How to Drive Traffic to Your Website? 7 Pieces of Advice
Whether you’re in the market and looking to sell your product or running a blog about your daily life and advice, chances are that you have a website.
But regardless of the reason, a site is useless if there isn’t an audience to experience it, and that can often be the case for many websites that find themselves losing users by the day!
If you’re reading this article, then chances are you have a similar problem, and you’re looking for ways to fix it. Well, we have some good news for you then.
Here are 7 Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Website
There are multiple ways you can drive traffic to your website! Some are more effective than others; some cost nothing, while others may be worth a pretty penny. In any case, we’d like to give you 7 pieces of advice to drive more traffic to your website.
Let’s begin!
1. Scour the Net for the Right Keywords
Keywords are the most effective tool you have when attracting traffic to your website!
When looking for something specific, users often tend to type exact words into search engines. These words (also known as Keywords) are how search engines recognize that your site has the content they are looking for!
Well, how do you find Keywords? There are 2 ways to do that, either you use a Keyword finding application or go straight to the source and use Google Search.
– Using an Application:
There is no shortage of applications on the internet made to help you find keywords about your site and content. You simply enter a seed word, and BAM! You have a list of different possible Keywords to add to your website.
The applications are generally free, but there are also ones you have to pay for. In return, they offer you more information. This includes the popularity of certain seed words, their industry, etc.
– Using the Google Search Bar:
Alternatively, you could go old school and use search engines like Google directly to find your keywords.
Simply type phrases and questions potential users of your site may type into the search bar, the options that pop up to auto-complete your queries will have keywords and phrases in them that you can use.
2. Hone in on Popular Search Topics
The next bit of advice we have to give is, follow the trends! Keep an eye on what your user base is doing.
Are they celebrating a specific holiday or discussing an event recently that affected them?
Your website should adapt to their patterns and trends to stay on the up and up. Some good examples of this are e-commerce sites that only have clientele from the US.
Christmas is a big holiday in the United States, so every e-commerce site worth its salt has multiple events planned for when Christmas arrives. They often change up their visual themes to be more similar to the holiday themes and launch massive sales and charity events.
If you don’t know where the bulk of your traffic is coming from, you should get on that ASAP. An excellent tool to help you figure it out, and one you should get accustomed to using, is Google Analytics.
3. You are not Alone! Exchange Backlinks with Other Sites
Backlinks from other websites mean more referral traffic, and obviously, that means more traffic overall. Many sites are looking to exchange backlinks, and with the right website, you can even end up seeing a traffic increase above 1000%.
Do be careful who you exchange backlinks with, though, since if the website you’re trading links with is shady, you can end up getting the short end of the stick! Search engines bump down your site’s ranking if websites that are deemed “unsafe” or “shady” backlink to you.
As long as you’re smart about it, you can see a significant increase in your site’s traffic.
4. Watch Your Bounce Rate
“Bounce-rate” is the rate at which users visit your website and leave extremely quickly. It usually applies to pages on a website rather than sites as a whole.
You can monitor your bounce rate using Google Analytics and find the page that is causing the problem. But why would you care about your bounce rate?
Well, think of it this way, if users come to your site and then encounter a page that loads so slow, or has a bug in it so unappealing, that they immediately leave. What are the chances they will stay on, or ever visit, your site again?
If you face a high bounce rate on any of your pages, locate and fix the problem immediately! You may not be able to bring those users back, but at least you can retain the ones that’ll visit in the future.
5. On-page SEO – Play to What the Search Engines Want
Search engines play a massive, massive part in website traffic, especially Google. So it’s vital if you want more people to see and visit your site, to play nice with the search engines, and optimize your site to their liking.
On-page SEO refers to any optimization you would do that users and visitors could plainly see, including;
Ø Keywords and Keyphrases (which we discussed in length earlier)
Ø Meta-descriptions
Ø Internal linking
Ø Image alt text
You don’t have to go above and beyond when it comes to on-page SEO, just the healthy tweak and change here and there. This will keep you in good standing with search engines and help usher traffic along to your site.
6. Use Email Marketing. Trust us, it’s still Effective
Email marketing sounds like a thing of the past, doesn’t it? I mean, 90% of marketing emails end up in your spam box anyway.
So what’s the use?
According to Hubspot, 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months.
Interestingly enough, marketing emails are still responsible for quite a number of conversions for many businesses. People like it when the product or content they are looking for appears in front of them. It’s easier than expending the energy to look for it yourself!
Whether it be in the form of newsletters, excerpts from your site’s blog, or just information about a sale you’re having, email marketing can help bring back and recycle old traffic.
So, if you don’t have one, start compiling an email marketing list right away! It would help if you had an audience you could send those emails to in the future, after all.
7. Collaboration and Appearances – Influencers can go a long way!
Now no one likes spending money, especially on marketing, even more so in an age where you can rack up an audience of thousands of devoted followers with good social media management.
The fact of the matter is, though, if you want more traffic, then more people need to be interested in your product. One of the main ways to get them interested is to relate that product with something or someone that positively affects them.
Enter Influencers!
The logic behind it is the same as those of companies and movements that buy television advertisements. It’s just a different medium.
If you’re okay with spending some money to promote your website, then the best advice we could give you would be to look for podcasters, YouTubers, streamers, and other influencers and sponsor them to talk about your site.
You end up reaching a massive audience, and you will see some form of change in your website traffic as long as you’ve picked the right influencer for the job.
For example, if your site is related to baking, sponsor someone who bases their content on food or cooking! You’re much more likely to expose your site to an interested audience and thus more likely to receive traffic from them.
Wrapping Up
Website traffic is a difficult factor to control. People are not standardized, and they have different wants and needs. With these methods, you can do your best to attract users to your site, but unless your site is offering something they both want and need, it’ll be an uphill battle.
If you take these steps, no matter what, you will see a change in the amount of incoming traffic for your site. But in the end, it’s up to you and the effort and cares you put into your site.
Regardless, we hope this article helped you figure out a list of things you should do to usher more people towards your site.
