At somepoint, every entrepreneur will ask the question – “How do I increase website traffic for my business?”.
The answer will involve the same talking points, regardless if you’re looking for your first visitor or 10,000th visitor. There’s very few ways to increase your traffic rapidly overnight, outside of hiring influencers or striking lucky on social media. I won’t be covering these areas today. Instead, I’ll highlight some changes you can make right now which will undoubtedly nurture and increased flow of traffic to your website.
Why would you want to follow this advice?
Ultimately, increasing traffic to your website increases your chance of creating a customer. While ‘more traffic doesn’t equal more customers’, if you are providing a product or service that is valuable to a substantial market, then attracting more traffic will certainly increase your customer conversion rate.
With that said, let’s highlight some of the easiest ways you can increase website traffic
Keyword Research
It is vital that you research keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business. Keywords should be naturally integrated into your content, so bear this in mind when scouting for keywords to feature. ‘Keyword stuffing’ is when content is written, and you guessed it, these selected phrases are stuffed into sentences unnaturally, such that it will break the focus and attention of the reader.
Not only will you lose the attention of readers, Google and other search engines have been refined and masterfully developed to detect instances of keyword stuffing. Therefore, falling out of favor with search engines will only hinder your discoverability. Tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner are excellent for identifying potential keywords.
Now for the next question.
How do I find the most effective keywords?
First, you’ll need to put yourself in the position of a customer. What searches will they perform on Google (or other search engines) when faced with the problem that your business solves?
If my roof begins leaking, I’m going straight to Google and typing ‘Roof leak repair Glasgow’. Companies who rank highest for this keyword will appear first in my search, and are most likely to get my business. Infact, 75% of website visitors never go beyond the First page of search results
Utilizing Keywords
Unfortunately, it’s no longer possible to just paste keywords into meta tags and watch your traffic explode. Instead, you should be using your keywords in various areas of content throughout your pages.
Using H1 tags to declare your chosen keyword or keyphrase is important, as it allows Google to figure out the content of the page.You should only use H1 tags once so as not to confuse Google when it crawls your page. You should also naturally integrate your keyword into your main content text. If your website features images, you can define alternative text, which should be used to describe the image. By featuring your keyword here, you’ll boost your discoverability, thus allowing you to increase your website traffic.
Mobile Responsiveness
Here’s a stat that might not shock you: 60% of all Google searches are performed through a mobile device. That number is only going to continue to climb, as the global number of smartphone users is projected to top 3 billion by the end of 2022.
What may shock you though, is if your website isn’t fully optimized to provide mobile users with the best experience possible, you’re almost guaranteed to lose business as a result. Users won’t stick around on a website that is difficult to read or navigate on their device, which will damage your search ranking and credibility as a business. These reasons are why we prioritize building websites with a mobile-first approach.
The most common issues that websites may face when tackling mobile responsiveness are:
- Scaling issues, resulting in content being difficult to read.
- Poor implementation of media, resulting in long page loading times
- Unclear call-to-action
Most pagebuilders, such as WordPress, Wix and Squarespace provide themes that are already mobile responsive. But you should review this using their built in tools, or even Google Chrome’s Developer Tools. If your website doesn’t scale or perform to a satisfactory level on multiple screen sizes, you should contact a specialized web developer.
Can page speed influence my website traffic?
For years now, Google has been ranking websites based on page speed (the time it takes to load a page after clicking a search engine link). Google is continuing to hone down on this area of their search algorithm, with the Core Web Vitals putting heavy emphasis on evaluating loading and stability.
Google has reinforced this point, by providing tools for web developers, such as PageSpeed Insights.
It’s important not to be fooled into thinking that only the most poorly developed websites will draw lackluster page speed results. Often, you’ll think that because your website is usable, your score will be fine, but this isn’t always the case.
Source: Fasterize
Using the image below, you can see the 3 score thresholds used by Lighthouse:
- 0 to 49 (red): Poor
- 50 to 89 (orange): Needs Improvement
- 90 to 100 (green): Good
It’s important to often use these tools to perform a health check of your website. As time passes, your website grows in terms of code and content. Not to mention the frequent software updates that your website will require to continue to operate. With all of these factors combined, your page speed will slow, unless you can dedicate time to stay on top of maintenance work.
Source: Think with Google
A great first impression
With the amount of content and data screaming for our attention, it’s more important than ever to capture your audience instantly. You’ll have heard this in all forms of media and entertainment, and your website is no different.
Word of mouth is the most important marketing asset you can acquire. If you can make a good first impression through your website, your chances of converting a site user to a customer have dramatically increased.
Consider the fact that 88% of consumers don’t return to a website if they have a terrible experience, along with the first impression of a website taking on average 2.6 seconds to develop. Keeping these numbers in mind, you must do everything to achieve the following:
- Reinforce your visitors that they are in the right place
- Show the benefits that you can provide
Once again, to examine if you’re on the right path, create a persona of a typical member of your target audience. Then, go straight to your website and ask:
‘Would I be interested in working with this business?’
Let’s recap!
Summary
Ensure your website has outstanding quality on mobile, is fully responsive and loads in under a second.
Ensure you are able to perform or hire someone to conduct regular maintenance on your website to ensure it is stable and up to date.
Discover and utilize keywords that align with your brand’s values and objectives. Integrate keywords naturally into content on your website.
Capture your audience instantly. Reassure your visitors that they’re in the right place and showcase the great value you can bring to them as a product or service.
There’s a lot more in-depth advice that could be given. But if you’re looking for some time & cost effective changes to increase your website traffic, I urge you to take a look at your website with these points in mind.
Now I’d like to ask you
Which area are you going to tackle first on your website?
Let me know by commenting!
