Your business website is useless without traffic. It will just sit there in the void collecting virtual dust. You depend on traffic to try and generate leads and convert those leads into sales. It’s the same as having a physical store or a restaurant. If nobody comes into your premises, then your business will fail.
Thus, companies around the world are fighting for the same thing; web traffic. You’re looking to drive as much traffic as possible to your web pages – but how can this be done? Or, more accurately, how should this be done?
Lots of tactics present themselves, but the way in which you gain web traffic matters greatly. With the correct approach, you’ll see a constant stream of traffic that converts. As a result, you end up with lots of paying customers that fuel your profits. To help you achieve this, here are the golden rules of gaining website traffic:
Start with SEO
It’s a well-known fact that search engines are still the number one traffic source for websites across the internet. This is because most consumers start their online journeys on search engines. Consider this, if you’re looking to buy something, what’s the first thing you do? You type a search query into Google, then click on the most relevant results to help you proceed.
As such, SEO becomes a critical part of your traffic gaining strategy. The short explanation of the term is that it relates to optimising your website for search engines. By doing this, you will improve the ranking of your pages in Google searches. Therefore, your visibility is increased as you will be one of the first results people see. This increases the chances of gaining clicks, which leads to a lot of web traffic.
With a solid SEO strategy in place, you will be set up to gain a lot of traffic from this very valuable source.
Focus on Targeted Web Traffic
I would say this is probably the key thing to keep in mind. Yes, web traffic is essential. However, there’s such a thing as bad web traffic. Well, it’s not really ‘bad’, but it is useless. I’m talking about traffic from users that aren’t going to be interested in your website or what your business has to offer. Sometimes, you end up with lots of people like this on your site, and it leads to high bounce rates – people leaving the pages instantly. Consequently, you gain nothing from their presence.
Typically, this happens when you don’t target the right audiences. Going back to your SEO strategy, you might target the wrong keywords and searches. All of the best SEO services make a point of beginning your campaign with keyword research and audience analysis. In turn, this lets you identify what keywords and phrases to target, meaning you zero in on your ideal audience. As a result, you can improve your search performance for searches that are most likely to bring in traffic that converts.
With targeted traffic, you’ll get lots of people who are already somewhat interested in what you have to offer. This makes the process of converting leads and closing sales so much easier. An individual is more likely to become a customer if they have a prior interest in what you’re offering.
Explore Paid Methods as Well as Organic Ones
While you may pay for SEO services, it’s not technically categorized as a paid method. This is because it works organically to provide you with traffic naturally. By contrast, paid methods include things like PPC advertising. This is where you pay to place ads alongside your organic methods. If you run any Google search, you’ll see multiple websites appear as ads above the organic results.
In effect, it’s a way of boosting your awareness above other websites. This can be a genius way of beating your rivals to the punch. Yes, you need to focus on organic search marketing, but also explore these paid methods. The best thing is that you only pay when people click on your ads. So, you will usually profit whenever a click goes through.
It’s also not something that’s reserved for search engines. You have display ads and social media ads that can also drive targeted traffic to your site. There’s that word again – targeted. The beauty of ads is that you choose who they’re aimed at. So, only the people you care about will see the adverts, increasing the chances of them being clicked.
Convert Your Traffic
Finally, we have to talk about converting your web traffic. We’ve tiptoed around this a bit, but it needs to be addressed. The biggest mistake businesses make is that they only care about traffic numbers. As long as you have traffic on your site, then that will instantly mean you’re successful – right?
Unfortunately, no.
I already spoke about targeted traffic, but even this is somewhat useless if your website doesn’t convert. Getting the traffic to your site is one thing, but converting them to leads or customers is another. This is where landing pages and your website content are crucial. Whenever someone arrives on your site, they need to be convinced to complete an action. You shouldn’t be too in-your-face about this, but your content needs to almost guide them towards the desired action. This might be buying something from your store, filling in a contact form, or just supplying you with their email address.
Realistically, you should measure the success of your website based on how much web traffic you receive, and how much of it you convert. All businesses will have access to web analytics software these days. So, make sure you pay close attention to your conversion rate stats and work on improving them.
In summary, your business needs to approach web traffic in the right way. All of these rules should be followed, meaning you end up with the perfect blend of organic and paid traffic sources. Additionally, be sure to focus on targeted web traffic that has a better chance of converting – then, make sure you set your site up to convert as effectively as possible.
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