After building up a website, or even starting to build it, during the development process you can start applying some strategies to make sure you get good traffic on your website. It could be SEO strategies applied during the development process or attracting visitors by a decent marketing campaign. Choose what suits best to your site and your pocket.
1. Build a Great Website
Everybody wants a great website. But what do you mean by a great website? Who has the say if any website is good or bad? Your visitors decide if a website is good or bad.
In the article 10 Elements of a Great Website Design Loved by Visitors, we have listed the top ten features of a great website loved by visitors. The article basically says that if the website works for the visitors, any number and combination of the elements listed in the article are enough. If they love a simple yet fast design it is great. If the visitors want graphic rich website, give them that. The appearance and experience of the website differs with the type of audience you have.
2. Have a Targeted Audience
First of all clearly understand what your target audience is, because that is going to decide everything from your website design to marketing strategies. Everything mandatorily depends on it and if you mess in that step, your highly accurate subsequent steps are going to fail inevitably.
Reason is, each audience type reacts to presented content differently. They don’t want to adjust with the website, but wants the website to be build according to their convenience and comfort. Their psychology also has a major play in the game. If the combined nature of the target audience have the element of impatience, then your site must be fast, easily navigated and to-the-point in content delivery. You can sacrifice the element of beauty to some extent for faster page loads times.
For instance, we can assume that the typical audience visiting famous website Reddit.com, comes for entertainment, amusement, news and similar traits represented in informal, quick and simple way. The site doesn’t have attractive features but just plain and simple placements of the required elements to create the website and serve the visitors. The heavy graphics are eliminated for quicker page loads, while simple design is selected for easy navigation and site understanding for the new or returning user. The website nowhere troubles the visitor.
On the other hand, if you website is made for kids, rather impatient yet persistent group of people for what they want, you should make the website with eye-catching bright colors, inclusion of heavy graphics and animations and similar stuff. Because this group won’t mind to wait a couple of more seconds to get what they want. Just like Disney.com has used graphic heavy approach to give the kids a ‘magical’ experience on their site.
Such site building strategies based on targeted audience also helps the site to fall into a specific criteria of search results where its target audience comes. It makes the site more search engine friendly with improved SEO.
3. SEO Friendly
SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is a great way to get more traffic on your website. Because, it influences search engines to show your website first before other similar websites.
There are many ways to make a website SEO friendly for optimum search engine exposure. We can divide those two ways in two main segments:
- Onsite
- Offsite
The Onsite SEO makes tweaks and tricks on your website. It changes and optimizations the sites structure, navigation, content, URLs, tags, various links (inbound, outbound, internal), keywords, meta information, images, site map, CMS (Content Management System), technologies, frameworks and basically every element of your website which could be optimized to make the website SEO friendly.
The Offsite SEO is all about things you can do outside of your site to make the website SEO friendly. It includes taking care of backlinks, authentic backlink generation, press releases leading traffic to your website, various blogging efforts, site listing on web directories, reciprocal links, bookmarking, leveraging social media and every other effort made outside of the site to increase the site’s search engine exposure and increase website traffic.
Turning the website into an SEO friendly site is a huge task and most probably isn’t a do-it-yourself job unless you know about this stuff thoroughly. You can also create an SEO friendly website from the beginning considering and including all the aspects of SEO from the beginning for a search engine ready website development. For the task you can hire professionals who are able to provide accurate SEO friendly website development and services, like we do.
To understand SEO deeply, read What is SEO – Search Engine Optimization?.
4. Quality Content
Have a quality content. That’s it. That’s the best advice you can get or give to increase traffic on your website. Everything else come later if the content of your website exceeds the expectations.
By content, we don’t only mean words. It is the stuff for what your website is made of. For an eCommerce website it could product range, for Pixlr it is photos, for Facebook it is the users and their shared data and for youtube it is the videos. Whatever is the main element your website is made of, have the best of it.
