Thanks to website builder features, creating an appealing eCommerce website is easier than before. However, business owners’ responsibilities don’t end after website development as they need to implement strategies to attract visitors and turn them into customers.
In fact, more than 60% of marketers say that driving traffic and leads is their biggest challenge. This issue can be frustrating, especially for new entrepreneurs overwhelmed by various online marketing strategies.
This article will explain seven practical ways to increase website traffic, along with the essential tools to help you execute the methods.
Mind the User Experience
Google started to include page experience as a ranking factor in 2021. This metric measures how people interact with web pages beyond the content, and Google may not rank a website on its search engine results pages (SERPs) if it judges the user experience to be poor.
The three important elements of the page experience include:
- Core web vitals. They measure whether the site loads quickly and stably. Check your core web vitals score using Google Search Console or GTmetrix.
If your site is too slow or unstable, consider changing your hosting provider or installing caching plugins to improve its performance.
- Mobile-friendliness. This metric ensures your website works well on mobile devices. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is a helpful tool to check if your pages are mobile-friendly.
- HTTPS. Websites with HTTPS in the URL and a padlock symbol on the browser bar indicate that an SSL certificate secures them. Many web hosting providers offer a free SSL certificate, so ensure yours has it too. If not, you can purchase and install it separately. You can find third-party reputed vendors or resellers for discounted prices. Either it is a single domain, RapidSSL wildcard certificate, multi-domain SSL certificate, multi-domain wildcard SSL cert, etc. If the website shows a warning message, visitors will not visit the site anymore in near future. To avert this situation, you need to buy an SSL certificate and install it on the server.
Optimize Content for Search Engines
Content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) effectively drive organic traffic to a website. Seventy percent of people prefer understanding a company via an article rather than a conventional advertisement.
The first step toward producing quality content involves performing keyword research. Find keywords with high search volumes – at least 100 to 1,000 searches monthly.
Then, combine popular phrases with long-tail keywords to help attract website visitors with specific search intent. For example, choose terms like “online marketing for beginners” or “B2B online marketing tips” instead of “online marketing.”
Free tools like Google Trends and LSIGraph will help build your keyword strategy. After that, prioritize evergreen content – comprehensive blog posts that don’t go out of date – as it brings more consistent traffic than seasonal or trending posts.
Repurpose Your Content on Other Channels
Finding ideas to create content is challenging, so turn the content into different formats to save time and labor for researching new content. For instance, transform long-form content into a video on your YouTube channel or infographics for social platforms.
That way, you can generate traffic from multiple channels and attract people with different content preferences. Moreover, users are more likely to click search results with video thumbnails.
Gimme Some Oven is an excellent example of a website capitalizing on this practice. It provides complete recipes and one-minute videos to demonstrate the cooking process.
Build a Social Media Presence
More than 75% of marketers agree that social media marketing helps increase website traffic. This is unsurprising as there are over 3.5 billion social media platform users worldwide.
Put your website links in strategic places, like profiles and social media posts. Currently, Instagram also lets all users add links to their Stories.
Then, promote blog posts on your social feed. As an example, look at what Harvard Business Review does. It summarizes its blog posts on Instagram and directs the followers to read the full article using a call to action statement.
To reach more people, find relevant hashtags using a tool like Hopper and include them in the caption.
Run Paid Ads
Using paid advertising is an instant way to increase search traffic. It’s also measurable as you can monitor how much traffic comes from the ad network channels.
There are several kinds of paid ads:
- Search engine ads. Get paid traffic from Google ads or Microsoft Ads. Search engines will display your content at the top of their search results pages or sponsored slots on relevant sites.
- Social media ads. Show your ads on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
- Content discovery networks. Display your blog posts under “Sponsored Stories” or “Paid Content” categories on popular sites like CNN and Bloomberg. Some popular content discovery tools are Outbrain, Taboola, and Gravity.
Find the right target keyword to maximize your paid ads. You can use keywords related to products or services or include competitor terms as SEMrush does. It targets people that search for its competitor brand names, such as Moz and Ahrefs.
Work With Influencers
Influencers have the power and expertise to affect their followers’ decisions. They include Instagram or TikTok personalities, bloggers, and YouTubers.
Almost 50% of people listen to influencer recommendations. As a result, it’s not surprising that many companies rely on this digital marketing strategy by asking influencers relevant to their target audience to mention their websites or recommend their products.
You can also write blog posts featuring influencers, as Todoist does. This to-do list app features Meg Gallagher, a fitness influencer who has shared her productivity tips on its blog.
All that said, influencer marketing may be hefty for new business owners. If this is the case, opt for nano or micro-influencers with less than 10,000 followers. They have more robust engagement and feel more authentic, although their audiences are smaller.
Write Guest Posts on Other Blogs
Writing a guest post is one of the most effective traffic strategies to build backlinks and bring referral traffic to your site. It involves writing helpful resources for another blog, such as another company’s website, and placing a link to your website to drive traffic.
Relevant online communities on LinkedIn or Facebook are excellent platforms to find guest blogging assignments as their members often share possible guest blog opportunities. Before writing the guest article, ensure that the blog has authority, high traffic, and is relevant. A tool like Moz’s Free Domain Analysis Tool should help check these metrics.
Conclusion
A journey of increasing website traffic can be overwhelming for new entrepreneurs. Therefore, follow these seven effective methods to drive traffic to your new website:
- Understand the user experience.
- Integrate SEO into your content.
- Leverage different content formats.
- Be active on social media networks.
- Create paid ad campaigns.
- Collaborate with influencers.
- Start guest posting.
After taking the effort to drive traffic, monitor your performance using Google Analytics and improve the strategies that don’t work well.