Modern society is all about instant gratification. We want what we want right away. While there are plenty of strategies out there for driving traffic to your website, these website visitors may just drift away.
If you have a small business of your own, you need a reliable strategy that details how to attract visitors to your website. Once you have people coming to your website, you can then engage and nurture them. We will discuss lead nurturing in the following chapters. For now, let’s answer the big question: How do you attract visitors to your website in the first place?
The best answer is Inbound Marketing!
By now, you should be more interested in building a strategy to drive traffic to your website continuously. Every business needs a decent inflow of new leads. You can then convert some of them into customers over time.
You also want to appeal to your existing customers, which means you want them to keep visiting your website. By building a base of loyal repeat customers that’s always being augmented with new potential customers, your company will thrive.
The following tactics will help you build the consistent website traffic you need.
Search engine optimization is a constantly-evolving beast. Essentially, what those three little letters boil down to is how visible your site is in search engine results. When a lead searches for keywords related to your business, you want to be not only on the first page but you want to be first result that appears at the top.
Here are a few universal SEO tips that will take you in the right direction:
Content marketing and SEO often overlap. The tactics you employ for your content marketing strategy could boost your SEO. That’s great, especially for busy business owners who don’t have much time to devote to either.
Even though SEO is solely algorithm-centric, you can't forget who your audience is. These are people, real humans, just like you. They have problems that your products or services can solve. As much as keyword optimization is handy for SEO, if it doesn’t help the human reader, rethink your content strategy.
Every company is expected to have a blog these days. Yours is no different. You need to keep at it, updating the blog weekly or semi-weekly. By creating an editorial calendar, you’ll always have blog content in the pipeline. This way, even if there’s a holiday coming up, you’ll have something to publish. Better yet, you can plan your content to fit the theme of these special days well in advance.
If a company hasn't updated its blog since 2016, that has probably negatively affected your perception of them. After all, if the company doesn't have content to post on their blog, you begin to wonder if they really care about their customers. An updated and maintained blog is a sure website traffic booster.
Once you know what you’re writing about, you should start thinking about the length of your posts. As mentioned, the current Google algorithm favors longer content. That means the days of 500-word blog posts are gone. Even 700 words per blog is too short now.
Instead, you should aim to write 1,500 words as a baseline. It’s okay to write as much as 2,500 words and sometimes even 3,000 words if the article requires it. Remember, though, you’re not writing just to write or fill a word count requirement; fluff will dent your SEO efforts.
You want to write actionable, interesting, educational content that’s providing a genuine value to the reader.
One of the most commonly-used tools to increase website traffic for free is good presence on social media. Now, this is a two-part strategy. First, you have to get curious leads on your social media pages. Then you have to redirect them to your website. This can be to your blog, your
landing pages, or your pricing or product pages.If you thought Google was changing SEO algorithms a lot, then you would be shocked to see how frequently Facebook does it. As we discussed in our landing page guide, Facebook's algorithm was updated in 2018. Today, posts from businesses are on the backburner. Instead, posts from family and friends are more likely to be on the top of a user’s newsfeed.
That doesn’t mean you should give up on Facebook. The content you post to your Facebook Business page must be more engaging right from the start. We’re talking viral images and videos, and re-posts of your blogs.
Your social media feed shouldn’t solely be used for self-promotion either. If you see a post from a fellow marketer that could benefit your readers, share it! Said marketer may share your posts too in the future.
Like your content marketing strategy, social media is only useful for attracting web visitors if you post often. According to an infographic from 2017 on Louise Myers Visual Social Media, the most recent data suggests that you should post on Facebook thrice every week. Myers said users may be more receptive to your posts very early in the morning (6:30 a.m.) and later at night (8:30 p.m.).
While these recommendations are backed by data, they may not always work for you. What you want to avoid, more than anything else, is annoying your customers by posting too often. You also don’t want to be a ghost and not post often enough.
A word of caution though: As a part of Twitter's crackdown on fake accounts, they're closing accounts that post similar or same content at a very high frequency. It makes them come across as bots and Twitter is actively banning these accounts.
Our last recommended tactic for driving more web traffic is using Outbound Marketing. We already covered outbound marketing earlier in this guide. With this kind of marketing, you’re the one who’s doing all the reaching out. You might opt to make cold calls or send cold emails. emails. You could even go old-school and try radio and TV ads or even newspaper ads.
The problem with outbound marketing campaigns is that you risk annoying your audience. Inbound marketing tactics often convert better. Your potential customers want the opportunity to do their own research. They want to look at your website, read your blog, and scroll through your social feeds. They want to price your products and services and read reviews. Then they’ll decide if you’re right for them.
With outbound marketing, they don’t get to do all that work. They’re essentially making a decision on the spot about whether they’re interested in you or not. Most of the time, it’s “not.”
That’s not to say that you should abandon outbound marketing campaigns entirely. Instead, we suggest a healthy ratio of outbound marketing and inbound marketing initiatives, with more focus on inbound marketing.
Before you can build a relationship with your customers, you need to have customers. That starts with attracting curious leads to your website. If they’re interested in your products and services, they might sign up for your newsletter. Some might even make a purchase, even if it just a small introductory offer.
These tactics will help you drive more website traffic in the form of leads and repeat customers. In the next chapter, we'll talk about advanced website visitor engagement strategies for high conversion rates, so keep reading.
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