10 Low-Cost Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website (Tips and Tools)
So you’re a budding entrepreneur. You’ve set up that all-important website, your digital storefront. Your main concern would be virtual visitors; people whom you’ve never seen before and are keen to buy what you’re selling. After all, what good is your website if nobody visits?
Understanding Website Traffic
Website traffic literally refers to web users who visit a website. It is measured in visits, sometimes called ‘sessions’, and is a common way to measure an online business effectiveness in attracting an audience. Keep in mind that website traffic is both an important indicator and driver of business growth.
It helps you to:
- know your marketing’s performance
- gather valuable insights about your audience in order to make effective decisions
- improve your SEO and increase your search engine credibility
- generate more leads, increase conversions and ultimately obtain more customers
Yet to reap such benefits, would require bringing in quality traffic to your website via the right ways. Your goal is to attract the right visitors to your website, those who are most likely to convert into leads and finally customers.
Note: Here’s the beginner’s guide on how to make money from affiliate marketing.
How to Increase Traffic to Your Website?
The foundation for any successful business is having great and quality website traffic. Here are several low-cost ways that can help increase traffic to your website.
Know yourself and thy enemy and you will win every battle. The very same principle applies when it comes to owning a website. By observing the competition you can learn many things and use them to your benefit.
To get an idea of how this works, one direction of thought is that competitors may be getting ahead because they use better tools, automation, and the like to build scalable, more robust systems. This brings about a leaner, more effective and efficient business. Learn from them.
There are a ton of free tools you can work with to do this. For example, both BuiltWith and the WHSR Tool offer free, behind-the-scenes peeks at the technologies that drive websites. ALl you need is to provide the tools with a URL to check out.
This can give you a high-level technological overview at how online businesses track their visitors, manage their website content and even convert qualified leads.
Create an optimized Google My Business listing and link it to your website. Bear in mind that a completed one can bring in 7 times more visits than an uncompleted one. This is a free and great way to get more traffic to your website.
Also, if your listing provides all the information a potential customer needs to make a decision, they might even contact your business directly.
At this time, if you don’t understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. It is the process of optimizing your website and content in order to help improve its ranking on search engines. SEO works to gain positive traction from the algorithms set in place by search engines.
There are SEO tactics you can perform on each of your website pages to increase their ranking in search engines. This includes creating useful and high-quality content which your audience is searching for. How?
Just make sure your content answers the many questions people are asking online. Use this simple framework below to approach writing useful content:
- Type in potential questions in Google that people are asking online
- Do keyword research to find the popular question
- Write a post that answers this question
- Follow SEO best practices when writing
- Ensure the word count is sufficient to fully answer the question
- Edit, publish, rinse and repeat
Do the above repeatedly and search engines will send traffic to your website. Also, include concise meta descriptions for each of your pages; such meta descriptions appear below your URL in search results. Having an idea on what a page is about can result in a click.
Don’t neglect traditional methods such as email marketing; it can be a powerful tool. A simple and moderately successful email blast can result in a significant uptick in traffic. However, be careful not to overly bombard people with relentless emails just about everything in your business.
A friendly email reminder now and then, about a new service or product can help boost your traffic.
Social media is favored by many entrepreneurs to bring in traffic. This is of no surprise due to the obvious uptake of social media worldwide which is projected to register 4.41 billion of users by 2025. So, it makes sense to make use of social media tools to promote your content via different social media channels to increase your website’s visibility.
Twitter is great for short and snappy links. LinkedIn is especially effective in B2B niches and can help your content show up in personalized search results. But, if you’re a B2C company, you might find greater traction with image-heavy social sites like Pinterest and Instagram.
Also, you need to actively participate in the communities in social media. Join relevant group discussions. Answer questions and engage with your readers. Don’t just broadcast, interact with your readers. Then, they’ll believe that you’re serious and sincere about your business.
This day in time where speed is everything, you have to ensure that your website is fast and up always, as it should be in the first place. Having a service downtime or making your visitor wait is basically telling them to go elsewhere. You don’t want a high bounce rate.
Your hosting solution can either make you or break you. It is also crucial for SEO. Since Google takes speed into account when ranking sites, a good hosting solution can help in pushing you to the top.
There are many affordable web hosts that you can explore such as WebHostFace. Remember that an overall good web host performance will help heaps in boosting your website’s visibility.
You have to ensure that your site is efficient and fast always. To help with this, your pages need to be as technically optimized as possible, including image file sizes, page structure and layout. Also, don’t forget the functionalities of third-party plugins too.
Your website also needs to be mobile-friendly. Today, more and more are using mobile devices to access the web and if your website is not mobile compatible, you’re basically cutting off this huge portion of mobile users.
If you want higher traffic to help make your business successful, you’ll need to know where your competitors are achieving success with keywords for pay-per-click ads and improving SEO. WordStream Free Keyword Tool helps with this. It is one of the best tools for SEO and Paid Search Data.
Type in what you need and you’ll get a report that has:
- the top ten keyword suggestions, which includes long-tail keywords
- Google search volume for the keywords concerned
- the function to filter by industry or country
You can opt to give your email to get more information for free, including:
- keywords competition level
- the estimated cost-per-click
- a complete list of tons of keywords
Being aware of your competitors’ social media activity is crucial. You need to know what’s being said about your competitors and who are mentioning them. With that, you can then get in on that action.
Social Mention is basically a social media search engine that searches multiple social media sites in real time. It searches user-generated content such as blogs, images, video, comments and others for mentions of a company or keyword.
You’ll be able to track and analyze all the instances that your competitor was mentioned on a social network like Facebook and Twitter. Just input your competitor’s name, product or any keyword. You’ll obtain a snapshot of real-time data results. From here, you can know the individual mentions and their sources.
Take note of these sources as you can target them to drive traffic to your website and generate quality backlinks (incoming links from other websites). One of Social Mention’s top-notch features is sentiment analysis which gives an overall feel of something if it is positive, negative or neutral.
Additionally, it gives the number of individuals who are mentioning the brand. In short, SocialMention provides a useful overview of how people feel about your competitors and also about you.
Conclusion
The above are some of the low-cost ways you can use to help boost traffic to your website. Try them out and consistently monitor the results. Then adjust accordingly to suit your website needs. Take note that this is a continuous cycle. Be diligent to do this and you’re well on your way to increasing traffic.
