Website traffic is important. It brings visibility, brand affirmation, and sales to your company. Customers, stakeholders, potential investors, and your competitors see it on a daily basis. Since you work so hard on your website and it stands for everything that you are, you want people to see it. In a few simple ways, you can increase traffic in an impactful way.
Inviting all the right people to the party!
In Jayson DeMers’ “39 Actionable Ideas For Driving Traffic To Your Website” Forbes article, the author looked for ways to tackle one of the most common challenges he hears from business owners – lack of website traffic. While the article is not included in its entirety, many powerful key points are included and summarized below.
Embracing the new keyword
Actually, it’s not even one keyword at all. Your business now needs to understand and embrace long-tail keywords (also known as Latent Semantic Indexing – LSI) that are relevant to your organization. After you first identify your primary keywords, work on your LSI keywords to boost your SEO success. In tandem, start a forum on your website that can quickly start to rank long-tail keywords. This online space can also help build a community, increase the time visitors are on the site, and help decrease your website bounce rate.
Cross-promote
Consider multiple ways to drive traffic to your website by utilizing some of your established vehicles:
- Create a Facebook group that encourages dialogue: Provide answers and support to your customers that want a deeper experience with your brand. Make sure to highlight the relevant web content that will carry them over to your site and boost foot traffic.
- Leverage your email list: This compilation of people (your target audience) that want to hear from you is your gold at the end of the rainbow. Include links to your most important website blogs (including special promotions) that will simultaneously increase traffic, potential leads, and profitable sales.
Make content king
Traffic gets the green light with good content that is shared in the right way. A few simple tips:
- Take the time to create a great headline: Arguably, this is more important than the body of your written piece, since today’s busy people rarely look beyond the bold tag. In a witty and informative line, entice your readers to click “read more” to get the benefits. If a headline is really good bait, your chances for social media shares are good.
- Post content often: According to Neil Patel of QuickSprout, posting high-quality posts 6 times per week (instead of 5), increased blog traffic by 18.6%.
- Flock to Reddit: Submitting relevant posts to this online forum can work in your favor for boosting website traffic, especially attracting people that may be new to your brand.
Embrace collaboration
Since traffic is not created in a vacuum, it’s important to expand your online footprint:
- Join a blogging community: As a smart way to network with other bloggers and cross-promote overlapping content look for communities like ProBlogger or CopyBlogger to get started.
- Practice smart linking: Can you relate some pieces back to previous entries every time you create a new blog post? For instance, if your new blog mentions a technical term, link that phrase back to your other great blog that is specifically written on this issue. Not only does this enhance the customer experience by receiving a deeper education through your blog, it’s also a powerful way to improve conversion rates, increase time spent on the site, and boost referral traffic.
- Try your hand as a guest blogger: Look for popular blogs within your specific niche and contribute to it with a high-quality piece.
- Become a columnist or website contributor: This is simply a win-win situation. Not only will you drive valuable traffic to your website, but you’ll also earn major credibility points if you become an expert through a popular publication or respected website.
Become a communicator
The greater presence you have online, the greater chance you have to drive traffic. In building your presence:
- Respond to blog comments: Through your helpful feedback, you dually build relationships and bring people back to your website.
- Provide answers: Become a resource and answer questions you know the answers to on relevant (and widely-watched) sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers.
- Become friends with influential bloggers: If you’ve composed something huge for your industry that is important for everyone without being self-promotional, share it with key people in your field that may be inspired to share it and link back to your original post.
Stay in the limelight
Don’t let people forget about you! If you want to be on people’s radars and you want solid website traffic, you need to do the legwork. Take to Twitter and have exciting conversations with influential people, create engaging Facebook posts that can go viral, and get on YouTube if it makes sense! Did you know that YouTube creates the most engaged traffic out of all social media sites, with an average of 2.99 pages per visit? If you want to stay in the business ballgame, ever-increasing website traffic is your home run.
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