Increasing Website Traffic 101

June 1, 2024 Roberto Magalhães

Web traffic is critical to your brand's success. It informs who identifies with your mission and who is interested in the services you offer.

Web traffic is critical to your brand's success. It tells you how many people identify with your mission and are interested in the products or services you offer. This means that your identity as a company resonates with people. But getting more traffic on any website can be quite a challenge.

How can you increase website traffic at a time when every brand has a huge digital presence? Start by taking advantage of these strategies.

Why is it important to increase website traffic?

Website traffic is an important metric for evaluating the success of initiatives and your overall business strategy. You can find out if specific efforts and campaigns are working and which ones are performing best. You can learn about your audience to target your marketing strategy accordingly. You will also be able to identify areas that need improvement.

Increasing website traffic means you are getting the word out and your brand is gaining visibility. This is not only important for making sales (and attracting investors if you're a startup), but also for developing an excellent reputation.

How to increase website traffic

Study Marketing Analysis

You can leverage data from marketing analytics like those provided by Google to inform your website strategy. Before you work to improve it, you need to establish your baseline. Examine key metrics such as the number of unique visitors you receive daily, weekly and monthly, click-through rates and the type of content that attracts the most viewers.

This information is essential to knowing your current and potential audience and what will drive them to your website.

SEO Optimization

Your overall website and each individual page should be easily searchable. In other words, your pages should rank high in search results when people search for terms that match the nature of your business and the services you offer.

SEO is not about packing your website with keywords. Search engines like Google have become sophisticated, and you must adjust your SEO strategy frequently to account for changes. Bringing in an expert can help you come up with a plan to improve your rankings.

Leverage your social media accounts

Social media can do a great job driving traffic to your website and promoting your brand. Your social media strategy will be more comprehensive than the brief synopsis here, but there are many types of posts that can engage your user base, from purely promotional posts to engaging content-based posts that encourage users to visit your website.

Depending on the nature of your business, you can create a presence on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and other platforms. Your social media or marketing specialist can help you create copy and graphics and select the best links to promote.

Add new content routinely

Keeping your content updated is one of the best ways to improve your rankings. You should not only review your web copy routinely, but also add compelling content like videos, images, and blog posts to attract users to your website.

The content you add must align with your brand and business strategy, attracting the right target audience. It should also be optimized for SEO to ensure it ranks well in a search.

Clean up old content

Part of keeping your content fresh also means making sure your old content isn't out of date. Instead of getting rid of this content completely, consider combing through it and revitalizing it with SEO best practices in mind. This is a better strategy than deleting it completely because this would create broken links if you had linked your site or someone else had referenced it.

Turn to email marketing

More and more brands are leveraging email marketing to inform customers about their news and happenings, promote products and generally keep their name out there. This is also a way to direct users to your website. Including links to your latest blog post or listing your newest product or project will give people a reason to visit your website and learn more about what's happening at your company.

Engage influencers or thought leaders

Unfortunately, your word only goes so far. But when you give users a voice they admire and respect, whether it's a celebrity or a leader in their field, they will be more willing to trust your brand and more likely to engage with it. Consider, for example, asking a thought leader to write a guest blog. Or hire an influencer to appear in a targeted campaign. You can also post a video interview with a respected voice in your field.

Create backlinks

Backlinks (links to your website from external websites) will not only increase traffic because your website will be more visible, but also because your Google ranking will increase. This is because backlinks indicate that you are a credible and trustworthy resource in your area of expertise.

But you can't just randomly post backlinks and expect your SEO rankings to improve. They should be referenced on other high-traffic sites that have gained credibility.

Announce

It's not free and it's often not cheap. But advertising through Google Ads and social media platforms like Facebook will allow you to target your message to the people you want to see your brand and products and increase the number of visitors coming to your website.

Digital advertising requires planning and experience, so you'll need to do some research to discover the best platform, content, and methodology for your business.

Build a community

Your website is more than just a marketing tool. It's also a means of building a community – a community that will look to your brand as a resource and an authority.

To build a community, you must actively engage with other sites and post on social media. You should also answer questions related to your field on public forums like Quora or Reddit and interact with your target audience. Additionally, you can create boards and forums on your own website to allow visitors to interact with you. Just make sure you respond often.

Interconnect

You want to keep visitors on your website for as long as possible. One way to do this is to embed internal links on your pages. This way, instead of abandoning your site, they will engage with a related blog post, a similar service that might interest them, and so on.

Make it accessible

Is your website fully accessible to people with a wide range of skills? Hire a user interface (UI) expert to ensure that, for example, people with visual impairments can still experience the message and content your website offers. In this day and age, this is essential to keep you relevant and ensure you don't leave anyone out. You should also make your website accessible across different platforms and devices.

See what your competitors are doing

Conducting an analysis of your competitors will allow you to identify trends in your industry and gain new ideas. Think of it as an inspiration tool. You should not only go to competitors' websites, but also scour their social media accounts to see what type of content they are promoting.

As we enter a new era of business and commerce, your website will prove to be a fundamental marketing, engagement, and community-building tool. These methods will help you drive traffic to your website and boost your business in the process.

If you liked this, be sure to check out our other articles on web development.