Lack of website traffic is one of the most common challenges that online business owners face today. It’s simple to understand how important traffic is to any website. In essence, traffic is the lifeblood to any online business. No traffic results in zero leads, no leads means no sales and no sales ultimately means no business. Many of you may have lost a significant percentage of search traffic over the last couple of years and are now looking for new ways to drive relevant traffic. MLK Marketing looks at some simple steps to help your business go from zero visitors to attracting thousands of visitors to your website.
As a business owner or a marketer, the number one priority is to increase sales. This however can only be done when you have more customers purchasing your goods or services. We all know that in order to get more customers we have to attract them to our website. There are many ways to boost your website’s traffic. You can be surprised how many actionable tips are easy to apply and how quickly they can start to generate results.
Driving traffic comes down to many factors. Your website may even experience high traffic levels, but may not generate leads. Whether it is how you promote and advertise your business, publishing the appropriate content, and actively engaging with your customers are just some of the few factors that influence the amount of traffic your website gets.
Target Long-tail Keywords
Nowadays, focusing on single and short keywords for each page is not as effective as they once were. In fact, the days of focusing on a single keyword are long gone. Short keywords are highly competitive and they are extremely difficult to rank for. Even though they are lucrative keywords, it will be hard for your website to rank with them. For all you know, there could be hundreds and even thousands of other businesses using the same single keyword. On the other hand, long-tail keywords are much less competitive as they are more focused and are directly aimed at your target audience. Long-tail keywords account for a majority of web searches. This means when you are using long-tail keywords, the majority of your search traffic are coming from those specific keywords. Simply adjusting your keywords within your content or twerking titles of your blog posts can also increase your traffic.
This is an extremely easy way to drive traffic to your website without having to do any marketing for your business. When focusing on long-tail keywords, it is also important that your posts include all the relevant terms and phrases related to your business.
Build A Community
Building and fostering a community on your website will increase traffic to your website. Starting an active forum on your website can quickly begin ranking for your long-tail keywords. By creating a dedicated forum or implementing a commenting system through social media such as Facebook; visitors can ask questions and speak their minds about topics they fell passionately about. Forums are great for decreasing your website’s bounce rate and increasing the amount of time spent on your website.
Creating a community where members can communicate and support one another is a great way to keep your visitors engaged. Also don’t forget to make sure you regularly monitor and manage the forums or commenting system to ensure minimum standards of decorum are met. By doing so, you can even join the conversation and make yourself heard in the comments sections. Even though commenting doesn’t provide an immediate boost to referral traffic, it can improve your overall reputation and image.
Create Rich And Relevant Content
When creating and writing content for your website it is always important to remember to publish relevant and appropriate content. Getting a lot of traffic but not being able to convert that traffic into sales can be difficult if the content on your website is not useful for your users. You need to create content that not only generates leads but also convert those leads into sales. Your content should establish you as an expert within your industry where people want to buy from you. There is nothing worse than having a great looking and functional website with poorly written information (grammatical and spelling errors are a rooky mistake). Quality content will get ranked higher and by addressing the needs of your readers, consumers will find all the information they are looking for in the one spot.
Not only does your content have to be user friendly, but engaging as well as interesting. When writing blogs and articles, think of creative headings to draw the user’s attention. Headings are the first thing a reader sees; therefore, it is crucial to developing good and eye catching titles. It is also ideal to frequently write articles and blogs in varying lengths; your content will be more successful and help rank your website more when you have a steady stream of content.
Furthermore, when writing content, it is also important to remember to mention and link other posts your readers may find helpful. By including links to other relevant content, it will increase the time your users spend on your website and improve your conversion rates. This is also great for SEO and enhances the user’s experience by providing them with useful information. The strength of your link profile can be affected by your internal linking structure.
Start Guest Blogging
Surprisingly enough, guest blogging is still around and can increase the traffic to your website. By securing a guest post on a reputable website, it can help build your brand. Although be cautious and try to avoid blogging on websites in an unrelated industry and different target market. There is not much point to blogging on unrelated websites as it can be a waste of your time and effort. Make sure you only contribute to relevant and high quality websites in your niche.
Once you have started guest blogging, you can invite others to guest blog onto your website. Other people are likely to share and link it to their guest article. By inviting others into your niche to blog, they can bring about new readers, thus increasing your website’s traffic.
In addition to this, you could even join a blogging community to communicate and network with other bloggers. This way you can cross-promote each other’s content and further increase the chance of new readers.
Get Social
We all know the impact and reach social media can have. There are millions of users on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In this day and age, it is not enough to produce great content. You may write excellent blogs and useful information, but it may not even be found by your target audience if you are not proactive. One of the most effective ways to increase traffic to your website is to use social media to promote your content. Each social media network has its advantages and limitations, so use the platforms that will work best for your business.
Ensuring you have a solid social media presence will have a large impact on your views. You can easily engage and communicate with your followers and continually expand your reach by sharing your content more frequently. Posting regularly will show your followers that you are active. Using social media to broadcast your content is great; however, actually interacting with your fans creates a positive image of your business.
If you are already using social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, you may want to consider using LinkedIn. The number of LinkedIn users has significantly grown and it has become more than a means of finding a job. Yes, it is the world’s largest professional social network, but it has now become a valuable publishing platform. With this said, you should get on board and start regularly posting useful and relevant content to LinkedIn. This will boost your profile within your specific industry as well as drive more traffic to your website. Read more about the benefits of social media for your business here.
Make Sure Your Website Is Responsive And Fast
Having a fast and responsive website is critical for driving traffic. Internet browsing has long moved on from exclusively browsing on desktop PCs to using mobile phones and tablets to access the web. It is important to make sure your website is optimised for different types of devices to allow your users to comfortably access your content.
Not only should your website be responsive, but it should also have a fast load time. No one wants to wait more than thirty second for a website to load. Long load times dramatically increases your bounce rate sky high. We can become impatient when it comes to waiting for websites to load, which is why the majority of us would rather click away than wait. In order to reduce the amount of load time, your pages must be technically optimised. Read more information about how responsiveness and speed (and other critical factors) of your website can impact your business brand and credibility here.
Don’t Forget Email Marketing
The progression of technology has made businesses more focused on attracting new customers through content marketing. Many of the traditional marketing methods are forgotten even though they still are powerful and useful tools to generate traffic. By emailing potential and existing customers in moderation, email marketing is still an effective method to driving traffic as long as you don’t bombard and spam your recipients about every business update.
