When you run a website, the amount of traffic you receive is paramount. You might run it as part of your business, or it may just be a hobby, but either way you want as many people as possible to see your content. Visitors are especially important if your website promotes your products or services, or even acts as an online store. To increase your chance of gaining customers, you want as many people as possible to see your site. Site owners are always looking for ways to increase their traffic, and preferably without having to spend a lot of money. If your traffic flow isn’t as high as you’d like it to be, there are many things you can try to increase your success. Try some of the suggestions below to get more visitors flocking to your site, and perhaps even staying for longer.
Create Great Content
If you aren’t already, you need to start focusing on producing amazing content. There are so many different factors that contribute to what makes good content, but you can improve yours by taking note of just a few. First, start with your headlines. One of the first things people will read is the headline of your article, especially when you share it on social media. So make sure you’re creating brilliant titles that catch people’s eyes and draw them in. You can find lots of advice and cheat sheets for putting together subject lines, which recommends practices such as creating lists and using buzzwords.
The main body of your content is important too, of course, and in-depth articles can perform particularly well. Your content needs to give readers what they’re looking for, with clear and helpful information. It should all be fresh and written from scratch, never produced from a content generator or copied from elsewhere. Although some sites will cover a range of topics, aiming to fill a certain niche could be more beneficial for bringing in traffic. It’s also important that your content is shareable, meaning that your readers should be able to share it on social media with just a couple of clicks. Your titles also factor into how shareable your content is; for example, people are particularly attracted to numbered lists.
Create Content Frequently
You can’t just create some content and allow it to sit on your site, waiting for your traffic to increase. You should keep everything fresh and up to date, with frequent updates to your website. Make sure that the areas of your site that experience the most traffic stay relevant and add extra content weekly at the least. If you’re struggling to keep up with updates, you can outsource your article writing to someone who can do it for you.
Use Videos
One of the best tips for creating shareable content is to make videos, and not just stick to text. People pay a lot of attention to videos because they’re visual and often clearly visible in search results. Making quality videos isn’t easy, but if you can get it right then it could be hugely beneficial for your site. A particularly smart or funny video might even go viral, giving your website tonnes of exposure.
Set Up Social Pages
Many businesses set up social media profiles to promote their products or services, and your website should be no different. When you create pages on Facebook, for example, you can include a link to your site in your profile. But, more importantly than that, you can share links to your site regularly, through your status updates. You should be careful to balance sharing your content with linking to other people. Your fans don’t always want to see you promoting yourself and no one else. This is an excellent opportunity to swap links with other websites and agree to help each other. When you post on your social pages, use calls to action to get people to like, comment on and share your posts.
Link from Other Sites
Building links is important to your website’s performance in search engines. You need to have links on other sites that point towards your site. You can do this in lots of different ways, including having guest posts and promotional posts on other people’s blogs. But you must be careful to include your links within proper content. You can trade links with others, as long as you only link to sites that are relevant to your visitors. As you grow in popularity, links to your website will naturally increase from people sharing your content. Apart from using your social media presence to link to your site, you can also do so from other websites. Perhaps you also own a similar site. Or you could build something light-hearted like http://ragemaker.net/ to show your skills and link back to your primary site.
Paid Advertising
Of course, if you want to increase your site’s visibility, you can always use paid advertising. You can use Google Adwords, Facebook advertising and similar programs to target your audience. But those aren’t the only forms of advertising you can use. There’s also affiliate marketing, where you give someone commission from a sale for advertising your products. Or you could pay someone to review your site or product.
Improve User Experience
It’s not just getting people to the website in the first place that matters. If the user experience of your site is better, people are more likely to stay on the website and share your content. One of the ways that Google measures user satisfaction involves how long users stay on a page and whether they return to the search results. For example, your website looks great to Google if a user clicks and doesn’t go back to the search page. However, if they bounce right back to click on another link, your site doesn’t look so good. If you can increase the chances of users staying on your site, you could rank higher in Google’s search results.
