As business owners in the digital age, having a website without traffic is like having a physical shop in the middle of the Simpson Desert.
People will most likely not see or hear about your business if you do not make an effort to get traffic to your website. Referrals within your business network will only take you so far. Website traffic can help scale it.
So now we appreciate it’s importance, let’s discuss 20 ways to get more people to visit your website. Use the table below to help navigate the article easier.
Run an Ad Campaign
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
UI/UX Enhancement
Content Creation
Social Media
Email Marketing
One of the easiest ways to get people to visit your website is through Google’s favourite tool, Pay-Per-Click (PPC). It’s a paid service that makes Google display your website on searches that you select or Google deems appropriate.
There are many types of ads you can place on Google; these include (but are not limited to):
Search ads are the ones that appear at the top or at the bottom of Google’s search engine results page (SERP). They look like standard results but are labelled as ads (in accordance with Google’s rules and regulations).
According to this 2020 study by BrainLabs, 65% of brands claim that Google Ads surpass all other types of paid ads. If you are operating on a limited budget, consider focusing on search ads.
If you are a business selling products online, you can opt for shopping ads – provided that you have an account in Google Merchant Center.
Shopping ads are the products displayed on the product carousel.
These are ads that are strategically positioned on third-party websites. Website owners are paid to create ad slots.
Discovery ads are the ones posted on YouTube home, Discover, and on Promotions and Social tabs of Gmail.
These are the short videos at the beginning or end of Youtube videos. This is also one of the most effective ads because they are naturally engaging and can be non-skippable.
SEO is the process of boosting a website’s traffic through organic/unpaid methods.
Whenever a user searches for something on Google (or any other search engine for that matter), Google’s bot will skim and scan through billions of web pages to curate what it thinks are relevant results. It will check keywords, metadata (more on this later), and other metrics. If your website is search engine optimised, you can be on top of the SERP without paying for PPC. Here are three ways you can improve your SEO.
Optimising keywords on your website involves creating and editing content that matches the exact search phrases your target market is searching for on their search engines. For example, suppose you are a dentist in Sydney, Australia. In that case, you may want to use the words “dentist in Sydney, Australia” or “dental clinic in Sydney, Australia.” You can put these words on your homepage as headings so it will be easier for Google’s bots to detect your services and suggest your website to the searcher.
This is the practice of linking all your pages together in a way that’s easy for your visitors to navigate. For example, if you have a blog and your topic touches on another topic you have already discussed, you can link them together. However, it’s important that you don’t use non-descriptive anchor text such as “click here to read the blog.” Instead, consider using the title of the blog or page as your anchor text. This way, your visitors and Google bots will be informed about the link.
There are cases where business owners and website creators focus too much on the content humans read and forget about metadata. Metadata is the blurbs of text Google bots read and quantifies to understand its relevance. It includes image tags (the alternative text for images), page titles (the headline seen at the top of each organic search listing, meta descriptions (a short summary of what the page is about), and headings (the structure of a website’s content).
UI/UX stands for user interface and user experience. User interface is basically how a website looks, while user experience is how a website feels.
All websites must be optimised for mobile. This is because almost everyone uses a phone to browse the internet due to its convenience. Coupled with powerful mobile tools like Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri, phones can do anything a computer can – especially for an average user.
So, getting your website designed for mobile and desktop is a non-negotiable for UI/UX. Otherwise, your website will not render correctly on mobile, and you will lose visitors.
Page loading time is one of the most common reasons visitors will choose to bounce out of (or exit) websites. According to Google Consumer Insights, 53% of mobile visitors will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. And the average load time on desktop (to optimise your traffic) is 2.5 seconds.
We, humans, are visual beings. We are naturally drawn to beautiful things. Having a beautifully designed website will help you retain eyes and attention on your website.
Beautiful web design should be coupled with great copy. Copywriting is writing to persuade your visitors to complete an action, like staying on the website, reading blogs, buying a product, booking a service, or scheduling a meeting.
Google and other search engines love blogs because of their value to visitors. If you don’t have a blog yet, you may want to consider investing your time to write or your money to hire a writer.
One of the things Google checks is a website’s credibility and domain authority. If you have new blogs (and you update them from time to time), Google will see that your website is valuable and has a bigger chance to be displayed on page 1.
Evergreen content is a type of web content that never dies. It does not get old and remains relevant for a long time. For example, tutorials, general blog articles, and listicles– provided they are not based on trends.
Trends die, but evergreen content can remain fresh for as long as you update it according to Google’s ever-changing SEO guidelines. Evergreen content has the potential to drive traffic consistently to your website no matter what time of the year it is.
Thought leaders (people with a following and authority on a certain subject) are traffic magnets. It’s a great idea to feature them on one of your blogs or any other content so that whenever their names are searched, your website will be one of the results on the SERPs.
People consume content in many ways, and podcasts have emerged as one of the biggest players, where content creation is concerned. Podcasts are audio recordings that can be about anything, but it’s typically by experts sharing their thoughts. You can use podcasts by repurposing your blogs into narrations or inviting experts to discuss the relevance of your products or services.
Videos are a great way to entertain and educate your visitors and, at the same time, keep them on your website. Like podcasts, you can repurpose your content to become videos and embed them on your website through Youtube or any other video-hosting platform.
Businesses and brands mingling with their audience on social media is nothing new. It’s a great way to humanise your brand and to listen to your audience and the trends they follow.
Having a social media presence can greatly affect how your audience views your brand. Instead of just using social media for announcements, use it to post valuable and entertaining stuff like memes, videos, and more. Just keep in mind that you are not on social media to only promote.
Try the 80:20 principle, wherein 80% of the time, you try to give value or entertain, and only 20% of the time, you promote your products or services. Social media users tend to unfollow brands that are too sales-y.
Influencers are found to be more effective than celebrity endorsers because they are viewed to be more genuine. They also typically have a lower collaboration fee and are flexible with the type of content you need to be posted.
You can also drive traffic to your website by promoting via email. This requires more work and various tools to execute properly, but it can be a small investment with the biggest ROI when done right.
Email flows are a set of emails that are automatically sent to your subscribers’ inboxes based on their activity with you. For example, when customers purchase your product, they will receive a thank you email with a discount coupon for their next purchase. After 2 weeks, they will receive another email asking them to write a review on their website or give the brand a follow on social media.
Unlike flows, campaigns are not triggered by your subscribers’ actions; instead, you decide when to send the emails. The emails could be about freebies, sales, or event invitations.
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