Even if you’ve spent the time and money to build a beautiful website, the hardest part is getting people there to engage with it. Some companies and individuals will pay thousands per month to drive traffic to their site. The average small business (not even a huge retailer) will spend between $5,000-10,000 a month on online advertising to keep up. But you can’t just rely on paid traffic alone, there is huge opportunity in other methods of getting people to your site. There are multiple components to increasing website traffic:
Your two focuses should be:
- Increasing organic traffic over time
- Optimizing paid traffic to target the right audience for the best price
Exceling both of these strategies will result is exponentially growing web traffic at a sustainable cost to you, both time and budget wise.
Here are 7 actionable tips you can implement right now to increase website traffic:
1. Link up with micro influencers and leverage networks.
One of the easiest ways to make a slash in a specific part of the web instantaneously is to leverage the networks that already exist. Quality backlinks are among the most important SEO factors and can be one of your biggest tools to long term and instant traffic. Seek out the micro influencers or top websites and publications that relate to your website. Offer to provide guests posts, work out collaborations, or simply introduce your site and your value to help expand your network and leverage already “qualified” traffic. The great thing about influencers is that their audiences are genuinely engaged and already vetted unlike paid ad traffic. Even if you have to pay a little, having correlation is an easy way into the right “stream” of traffic for your site and a plus in the eyes of Google.
2. Re-target ads and bring back qualified traffic.
If you are going to be putting money behind Adwords and ads on social platforms, you want to make sure that it is being used as effectively as possible. Re-targeting those who do click through your ads once will help ensure that you are paying to reach the right people. There is some really easy, helpful software for this like AdRoll that lets you re-target users that have been to your site on other sites and places around the web to increase the chance that they come back and take whatever desired action you want them to. It’s a better way to narrow down and only put money behind the traffic that is going to have the most lucrative result for you. All you really need to do is add a code to your site, design and set live your ads, and see engaged, relevant traffic roll in.
3. Get your current traffic to promote you for free.
Your current customers or visitors, no matter how small, has great potential to be one of the biggest drivers of organic traffic for you. 31% of all traffic to sites comes from social media. Create something they want to share with their networks and make extremely easy to. Some of the sites with the most organic traffic per month have nailed this. Create content, tools, and offers that are interesting, relevant, and helpful to your target audience and then make it easy to share. Add share buttons using AddThis website sharing tools to all parts of your site and content and even reward users for passing on your message. Hubspot has done a great job at creating short, helpful content that is easily shared around the web and Dropbox rewards users to sharing their site with more storage space. Even just a few shares to small networks can be a catalyst for organic traffic.
4. Create relevant content and re-purpose it.
People are online and on social to mostly entertain and educate. A good content strategy should take into consideration what is interesting and educational to your target audiences and what keywords are most effective for you. It will take time, but building up a relevant content base is effective. Brands with social sharing that create just 12 new blog posts per month average 1200 more leads to their site. To further leverage the power of your content, you should always be repurposing your content for all platforms. This includes creating graphics and posts around the content that entice people back to your site. Try Canva to easily create compelling infographics and visuals for your posts to grab attention elsewhere online. Just one or two really strong posts can result in exponential traffic and a consistent building of content helps with long term SEO.
5. Speed up your site.
Optimizing your site’s SEO and ranking is heavily dependant on your site speed. Visitors to a website leave 50% of the time if the page takes longer than 4 seconds to load. The higher your bounce rate, the worse Google ranks you. A one second delay in your site speed means a 11% loss in page views. Your page speed is extremely important aspect of your long and short term traffic and conversions. It’s actually relatively easy to fix. Firstly, make sure you have an adequate hosting plan. Then try optimizing image size with a simple plugin like WP Smush and minify CSS and Javascript instantly with W3 total cache. Adding just these in a few minutes can make a huge difference in your site speed.
6. Make your website responsive.
Mobile traffic actually makes up more than 52% of all traffic. It’s imperative that users are able to reach you from their mobile phones and explore your website optimally. Your website should have a responsive mobile version for every page and function to avoid losing traffic from this one simple mistake. Ideally, your website is responsive from the beginning by using responsive themes and templates and making the necessary HTML and CSS changes when necessary to make sure all parts of responsive. If not, WPtouch is a great plugin to help you make your site responsive without a ton of work or a new URL. It also tags your site as mobile friendly worth Google.
7. Use Beamer to better engage with return and new traffic.
For the traffic that makes it to your site organically or paid, you should have an interface that is ready to engage and convert them. The more time people spend on your site when they get there first, the lower your bounce rate is which helps boost your search result positioning. Beamer is a really simple way to engage new and return users on any page they may land on. Beamer is an interactive newsfeed that sits right within your interface. All users have to do is click the “What’s New” tab or the icon in your interface to open up a sidebar full of engaging updates. You can create updates on anything: new features, new events, sign ups, new content, products, sales, etc. You can add photos, videos, and CTA buttons to engage users and get them further exploring your site. It’s a great way to get people spending more time on your site. You can enable push notifications and those who opt-in (the average is about 20%) will get updates on their desktop even when they’re not on your site to increase returning traffic!
Your goal for long term, sustainable, and effective traffic should be to optimize the money you are spending on ads and boosting organic traffic. It’s a balance between leveraging the technical aspects of web traffic with the creativity of properly communicating with your target audience. Communicate directly in the most effective way with your target audience with Beamer. Install Beamer in a few minutes today and see 10x more engagement.
