Is your website traffic looking low, or has it gone down recently?
Are you not getting visitors to pages that you want?
Are you getting ANY visitors?
If you own a website that offers a product or service, you have probably gone through the growing pains of trying to attract visitors to your website. While there is nothing wrong with focusing on creative and new strategies for increasing traffic to your site, don’t neglect tried and true methods.
Most are in a rush to get to #1 that they forget to start with a great foundation and the basics of great SEO: Content, link diversity as far as types of links you build to and on your website and being as social as possible.
It really comes down to you may simply not be promoting yourself enough. Maybe you got lazy after the big launch and took some “time off” from dealing with the website and expected it to get better with time.
We have worked with many clients who launched a website and just let it sit, thinking that it would eventually bring in traffic. In reality, we always start from the ground up on any new project, making sure ALL necessary basics are in place and being followed.
It takes strategic efforts to get people to your website. Use these five solid strategies to drive more traffic to your website effectively.
1. Create & Publish GREAT SEO Optimized Content
If your website isn’t optimized for search engines, you’re not going to show up in searches. Well, at least those that actual humans will bother to scroll through. When was the last time you searched for an item and went beyond the first 2-3 pages of results?
May sound crazy but on average, there are over 40,000 search queries every second on Google. With that many people searching, most will not spend time hitting “Next”.
Search engines are responsible for the majority of your traffic, and they can be the cheapest way to get traffic if you focus on organic results so you’ll need to make sure you’re optimized for relevant keywords through effective search engine optimization.
One of the most effective SEO strategies that businesses use to create consistent traffic is creating and publishing SEO optimized content on their website that creates authority with search engines.
This optimizing of content should start with your website’s actual pages first. Your website’s main pages need to be created for readability and optimized for your niche keywords.
You’ll need to optimize your headers, meta information, add links, and beyond, at which point you can move on to creating blog posts that answer relevant questions or provide useful information, helping you become an authority within your niche.
In our experience, creating SEO optimized content that converts is all about not making your website visitors feel as if they are being fed a long infomercial.
Squeezing in your main keyword 25 times within a 500 word blog post is a very bad practice.
Mentioning that the reader needs to “contact you today!” after every other paragraph is even worse.
Provide them with useful and informative information on whatever keyword brought them there so they WANT to work with you. Use software that tells you what search terms are being used to arrive at your site and create content based on those. Why stress about what to write about when your website can provide amazing clues if you have it set up to receive them.
The more quality SEO optimized content you have on your website, the more traffic you will drive to your website because content will always be king in search rankings. While some of this traffic will begin to come organically, there are other steps you have to keep on top of.
Summary: Create and publish quality SEO optimized content to your website regularly by strategically highlighting your niche keywords in your pages and blog, helping you become an authority website in searches. Ensure that your articles provide valuable information to the reader and are not “spammy” or “salesy”.
2. Sharing Articles Across Social Media
Social media is the easiest way to connect with your audience on a regular basis. People are on social media all the time and love following their favorite businesses and brands/people, especially on Facebook and Google.
Social media never sleeps, and you have opportunities to prospect and connect with your customers at all times of the day. When you connect with your audience regularly on social media, you develop a relationship with them, which results in them being more in touch with you and wanting to hear more from you.
You can use social media platforms like Facebook and Google to publish relevant information about your business, including your blog posts. A lot of times, your followers aren’t aware of what types of articles you’ve created on your website, so it’s a great chance to inform your audience of the different content that can be helpful to them.
They can even help you decide what content to create, which helps you get even more traffic.
Not only will sharing helpful articles on social media help increase traffic to your website, it will also help you become an authority that your audience can trust.
Summary: Through social media, you can help your audience become informed of helpful content that you create, which helps drive traffic and build your authority.
3. Building Backlinks To Your Website
Backlinks are a great way to drive traffic to your website, and while building them can be a time-consuming process (get ready to be rejected often), it doesn’t have to be complicated. When you build backlinks, you are creating more ways for people to reach you via as the number of QUALITY backlinks helps increase your overall site metrics (and search positioning).
One of the most common strategies of building backlinks is by using business listings, such as Google My Business, Yelp, Bing, the Better Business Bureau, Angi, LinkedIn, and even social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.
If you have a locally based business or serve customers within a certain area, this is a must.
If you’re a restaurant, you’ll want to build links to your website on popular restaurant review websites like OpenTable, TripAdvisor, Zomato, and Allmenus. This way, no matter what app or search engine your audience is using, they can find you and reach your website.
Other great ways of building backlinks are being a recommended business or being a relevant link on other websites. To do this, you’ll want to collaborate with other businesses and websites to get content promotions (I am ok with rejection. I am ok with rejection…)
You’ll want to inform other websites of the content that you create that can help their audience, as well as the services you offer that can help them.
Summary: Building backlinks, like business listings, recommendations, and content promotions, helps you be available and more relevant to your audience on a larger variety of platforms and websites, which increases your traffic exponentially.
4. Creating Guests Posts On Other Websites
Creating guests posts on other websites can seriously skyrocket your business online and create massive traffic.
When you create guests posts on influencer websites with large fan bases who get thousands of visitors daily, you’re setting yourself up for great word-of-mouth marketing.
The fact that another website trusts you to guest post on their website proves to their audience that you are trustworthy, which proves your authority to search engines, who eventually take notice as well.
This has an overall boosting effect to your websites page rank, which is just one of Google’s many algorithms.
When you guest post on a popular website, you have the ability to gain thousands of followers on social media overnight, which results in a great increase in overall website traffic.
It’s referral marketing that doesn’t just promote your services, it promotes your authority on a topic, which is what people on social media are looking for.
With guest posting, you will reach tons of people that you wouldn’t normally. You can easily reach out to other websites with ideas for articles that you can write as a guest blogger, or you can apply become a regular contributor to websites looking for contributors.
Summary: Guest posting on popular websites that are relevant to yours can skyrocket your fan base, resulting in a steady, overall increase in traffic.
5. Finding Broken Links On Other Websites
Finding broken links on other websites is an effective strategy to drive traffic to your website. Think of it as a treasure hunt.
You start doing this by finding high-ranking links on other websites that are broken, and then you contact the company to notify them of their broken link, while requesting that your own website articles or page links be used as the replacement.
Since the broken links are high ranking, they receive a lot of traffic, and if the business decides to redirect their broken link to your website article or page, you will automatically receive all of the traffic that the page would normally get.
It takes a long time to build up SEO juice on your website’s pages and posts, but with this strategy, you already have the SEO juice built up.
This method can easily increase your traffic greatly, and when people come to your link, they can learn more about your business on your website. You will gain more followers on social media, too.
Summary: When you find high-ranking broken links on other websites, you can request to have them redirect to your link instead, which gives you a huge increase in search impressions and traffic to your website.
Let Our Team Help You Drive Traffic To Your Website
ATC Domain Solutions would love to help you with these tried-and-true strategies to drive traffic to your website. Whether you need help with your guest posting content, link building, or content promotions, we’d love to be of service.
Contact us through our website form or call us at (503) 928-9661 to get the conversation started today!
