6 Ways to Increase Your Website Traffic

Whether you’re looking to start a blog or an e-commerce website, you aim to generate traffic at the end of the day. The more people who visit your site, the more your sales opportunities increase. If you’re looking to make ad revenue, you need as many visitors to click on the links as possible. 

For either of these to happen first, you need to create a draw to your website. This is a huge challenge in itself, with millions of websites vying for users’ attention. However, there are several ways to stand out from the competition.

High-Quality Website Basics

Attracting and retaining visitors requires a high-quality, well-thought-out website that adheres to the basic principles of good design. Your site needs to exude professionalism, and not just by showcasing contemporary design and sleek animations. The content needs to be useful, offering practical solutions to real-world problems. It also needs to be impeccably written and neatly laid out.

This is why it makes sense to leave the task to a professional web designer. Web designers know the qualities of a good website and won’t have to waste time on trial and error. They will know what works best for the goal you’re trying to achieve with the target audience you have in mind. Good web designers often optimize areas such as:

1. Quick Loading Time

With so many things vying for internet users’ attention, including addictive social media feeds, visitors don’t have the patience to wait for a slow website to load. If your web pages take longer than three seconds to load, chances are visitors will leave and go to the next link on the results page. 

In addition to costing you potential sales or ad revenue, a slow site can jeopardize its rankings on search engine results pages. Not only should your site load quickly on a desktop, but it should also load just as fast, if not faster, on mobile devices.  

Thankfully, you can use many free tools to test the loading speed of your web pages. If the results are below standard, you can improve speeds by compressing bulky image files and using plugins, among other measures.

2. Mobile Optimization

An astonishing 90 percent of internet users search a site using mobile devices. With this in mind, you need to ensure that your site’s browsing experience is the same for mobile users as it is on the desktop. Your web pages should load just as fast and be just as comfortable to navigate. It is not enough to make your site mobile-compatible; you need to design your site for mobile users from the ground up.  

If you’re running an e-commerce site, users should be able to window shop, view the features of products and complete their purchase as fluidly on their smartphones as they would at their computers. Be sure to test the mobile view before launching your website.

3. Offer Promotions

Social media presents a highly effective, pocket-friendly way to reach your target audience and drive traffic to your website. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the likes are accessed by billions of users daily around the world. While they offer incredible reach, it is easy for your brand messaging to get lost in the noise generated on social media. How do you capture the ears of potential buyers in this busy space? 

Coming up with promotions is one way. Even if you don’t offer your products for free, you can offer discounts for a limited period, using your social media handles to get the word out. Or you could give away supporting products or downloadable materials. If your following is not yet large enough, you could use paid social ads to get visibility on the timelines of those who don’t follow you.

4. Implement SEO Tactics

One of the most effective ways to get your site noticed by your target audience is to ensure it comes up when they Google-search anything related to what your site is about. Search engine optimization (SEO) ensures that your site is easily found by querying internet users by ensuring your pages meet the criteria search engines use to rank pages highly in results pages.

Among the SEO tactics you can use to achieve high rankings are:

• Using available tools to obtain keywords and strategically infuse them into content.
• Get as many inward links pointing into your web pages as you can.
• Keep up with algorithm updates by Google and other search engines.

5. Offer Unique Content

What better way to ensure visitors to your site keep coming back than by offering them engaging content? If you fill your website with information that solves real-world problems or entertains them well enough to forget them, you won’t need to work too hard to promote your site. This is especially true if visitors know that they can’t get what you’re offering anywhere else. 

6. Email Marketing Campaigns

This successor of direct mail marketing can help you communicate in a more personal way with potential website visitors than social media. After using one of the available tools to create a mailing list, you can reach out to your target market with exciting offers in regular newsletters.

Target Your Audience

It’s not enough to simply get thousands of visitors logging onto your site every other day. To engage meaningfully with the content or actually make a purchase, they have to identify with the market segment you’re targeting. Make sure to connect with your audience early on to create dedicated buyers for the future.