The obvious reason is that, you are targeting your audience to come and look at the content and if that’s not up to the mark, they will leave as soon as they have come, no matter how beautiful your website looks.
We here have to emphasis here a little bit on content meaning words on your website. Because, most search engines understands words and according to the words (and keywords) of your website, they are going to rank you at the bottom or the top.
5. Active Presence on Social Sites
Many people have started practically living through social sites. They chat, share and comment on the life events of theirs of their friends and families on the social sites. It is like a parallel life from their main life.
Obviously, people have found ways to derive traffic to their websites from social sites and you should do the same. Use all the popular social media platforms to do that.
Open page/account on the social site and start sharing relative information which your current/prospective followers could related to or could get interested in. Reply to their comments and queries for trust generation, brand awareness and customer loyalty. Make them feel familiar about your brand through social network and try to increase your followers.
All the followers and relations you build on your social sites ultimately leads them towards your website. Conversion rate of visitors from social sites could also stay higher as they are already familiar with your brand and services on social site. Such familiarity heightens the trust level and people are more likely to attend CTAs you want them to.
6. Marketing Strategies
You can also use various marketing strategies to increase traffic on your website. Prominent types of marketing strategies are:
- Display Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Paid Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing
There are more marketing strategies apart from the listed. You can choose from them by deciding which fits best to your needs and your budget. It generates the brand awareness and spread the word about your offered services/products.
Most of the marketing strategies would cost you money dearly. Though, you can have cheaper versions of Viral Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing and Affiliate Marketing Program.
7. Community Build Up
Build community. It is a group of followers who already loves your brand and products. It gives you a customer-base ready to buy your products and a confidence to create your product according to the needs of the community.
It’s similar to building online community on forums or other social networking sites. But, you can repeat the same thing in the real world by having concerts, seminars and exhibitions to influence the prospective customers locally. Building clubs and groups could also give a big boost to community build up. This community would spread the word around indirectly providing you the Word of Mouth Marketing benefits. Loyal followers could also be generated automatically by providing Grade A products and services. It makes them love the product and the like-minded people will build the community by themselves.
A loyal community could help in multiple ways. Do not underestimate the influence of a loyal community for your brand and sells.
8. Leverage Site Analytics and Assessed Information
To increase traffic on your website, you can do an internal search. Leverage the site analytics and assessed information, derive statistical and insightful information from them, apply the knowledge into your marketing, website building and other strategies and see the result for yourself.
Most probably your site might not be running on its maximum potential. Leveraging on such collected information provides you the knowledge about the segments in which the site lags and what could be done to mend the problem. After applying all the solutions and tricks you can see a significant increase in traffic due to better website experience, Search Engine Optimizations and for other reasons.
9. Keep an Eye on the Competition
Keep an eye on the competition to know that they haven’t outrun you in any of the segment. It is totally probably that your competition has leveled up the game and has started to offer better services, better site experience or other elements which can attract the visitors to go on their website.
A great article about how to beat your competition provides great insight about how to stay ahead of your competition. Though, the article is aimed for eCommerce websites, you can surely apply some of the points to your website and business as well.
10. Offer Some Free Stuff
Free things are the offers they can’t refuse. They love a free offer more than the product being offered. According to your business type, you can giveaway different free stuff you can afford or understand that products will generate brand awareness and accelerate sells.
Yes these are free stuff almost every business could provide for free for the same intentions:
- eBooks
- Reports
- Software
- Prizes in Contests
- Sweepstakes
- Free Samples
Due to the consumer psychology, the received free stuff instantly causes the recipient to trust your website/company. Other benefits are brand awareness, brand recognition, help in community build up, Words spread by the recipients, etc.
All this leads to more people coming to your website either to receive the free stuff or just for curiosity. They just can’t overlook such an offer. So, offer free things to gain traffic, conversions and ultimately sells.
These were main ways you can apply on your website for increased traffic. To know how to increase the conversion rate of the accumulated traffic read 10 Ways to Increase Conversion Rate on Your Website.
