How to get more traffic to your website
Looking to get more website traffic?
Whether you run an ecommerce store, a professional services agency or an educational platform, driving traffic to your site is paramount. However, you also want to make sure you’re driving the right traffic to your site; users who are interested in what you do, you want to hear from you or who want to buy your products.
So how can you drive more of this kind of traffic to your site?
Adopt a mobile-first approach
One simple way to drive more organic traffic to your site is to optimise for mobile devices.
Mobile has long overtaken desktop as the primary means of search and Google has acknowledged this by rolling out a mobile-first indexing algorithm for determining quality and ease of use.
This means that Google will crawl your mobile site first and, if it doesn’t offer a user-friendly experience, you’ll drop in Google search results.
Implementing a responsive design will help create a better experience for users across all devices. This means that your website will adapt to suit any device, whether that be mobile, tablet, laptop or desktop.
To achieve responsive design, it’s important to keep your web theme up to date. Most current themes are designed to be responsive, meaning that you won’t have to do too much work to get it started.
For some businesses, mobile will greatly outrank desktop users. If this applies to you, then you might also consider developing an app to ensure all features are developed in a way that considers the mobile user.
If you’re building a new website, aim to design your mobile site first to ensure that all functionality caters to your mobile users before transitioning this into a desktop design.
Optimise for voice search
Beyond just mobile, people are beginning to search with their voice, not their keyboard.
With virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa becoming an integral part of the way users search online, businesses need to make sure their content strategies target the way people are using them.
To do this, consider how people might speak a search query vs how they would type it. People talk and write differently and therefore optimising for voice search will need a slightly different approach.
To help optimise your website for voice search, aim to create content that considers the speaking language of users, incorporating long-tail keywords and full sentences rather than simple phrases that would be appropriate for typed queries.
Virtual assistants not only conduct the search but also answer questions using the provided snippet from the selected content. This means that we also need to focus more attention on perfecting snippet text, offering concise yet informative text that directly answers a search query.
Implement effective search engine optimisation (SEO)
Nailing your SEO is critical to a successful search strategy, yet many businesses fail to appropriately implement SEO techniques.
If you’re not sure how well you’re tackling SEO, it might be useful to conduct an audit.
When auditing your website for SEO, consider things like whether your navigation is intuitive and how easy it is for a user to retrieve necessary information. These things are 2 components of User Experience (UX) Design and are extremely important not only to SEO, but to the overall experience of site visitors.
You’ll also want to make sure your on-page SEO is set up in a way that is simple for search engines to crawl, understand and index.
Some other tips to help achieve effective SEO is to test your site speed (and improve if necessary), utilise your XML sitemap for faster site indexing and constantly update your content so it is relevant and informative.
Optimise YouTube SEO
Video is now the most popular way for users to consume content.
With around 15,000,000 unique Australian visitors to YouTube every month, and around 2 billion world-wide, it’s also a really effective way for businesses to target consumers.
In fact, video marketing now offers around 66% more qualified leads per year and a 54% increase in brand awareness, making it a really effective marketing tool.
It’s also becoming critical for effective search engine optimisation.
As a Google product, YouTube videos are becoming really popular in traditional search results. And as the most popular way to consume content, Google often favours these results, displaying several videos on the first page.
Another advantage of using YouTube is that you’ll also appear in YouTube’s own search engine results, meaning you’ve got even more chances of being seen by the people who matter to you.
To optimise your video, make sure to add an informative blurb to your YouTube description and include your URL so users know where to go.
You should also add your URL to your video Annotations and have a spoken or written call to action in the video itself, helping to boost your click-through rate and therefore, website traffic.
However, none of this will make a difference if your content isn’t valuable to your viewers. So, if you’re going to use video to increase your website traffic, make sure your content is interesting, informative and engaging.
Deploy a strategic backlinking process
Backlinking is one of the most important yet challenging strategies for increasing website traffic.
In the eyes of Google, backlinking demonstrates authority within your industry and is therefore great for boosting your search ranking.
For this strategy to be effective, these links need to come from popular or valuable sources; getting a whole bunch of backlinks from sites that no-one visits would be ineffective and may even harm your search ranking.
For this reason, getting a range of good-quality, authoritative backlinks can take time and energy.
To help generate quality backlinks to your site, aim to create high-quality content that others in your industry would find interesting or useful. That way, they’re more likely to want to reference or share it.
If you’re going to approach other websites to link your content, make sure you approach a range of diverse yet authoritative sources. This demonstrates to Google that your content is seen as valuable by a range of audiences and makes it seem more organic.
Unfortunately, there’s no magic button for increasing traffic to your site. It’s a process that takes time, energy and lots of testing to get right. If all of this seems a bit much or you just don’t have the time to dedicate to SEO, we’d love to help!