trends and monitoring content your competitors publish to see how they achieve engagement. Headlines, featured images, and meta descriptions not only contribute to SEO but also show up in search results. So, make these elements of your posts pop and stand out to users if you want to drive visitors to your website. When you post new content, share it on your social platforms, send an email to subscribers linking to the fresh content, and send links through your RSS feed to followers.
Image courtesy of Marketing Insider Group
As well as looking for new topics to cover, consider revisiting older content to update it in new ways. For instance, can a blog post become a video? Should you eliminate old content or update it with newer information? A website containing obsolete content with messages that no longer work damages your reputation and reduces opportunities to drive visitors to your website.
Changing up your content formats will also drive visitors to your website. Consider adding video and images to spice up your text content, for instance. Also, consider changing up the length of each post. By mixing up short, snappy posts with long-form content and data-driven insights you’ll drive visitors to your website. Make your content readable by using a table of contents, subheadings, and interspersing images within your content makes the content much more attractive and helps visitors find the exact content they want without forcing them to read the entire post.
4. Get Expert Help
The SEO algorithm changes all the time so your strategies must also change to adapt to the algorithm. If you’re not sure what to do next with SEO, you might need some help. Choosing to hire professional SEO services is a good next step. Alternatively, spend some time reading content from SEO experts such as Moz and SEMrush.
Among the changes made recently to the SEO algorithm are the inclusion of factors such as site load time, schema microdata, as well as updating poorly written or old content, as suggested above.
5. Improve Your User Experience
Your site might not get as much traffic as you would like, especially from repeat visitors, if you’re not offering a good user experience. If your site is slow or difficult to navigate, people are less likely to spend time on the site or to come back over time. You’ll notice problems with user experience (or UX) through your site’s bounce rate, which roughly translates as “I came, saw nothing I liked, I left”.
Easy-to-understand navigation is a core element of a good user experience. You also provide a good user experience when links embedded in social media and email marketing take users to the correct landing page rather than dumping them on the homepage of your website.
A poor UX design also affects SEO, especially if your site shows a high bounce rate. By improving the experience you offer to users, you’ll discover the ability to drive visitors to your website.
6. Monitor website performance
Building on the previous discussion about bounce rate, monitoring your website’s performance is an absolute imperative. Every day, check out key performance metrics (KPIs) such as bounce rate, time on site, and other metrics that impact your success. Every business is different, so ensure you monitor the metrics that matter for your business. Check out the dashboard below for some ideas.
There are other things you should consider as you monitor your website’s performance. For instance, monitor traffic from each of the major traffic sources, such as organic traffic that comes from your search efforts, traffic from social media resulting from your efforts on those platforms, and referral traffic coming from backlinks on other websites (BTW, these last 2 metrics also impact your SEO).
Monitoring website performance isn’t enough, however. You must analyze metrics to develop insights and use these insights to optimize your digital marketing strategy. That way, you’ll drive visitors to your website.
7. Search for guest post opportunities
Guest posting on related websites helps your business in two ways: 1) it helps SEO by providing backlinks to your website and 2) it increases your online reputation as an expert in your industry. As your reputation increases, so will the number of backlinks you gain and more visitors will seek out your advice.
Carefully choose the websites for your guest posts, as choosing poorly can damage your reputation and hurt your SEO. Choose websites in your industry or those that write about topics related to your website. Pay attention to the domain authority (DA) of the sites where you choose to guest post, as these reflect the reputation of that website.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed these tips designed to drive visitors to your website. Recognize, that this is a long-term process and nothing happens overnight. But if you stick to your strategy over time, you’ll see more traffic to your website.
Obviously, your ultimate goal isn’t to drive visitors to your website, it’s to convert that traffic. The more traffic you send to your website, however, the better your conversion looks. Increasing your conversion rate, which is the most important goal for your website, is a topic for another day.
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