There are a number of reasons your business might have a website – it could be to sell products and services directly, to raise awareness of your brand or even to showcase your portfolio. Regardless of your website’s purpose, one fact is unavoidable: your website needs visitors.
So how can you drive website traffic?
1. SEO: Improve the website visibility in Google
Let’s start with the basics – your website should be optimised for search engines to ensure that you appear in front of users who are actively interested in relevant topics. If they’re already interested in websites similar to yours, there’s a higher chance that they’ll visit your website when it’s suggested to them.
Depending on how much effort you want to put into your SEO activity, there are a range of basic SEO tasks you can do such as ensuring you have keyword optimised title tags and on page copy to more advanced SEO techniques like link building and schema markup.
2. Social Media: Improve your businesses activity and presence on the right social media channels
The next area to make sure you have covered is social media – according to Oberlo we spend an average of 3 hours on social media platforms every day so having a presence here is critical to reach potential website visitors. By posting on social media about your brand, you can reach users who are interested in similar topics but who aren’t actively searching for it yet and might actually click straight through to your website from the social media post.
This doesn’t mean you have to be on every single social media platform out there – in fact, having too many social media profiles to manage can actually be detrimental as you won’t have the time to provide valuable posts across all of them. Instead, identify which social media platforms are the most relevant to your audience, your business and your long-term objectives.
3. Content: Increase the value and focus of the content you produce
Let’s be honest, it’s very unlikely that a user is going to immediately be interested in the product or service you’re offering without first having seen some kind of content to influence their decision – if you think about your online activity, you probably spend more time researching and learning than you do simply buying products or signing up to services.
If the only thing you have to offer website visitors is a product or service, they have no reason to visit your site until they are ready to buy something. By creating helpful informative content (e.g. in the form of articles, infographics or videos), not only can you build a strong relationship with potential customers, you also give users more reasons to visit your website.
4. Collaboration: Improve your industry position with relevant collaborations like suppliers and partners
When you collaborate with another brand, you’re able to leverage the reach and audience of someone else to drive traffic back to your own website. In the visitor’s eyes, a brand they already follow and trust have recommended your website so they’re more likely to actually visit.
Finding the right partner to collaborate with is vital – you need someone with a relevant audience but who isn’t a direct competitor. Ideally, you’ll both gain something out of the collaboration such as reaching a new audience or adjusting your brand positioning.
5. Ads: Use paid channels to reach audiences that are not aware of you or you services
You can advertise through search engines and through social media to reach users who might be interested in your website. Depending on the platform and ad type, you can target users based on their interests, behaviours or search queries to have the highest chance of turning them into a visitor.
Ads can be particularly useful if there is another leading brand in your sector that most people default to or if there is a promotion you would like to highlight. When deciding to advertise online, it’s important to ensure you have clear objectives so that you can set your budget appropriately i.e. while website visitors are important to you, you may want to pay more for users who are likely to take some kind of action once they arrive such as contacting you or buying a product.
A key to making these strategies work is to understand your target customers’ needs and challenges to ensure you are presenting your business as the ideal solution.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as implementing all of these techniques to increase your website traffic – to get the most out of them you’ll likely have to try a few different strategies to identify what works best for your audience. By investing your time into identifying what really works for you, you’ll see long term benefits on your website traffic. For more digital marketing tips, follow us on LinkedIn or get in touch with our team.
