You’ve got your website up and running and everything is going great! Well, no, it’s not all great. No one is visiting. Or at least, not enough people. So what can be done? Here’s a few ideas to boost the traffic coming to your site.
Consistent Updates
A simple and effective method of increasing traffic is to set a schedule for updates and blog posts and stick to it. Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? But it actually gives technical benefits as well as appealing to return readers. Search engines like new content. And the more new content that appears, the higher your site will rise in the results. As for your loyal readers, they really expect you to produce the posts you promise when you say you will. Having your new update ready when they show up to look for it will keep people coming back. Missing a post will erode confidence and you may lose some followers over it.
Participate in Communities
Getting outside your own site and joining in other online communities like blogging networks can be a big boost. You do have to contribute to those communities but posting about your site’s update counts. The most beneficial is to actually create some unique content for the community. Guest blogging gives you a chance to show off your knowledge and your writing skill, while allowing you to link back to your home website in your bio. You can even invite people from the community to guest blog on your site. Of course, they will let their loyal readers know there is some unique content up on your site and that will drive some of their traffic in your direction.
Improve Your Site
Nothing drives people away faster than technical difficulties on a website. Make sure your site is mobile friendly, able to be displayed on any type of device, and optimized for use on that device when it is viewed. Make your site a merchant site by following a guide to creating an online store and allowing visitors to buy your product or service. Test that your pages are fast, that they load quickly and allow speedy navigation between them. Create a sitemap showing the whole layout of your website.
Search engines like this and use it to create a better picture in their data. People like it because it allows them to move quickly to the areas they want to go. Review your site for internal links. The more interconnected your website is, the easier it is to keep visitors moving through the different pages that might interest them without leaving. And always review your site for real technical problems: dead links, HTML errors, or server errors.
Use Video
Branch out from a text only site and provide more graphic, audio, and video content. Video can allow you to link to sites like YouTube and pull traffic from there. And video is very popular with site visitors, in fact, studies have proven that video content boosts overall engagement better than any other form of media. Try creating tutorials to walk people through some task which you are an expert in.
This provides value for the viewer while demonstrating your expertise. It may seem like you are providing a service for free, but once people understand you know what you are talking about and trust your competence, they will be more likely to come to your site again.
Optimize SEO
Use long-tail keywords and other Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices to boost your site into the first ten results for search engines. The higher you are on the results for a search, the more likely you will be visited.
Social Media
Infographic: source
Take advantage of the huge pool of potential customers on social media. Do the basics at the very least. Create a bio, include your website URL, and make your profile picture a good quality logo or professional headshot. Add quick share buttons on your site for visitors to share it back to social media. Through social media, you can share updates about your site, as well as other related content. If you are new to social media, it may be good to do some research on how hashtags work.
Advertising
Of course, the traditional way of getting more traffic is to pay for advertising. There are a huge number of services willing to help you with this, so do some research to be sure you have a reputable one that is highly recommended. If you do pay for ads, make sure you monitor how effective they are with analytics tools.
If one type outperforms another, you can invest more heavily in the most effective. Remember that even the best advertisements only bring people to your site. At that point you need to have reasons for them to stay or your boost in traffic will be short lived.
Conclusion
Of course, there are hundreds of other methods to attract additional traffic to a website. And each of these suggestions can be broken down into dozens of specific methods. Research the ones that seem most applicable to your site and invest the most time, energy, and money into those. If you feel too lost, you can even hire consultants who will help you. It’s a complicated task, but worth it if you can see a sustained growth in visitors to your site.
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