What’s the most important thing you can get from a website?
If you said “traffic”, ding ding – we have a winner and you win a prize. A website that doesn’t generate website traffic – you know, real people who actually want to come and visit your digital real estate – is worthless. It doesn’t do anything for your brand or business, and is just sitting there, taking up server space and gathering dust.
We can’t have that. If you have a website, you need to generate real numbers – real visitors, real impressions, real time-on-site, and real conversions. How do you fix website traffic and get more visitors? How can you turn on the “Welcome!” sign and attract visitors in droves?
Social Media: It’s Not Just for Cat Videos
One way is to take full advantage of social media.
Many people look at social media as just a way to look at cat videos, rant about sports teams, learn “one weird trick” to lower your credit score, discuss how a celebrity just did something really awesome/stupid, and “talk” to people you went to high school with but haven’t seen in years.
While all of those things are completely awesome ways to use social media (especially the part about watching cat videos), that’s not really the best way to use social media. Social media can actually be a great source of website traffic.
The key is to actually point people toward your website. Say you have this amazing blog that you’ve written. You share it on social media and convince people to like, comment, and share. That’s a good start – you definitely want to do all of the above. But you also want to promote the post by boosting it and sending it out to more people.
You want a catch headline and an enticing image that gets people to click.
You also want to send it out on Twitter and use hashtags. You also want to join Twitter conversations and share your content there as a part of being involved in the conversation.
And naturally, you want to post in Google communities and LinkedIn groups and share your wisdom there, too. This goes double if you have promotions – discounts, coupons, offers, contests, etc.
Use social media as a way to generate more traffic to your website. If you post it, they will come.
Guest Blog Like Crazy
Another way you can boost website traffic is to guest blog like crazy.
We don’t mean crazy like an escaped patient from an asylum. We mean crazy like relentlessly, aggressively, and with determination. There are a ton of blogs out there, and they all want content. All you have to do is propose something of value to them – a blog post, written by you, on something that interests their readers.
Pitch interesting ideas to the owners of these blogs. Offer to write or create whatever they need. And be sure to include links back to your website. Oh, and offer to reciprocate and post one of their blogs on your site. It works both ways; their readers will come to your website, too.
Now, don’t look at guest blogging as this awesome SEO tactic, because as Google has said, it isn’t anymore. While it may not be great at getting backlinks, though, it is still great for traffic, and that’s what we’re all about.
Pay For It – With Advertising
Social media and guest blogging are great organic ways to increase website traffic, but what about other ways?
Some people are so caught up in organic marketing that they visibly recoil when they hear the word “advertising”. It’s like they just caught a whiff of a particularly odorous piece of cheese, or something else equally distasteful. The truth is, advertising, done appropriately, can be a very effective way to generating website traffic.
The king of online advertising, arguably, is Google AdWords. With AdWords, you can choose appropriate keywords and then pay for clicks that lead to landing pages, which – ding ding again – are on your website and thus contribute to website traffic.
PPC advertising is used by brands from small mom-and-pop shops to multinational corporations. Everyone does it because it works. So what if it isn’t organic? It provides you with a traffic boost while your organic SEO catches up.
Speaking of which…
Make Sure Your SEO Is Solid
This is the number one, biggest reason why websites don’t generate traffic: their SEO is abysmal.
It is not a case of “If you build it, they will come” because a website, without proper optimization, doesn’t really do anything for you.
You need the right keywords in the right places. You need the right back-end optimization. You need anchor text, backlinks, cross-links, favorable page structure, submission to directories, and a million other details. It all goes into making sure your website appears on that crucial first page.
We highly recommend auditing your website for SEO if you truly want to fix website traffic. Since the vast majority of people arrive on websites thanks to search, making your website as visible as possible is the first major step in fixing traffic.
Putting It All Together
At the end of the day, in order to generate website traffic, you need:
- A robust social media presence;
- Content that is entertaining to read and points back to your website;
- A site that has been fully optimized for search engines;
- A presence on as many other websites as possible; and
- A bit of paid help (if necessary).
Websites don’t generate traffic; you generate traffic for the website. A website isn’t a magnet that draws traffic in; it’s something you push traffic to.
Want more eyeballs on that sparkling, five-star website you have for your business? Follow the above steps – and get those visitors!
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