Increase traffic to your website! One of the biggest issues we hear from clients who come to us is that they just don’t have enough traffic to their website.
This may be because their site is very beautiful and the designers were great at creating a good looking website. But when it comes down to functionality, they missed a few tricks.
Here we list eight steps to increase traffic to your website…
1: Have the Right Analytical Tools
Firstly, how do you know that you don’t have enough traffic to your website?
You need to make sure you have the right analytical tools in place and these will help you to analyse the data so that you can make informed decisions going forward.
We recommend that you at least have Google Analytics (GA) and Google Search Console (GSC) set up. We also recommend having Google Tag Manager (GTM) in place so that you can do this on a basic level and then have more advanced tools at a later date.
Top tip: One of the biggest reasons for having GSC installed is that you can see all of the “not provided” organic keyword search terms that GA hides from you.
2: Analyse Your Keywords: Both in Real Life and on Your Website
Everyone obsesses over their Google Analytics data. We know because we do too. It’s very addictive hence why our digital marketing team pore over the figures every day.
However, do the keywords in GA match your keywords in real life? What do people talk about when they discuss or look for your product or service?
If you’re starting up and trying to push an unknown brand name when you’re actually selling purple widgets then you’ll be missing a trick if you never actually mention your purple widgets and only your brand.
3: Audit Your Website
If you really want to increase traffic to your website, in addition to looking at your analytics traffic, your site will really need to have a digital health check.
When you audit your website you’ll see more than just the fact that you don’t have as much traffic as you want, you’ll start to understand why.
A website audit will identify where you may have missing or duplicate titles and descriptions, broken links, both internal and external links, whether you have too much or too little text in your pages and whether your images are marked up correctly.
There are so many things that an audit can highlight so it’s worthwhile running your audit now and regularly to ensure you are chipping away at and reducing all the issues that can slow down your site’s performance, both with users and the search engines.
4: Refresh or Rebuild Your Website
If you have an already fantastic website you may only need to perform some minor modifications to make it more effective.
A UX audit may reveal some issues that you need to address so that your Calls To Action are more obvious or appealing. Your template may need a spring clean.
Deeper problems will need more drastic action. For example; a designer may have removed half your content because they thought your website was “too wordy” and “nobody’s going to read all that”. Yet your traffic plummeted and you lost half your visitors. Now what?
This is where you’ll need a serious look at and a rebuild of your website.
5: Revisit Your Content Strategy – You do Have a Content Strategy Don’t You?
What do you mean you’ve never posted anything new to your website for the past year?
You’ve spent time and effort researching and creating new products and services so you really need to create a content strategy where you can regularly post about what you do and what you’re up to, what the latest news is and why people should speak to you, buy from you.
Everything you do needs to be talked about and that content strategy will feed the appetites of your audience when you tie it in with all your SEO, PPC and social media activity, but more on that next…
6: Keep Doing SEO
When you’ve invested in a solid content strategy you then need to support this with an equally decent content marketing strategy.
The first step is to keep doing SEO. There have been lots of premature predictions over the years that “SEO is dead” but there is no sign of a let up in the skills need to make a website perform well in search. In fact, finding experienced search marketers with the truly right skills is getting harder.
That’s where you need a trusted partner to step in and build upon those years of experience with the latest insights into what does and doesn’t work in getting your website the attention it deserves.
7: Invest in Paid Search (PPC)
What if your brand is new? What if your product is new? What if the re is so much organic competition that you haven’t got a cat in hell’s chance of “ranking number one in Google”?
That’s where Pay Per Click (PPC) comes in and the likes of Google Ads (Previously Google AdWords) and Bing Ads.
By entering what is effectively an auction to rank above the organic listings, you can achieve some great results. Now we have seen some real stinkers off campaigns but we have a good nose for these and can tell you what will work and how much it will cost.
But it is always worth investigating that you invest in paid search and at least run brand campaigns to dominate the search engine results pages.
8: Get Social
Last, but not least, you need to get social.
Social media campaigns will bring you traffic for free if you only take the time to build a relevant and engaged audience and you post the right things at the right time.
Again, just like paid search, you can invest in paid social and get some quite excellent results by paying for targeted Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn traffic.
We took one obscure product from zero to nearly four thousand followers on Facebook recently as a way to build brand awareness. It is the first step on a campaign to create an interested and engaged audience who will hopefully develop brand loyalty as they resonate with the posts and the product.
So there you have it. A very top level overview of 8 steps to increase traffic to your website. We will be expanding all of these points so that you can delve in further and understand just what it takes these days to have a successful traffic strategy that will drive visitors to your website.
If you would like to know more about any of these individual items, or the suite of digital services as a whole, then please do give us a call on 01276 402 381 or complete our contact form.