How to Increase Website Traffic
Website traffic describes the visitors who arrive on your page and the data you can collect from these visits. When these prospects visit your site, you have the opportunity to entice them to enter your sales funnel.
Understanding how to build your website traffic is a critical part of building an online reputation. An estimated 94 percent of B2B buyers and 81 percent of customers research products and services online before making a purchase. There has also been tremendous growth in ecommerce, with an increase of nearly 15 percent in 2015. A site that receives strong site traffic will be better positioned to capture this revenue and grow their brand. There is more to successfully building a website, though, than focusing on the website traffic report. You want to time your scaling efforts to ensure that your site is prepared for the influx. This will not only maximize your profit, but it will also help you protect your reputation and build your relationships with those visitors. A successful website will be equipped to handle online transactions while also being organized to encourage people through the sales funnel. Ideally, your content should mirror the funnel itself. In other words, you want to have the majority of your content focus on visitors at the top of the funnel, while also creating some targeted and useful content for those further down the funnel. Links between different levels of content can encourage people to move through your site, engage with your material, and enter your sales funnel, eventually becoming paying customers. You will find as you start examining your site traffic that it is arriving from a variety of different places, including organic and paid traffic sources. Here is what all site owners should know about how to increase website traffic.
What types of traffic should I examine on my website?
You should expect site traffic to arrive from a variety of different sources. The five most important ones that you will want to track and optimize for are:
- Organic traffic: meaning those who arrive on your site by clicking on results on the SERPs
- Social traffic: those who arrive on your site after interacting with your brand on your social media pages
- Paid traffic: those who land on your domain after clicking on an ad you placed on sites
- Email traffic: people who visit your site by clicking through a link that you had placed in an email message
- Direct traffic: Those who are familiar with your site and brand and just type your address directly into the search bar
While there are several different sources of traffic, it is important to remember that they are not all equal. Some traffic sources will bring more people to your domain than others. Namely, organic traffic brings more than half of the visitors to your page, on average. This means that your visibility and ranking on the SERPs is responsible for more traffic than your social, PPC, and email traffic combined. This is an important point to keep in mind as you begin the process of building traffic to your site.
Understanding how to increase website traffic
The key to understanding how to increase website traffic revolves around being better in tune with what your customers want to see and providing it for them on your website. The better you are able to align with the needs of your prospects, the more enticing your site will become for people navigating the web.
How do I optimize for organic traffic?
Given that organic traffic drives more than half of the visitors who land on your page, the focal point of understanding how to increase website traffic comes down to SEO. Properly leveraging SEO can help you build your site traffic and drive interested prospects to your page, encouraging them to enter your sales funnel. Optimizing your content for SEO and organic search should be an encompassing process that begins before you even write a single piece of content.
- Use keyword research to identify topics and vocabulary that will appeal to your targeted audience.
- Create high-quality content that is optimized with the keyword appearing in the title, H2 tags, URL, alt text, and body.
- Distribute the content thoroughly to ensure that you attract the eyes of those most likely to be interested in your piece to encourage backlinks and high engagement metrics.
- Review the information supplied through the BrightEdge backlink checker to uncover opportunities to ask for backlinks to boost off-page SEO.
- Monitor your progress with BrightEdge to see your success by page group and keyword group.
In addition to making your site more appealing through SEO, the other key to boosting organic traffic is to make your site look more appealing on the SERPs themselves. You want to focus on your meta description, since this is the site summary that customers see when your page is listed on the results. These 156 characters or so are your opportunity to tell customers why your site will do a better job of answering their questions than the other search results. Similarly, you want to make sure that your page title is engaging and encourages people to click. Remember that an estimated 8 in 10 people will read your headlines without clicking through to read your content. You want to make your title informative and interesting so that you increase your click-through rate from the SERPs.
How do I optimize for other sources of site traffic?
For the rest of your traffic, there are also a few steps you can take to boost the number of visitors to your site.
- Keyword research: this is not only for organic search. Keyword research will help you identify topics that are popular within your target audience. This will help you create emails, social media postings, and PPC ads that will better attract people to your page.
- You can also boost your paid traffic by analyzing your sales funnel. You want to have a keen understanding of who your customers are and what they are doing at each stage of their buyer’s journey. This will help you create more targeted materials because you will have a better idea of what they are looking to read.
Monitoring your website traffic report and understanding how to increase your website traffic are important steps in the development of a successful website. Before you look at your traffic, first make sure your site is ready to handle the boost in visitors. Then begin to optimize your page for the different traffic sources, remembering always to keep your focus on organic.
