How to Increase Traffic to Your Website

Ashley Hill — December 9, 2019

The very premise of inbound marketing is to bring traffic to your website’s door, invite them in, and turn these visitors into customers, right?

If you’re looking to expand the traffic to your website (and who isn’t?), you may be left wondering how to do this.

If you approach inbound marketing the wrong way, it can sometimes feel like cooking a seven-course meal and not having anyone show up to eat it. You have put the time and effort into building a website that generates viewer engagement. Now how can you actually bring visitors in—and then get them to buy?

Let’s take a look at a few simple ways you can increase traffic to your website and turn that traffic into paying customers.

Complete Your Google My Business Profile

Your Google My Business profile page is an easy, totally free way to boost your SEO and engage with more web browsers looking for a business just like yours. And the more complete your profile is, the more likely people will want to interact with your webpage.

An incomplete profile makes inquiring minds wonder if your company is still in operation or if your operations are up-to-date. It places doubt in their mind, which is never a great way to introduce your company to a potential customer if you’re trying to make a sale.

It’s incredibly simple to set up your Google My Business page, and it’s well worth it. Sixty percent of consumers have conducted on online search for a business at least six times in the last year. When your potential customers are searching for a company that’s just like yours, is your information going to be there for them?

One caveat to Google My Business: Your company has to have some kind of face-to-face interaction with your customers, meaning you can’t operate solely online. But if you have some kind of storefront or meet with clients, you can’t deny the power of your Google My Business page.

Write Great Content

Content marketing is still a great investment. In fact, content marketing, like creating a blog, gets three times more leads than paid search advertising. In a world where paid advertisements that come up in search results are ignored by 70-80% of people in lieu of organic search results, creating content that is valuable for your potential customers is an undeniably effective way to bring in new visitors.

It’s no secret that I love blogs and love sharing information on how to craft great blog posts. They are a great place to engage readers and to focus on your on-page SEO at the same time. The content you generate isn’t just informative but also a great way to boost your search engine rankings, bringing in more visitors and engaging them with your thoughtful content.

Blogs also boost your SEO, bringing more traffic to your page. Websites with a blog tend to have 434 percent more indexed pages for search engines—which is a 434 percent higher chance that a consumer will find your blog (and your company) thanks to your blogging. It’s definitely an endeavor that’s highly worth it, especially if you are trying to bring in new visitors.

One major thing to consider as you create a blog is how frequently you should post to drive readership and keep your search engine rankings climbing. Check out my recommendations on how frequently you should update your blog.

… And Share Your Great Writing With Other Blogs

If you’re looking to tap into a new audience, what better way to do that than by guest-starring in front of someone else’s audience? Guest writing blog posts for other organizations and publications is a great way to boost your readership—and your credibility.

You get the attention of a larger audience and have a chance to establish your authority, and who knows better than you about your business and industry?

Maybe you’ve heard that guest blogging is going away, but even today it remains one of the most effective ways to bring new visitors to your website—and therefore one of the best inbound marketing strategies.

Tap Into Your Social Media Presence

Here’s a statistic you can’t ignore: Seventy-four percent of people use Facebook for professional reasons. If you aren’t posting your blog posts or putting other content out on your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Pinterest pages, you are missing out on an entire audience of people who are turning to social media for solutions to their problems.

One thing to keep in mind about social media? It’s supposed to be just that: social. Encourage visitors to your account pages to engage with you—it’s a great way to hook them in and get them invested in your brand. Perhaps they can answer a question you’ve asked, tag a friend in an Instagram post or re-post your blog. Invite them in, and you’ll get them invested.

There are dozens upon dozens of great resources for how to use social media to market to a new audience. My main point: Don’t ignore it as a great way to connect. Seventy-one percent of social media users say that positive engagement and interactions with a business via social media drive them to recommend that brand to others.

Want a great way to convert these visitors to customers? Give a promotional discount or downloadable gated content to your social media followers. You can also post about deals, discounts, sales or special events from your social media accounts to encourage followers.

… And Use Video and Images

If you want your social media posts to be effective, they need to be eye-catching. A video is a highly effective way to capture the attention of a new visitor who you can then invite to follow you, sign up for your marketing emails and eventually convert into a new customer.

Want some hard evidence on the power of visuals in your posts? Take a look at these staggering statistics:

• Eighty-one percent of people only skim the content they read online.
  
• Posts with videos attract three times as many links as their text-only alternatives.
  
• Tweets with images get 18 percent more clicks, 89 percent more likes, and 150 percent more retweets than Tweets without images.
  
• The number of videos on Facebook’s newsfeed has increased to be 3.6 times what it used to be—because they are effective.
  
• Posts that include images produce 650 percent more engagement than posts without images.

Don’t deny the power of a picture or the compelling nature of a video. There’s a reason we all get caught up in watching video after video online. Get yours out there, and get your brand noticed!

Start Email Marketing

Once you get visitors to your website, how do you keep them coming back and then convert them to customers? If you have a well-crafted email marketing campaign, you can encourage visitors to sign up for emails.

Whether it’s for a promotional offer or an informational web seminar, you can create opportunities to inspire visitors to sign up for your emails, which is a stellar way to convert visitors to your webpage into customers.

Your best bet is a welcome email (or a welcome email series). Three hundred and twenty percent more revenue is generated from welcome emails than from other marketing emails. Build a welcome email series that nurtures relationships with your visitors.

Ultimately, the more you can do to invite readers in, the more welcoming your brand will feel and the more likely it will be that your visitors will want to engage with you and become loyal customers. And isn’t that what inbound marketing is all about?

If the goal of inbound marketing is to bring traffic to your website’s door, your work to convert visitors to customers should feel like laying out a welcome mat. And when you engage with them in all the right ways, they will definitely ring the doorbell.

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