Let’s look at how to increase website traffic – one of the most critical questions in digital marketing, in my opinion.
There’s no point in having a beautifully polished and strategically put-together website if your website isn’t a traffic-generating machine. But it’s not easy to get traffic, as you probably know if you’ve already got a website for your small business. And don’t be like me nearly 20 years ago and think you can publish a website, and the traffic will flow on in, in droves. It doesn’t happen like that. Take it from me.
How do I generate traffic to my website?
The critical question is – how do I generate traffic to my website? There are many ways, and some are more effective than others. Not one thing will be effective for everyone. And remember, what works one year, quarter, or month may not work the next.
- Google algorithms change
- what customers search for
- how they search
- what’s relevant
These are all some of the components that can change and will impact how you can drive traffic to your website.
Here are the 6 top ways to increase the traffic to your site.
1. Organically with curated SEO and an SEO Strategy
My favourite, of course. SEO is, again, an area you need to know what you’re doing with. But SEO will keep on giving for years to come. And it’s an area where you can customise your approach to suit your budget.
For example, if you have a healthy budget, you can continue to work and tweak your SEO Strategy.
Or if you need to do SEO on a budget, you can have your site overhauled so your SEO is on point or pick a:
- Website page
- Category
- Product if you’re an e-commerce website to focus on as a starting point.
It’s all about expectations. The smaller the approach, the slower results. But the sooner you start your SEO journey, the sooner you’ll see results.
2. Ads – social media and Google ads
The thing to remember with ads is if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can waste a lot of money testing and measuring and trying to get it right. When you do get it right, the ROI can be fabulous, though.
The downside is when you turn the ads off, the traffic stops too. Which never has sat well with me .😉 I want my investment to keep on working for me. But that’s my opinion, and ads are a significant business, so many business owners obviously don’t feel like that.
3. Content marketing
Creating content, especially for blog posts, is another favourite of mine, as I love researching and writing copy. And you can see such positive results with blog posts.
Blog posts work fabulously in conjunction with an SEO Strategy/plan too. And with a plan, you’ll see quicker results as your approach will be curated with where you:
- Need to improve your ranking
- Will be able to rank higher for – you want to get a foot in the door with a topic and article that will help you climb those search engine rankings. And a plan will help you recognise where those gaps are and what you need to be writing about.
- Don’t write about topics your audience doesn’t want to read. You want to write about topics that will bring traffic to your website and keep your visitors on-site reading to boot your time on-site stats. And even better, if they love your article, they share it with their network too.
Blogs work particularly well if you’re a service-based business, too, as you don’t often have changes to make to your website, so blogs are a great way to keep things fresh. And Google loves new content.
I know planning and writing blog posts can feel overwhelming. It’s another thing to do on a long list, no doubt. But consider your goals and ROI (return on investment) as well as ROT (return on time)
You don’t need to be writing a blog a week. If once a month is all you can do. Then do that—quality over quantity.
Google only has so much crawl budget when it crawls your website so use it wisely.
4. Organic social media
Organic social media is a great way to repurpose your content from your:
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Podcasts
Take that content and pick out snippets or teasers to turn into captions and posts. And then promote your website by dangling the carrot of clicking through to the article/content to read/watch more.
As you’re driving followers off socials, be aware of how many links you share in a week.
Social media platforms generally don’t like you driving traffic away from them, and rumour has it you’ll get a lower reach if you overdo it with too many links. But like I say, with everything, test and measure what works for you.
You can check your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is something from too.
5. EDMs and email marketing campaigns
EDMs (electronic direct mail) is a great and effective way to drive traffic. The important thing is to think and plan what you’re going to send out.
- Latest news
- New releases
- Sales/special offers
- Order cut-off dates
- Showcase testimonials/case studies and how you’ve helped solve a problem for a client
Remember to send exciting, quality content your subscribers will want to read. The important bit is “what your readers want to read”, and if you’re unsure why not, ask them.
6. Google My Business – GMB
GMB is another favourite of mine. And a platform you can publish posts and content on regularly – many business owners don’t realise this. Did you?
Google My Business is free, so if you don’t have it claim yours now. And if you do have it check it out and ensure it’s set up to showcase your business as best you can.
- Post content that links to your website
- Post videos
- Updates
- Offers with a timeframe
- List all your services or products
Include your opening hours and holiday closures if you have them.
And most importantly, drive your clients and customers to leave reviews there.
What are the reasons why website traffic is not coming
Have you been doing all or some of the things or completely different things, but you’re still not receiving the website traffic? Here are a few reasons you might not be receiving traffic to your website:
a) Your site is new and doesn’t rank yet. SEO, content marketing and backlinks (links back to your site) will help with this.
b) You’ve misspelled your domain name – it may sound silly, but I know of this happening. And it doesn’t hurt to double-check.
c) Are there any technical problems with your website that stop Google from crawling it and ranking it?
d) Your hosting or domain name has expired, or your hosting is down. This happens, so remember to check your front end regularly or invest in a website maintenance plan that includes uptime monitoring.
How to check traffic on your website
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are both FREE Google tools and the perfect way to check traffic on your website. If you followed me for a while, you’d undoubtedly have heard me mention these a time or two. 😆
Knowledge is power, and with these informative tools, you’ll get actual real-time stats to show you exactly:
- What traffic you’re getting
- Where it’s coming from
- Time on site
- Device types
- Where exactly they’re exiting from
And many other insights and stats.
What to do when it comes to your web traffic?
If you’re concerned about the lack of traffic to your website, then you can implement the strategies above. Don’t be overwhelmed. Make a plan and keep it real. By keeping it real, I mean only plan for what you can do, given your available time.
If you’d like a professional/expert opinion on your website, reach out. You can book a free discovery call where we can discuss your concerns and see whether I can help. I also offer Website Consults, where we can delve into any questions or areas you want to investigate or discuss. Or you can book a Website SEO Audit which gets into the nitty gritty of your website, but if you’d like to know more, I’m only a phone call or email away.
They’re just a couple of the ways that we can work together. Or feel free to keep reading through my digital marketing blog to absorb all things SEO and more.
