5 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website

You can build the best website in the world, but it is essentially useless without traffic. Likewise, you cannot build a website and expect that traffic will automatically come. You will need to implement certain strategies in order to attract visitors and ultimately retain them.

These are five tips and strategies for increasing traffic to your website and building better conditions for retaining that traffic.

Note: Before using any of these tips, ensure your web hosting provider can support an unanticipated influx of new traffic. This might sound silly, but in some cases, testing out new online marketing ideas can attract so much attention that the associated server might become overwhelmed. Specifically, ensure your bandwidth is sufficient to handle an increased amount of traffic.

1. Give Your Readers a Reason to Visit and Return

Think about your favorite websites. They likely possess traits that cause you to return time and time again. Do they provide useful information? Do they supply features that simplify your life? The truth is that people don’t return to websites for which they can’t find any use.

Think about the last time you used Google. When you typed in the search term, did you come across websites that didn’t offer information that you wanted? Could you see yourself returning to the websites that you left?

This is why it’s so important to create content that hasn’t already been recycled in a thousand different ways online. You will never surpass the competition if you can’t offer information that is useful to your visitors. Provide your own insight whenever possible, and create fresh, compelling content. Always keep in mind that “content is king.”

2. Create Shareable Content

Not only should the content you create be interesting, but it should be interesting enough that it naturally urges to be shared via email or social networking. Because social networking has such a strong presence in the online world at the moment, you will need to implement it into your marketing strategy in order to be successful.

One way in which websites are creating shareable content is by strategically structuring their article headlines. For the sake of the argument, we’ll use an example headline. Compare the two following headlines:

  • How to Improve Your Marketing Strategy
  • 7 Reasons Your Marketing Strategy is Failing and How You Can Fix Them!

The first is a bit more reserved and traditional in the way it reads. It sparks a little bit of user interest. The user might think, “Sure, I guess this might be a good read. Maybe the article will make a few good points.”

The second headline is much more bold and exact. It tells you that you’ll be learning several actual reasons that could be the cause of your struggling campaign. Likewise, you can confidently assume that you will be given advice on how to fix these mistakes. The second headline clearly takes more action than the first.

Always make your headlines intriguing and engaging. Of course, you should also offer compelling content behind those headlines. A good headline won’t be very effective if it doesn’t lead to good content.

3. Start Targeting Long-Tail Keywords

Simply put, don’t worry about spending so much money on short keywords with heavy competition. If you run a technology blog and attempt to target the keyword “technology,” you will be up against millions of other websites that are also targeting that same phrase.

The secret is ultimately in “long-tail keywords.” These are keyword phrases made up of several words, and they are highly specific. For example, a person searching for “recipes that contain beef and noodles” likely won’t find what they’re looking for by merely searching for “recipes.” This is why they used the long search term in the first place.

Because this is an odd search term with possibly high search volume, it might be beneficial to invest in it. It all comes down to finding a good balance between the search term, the search volume, and the competition. In theory, you should look for search terms that have high search volume and low competition. This is where a lot of potential traffic can lie.

Additionally, your web hosting provider might supply analytics tools for tracking the performance of your keywords. This can help you determine whether or not your keyword strategy is effective enough to continue using.

4. Start a Facebook Page in Your Industry

Think about the things you like to blog about. What is your niche? It might be worth your while to start funneling traffic from social media.

You can accomplish this by creating a Facebook page that is related to the interests of your website. You will have to implement similar website promotion strategies to also increase exposure for the Facebook page. If you create great content, get involved with your followers, and update frequently, you can also be successful on Facebook.

There are ultimately two tricks for funneling social media traffic back to your website. You will first need to periodically share content from your website to the Facebook page, and you will also need to leave links on your posts to your website. However, you must provide some sort of incentive for your followers to actually click those links. This is where the catchy headlines would come into play, for instance.

5. Update Your Older Content

One of the best things you can do to promote more traffic is keep your old content relevant. Even if an older post performed well at a certain time in the past, it is essentially useless if it contains outdated information. You will need to keep this information updated.

You can locate all of your older content by searching through your “archive” if your website has one. It’s a good idea to periodically perform an audit of posts any older than six months to one year. If the post has any outdated information, either change it or place a date on the post so that users know when the data originated.

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