Websites are built for people. The reason you built a website, I imagine is to promote your business to people. However, you need a healthy website traffic to achieve this aim. For most business people after spending a few hundred dollars or thousands of Naira designing a business website, getting people to visit it becomes the next logical worry.
However, you should start thinking about how to drive visitors to your website from the day the thought of building a website first came to you.
This article will show you how to ensure you build a website that will get visitors from day one as well as show techniques that can be used to increase website traffic. If you already have a website, but not getting results in terms of visitor count, an SEO site audit will be a great first step.
Write Quality Content for Website Traffic
A website built to attract visitors must have quality content. Earlier in this going online series we talked about the phrase content is king. It remains so. And by content, I mean largely text content. A lot of businesses often focus on the aesthetics of a website with little attention to text content.
They prefer images, flash, slides, JavaScript based, and all other types of flashy but ineffective content. These types of contents may make a website look professional and rich, but adding them at the expense of good old text content (HTML) will only hurt your website traffic.
The thing is that most visitors to your business website will come via search engines like Google. Though search engines have improved considerably in understanding and rendering non-text content like JavaScript, they do interpret and index text content a lot better.
Remember that no matter how beautiful a website looks, without website traffic no one (or only a few people) will see and admire the beauty (that is assuming they are there to admire your website). Having visitors on your website should be your top priority, converting those visitors into customers is equally important.
So, embedding important text content in flash, JavaScript or images is not a good content strategy. Whenever you use rich media add search engine robot readable text content that will enable robots to know what the content is all about.
Use JavaScript only when necessary. JavaScript is great for building interactivity, use it for just that. There are a number of useful guides on using JavaScript.
Each page on your website should have between 300 to 2,000 words. You can add rich content after that. So, when designing a website, make sure you provide quality content for your web designer.
It is also good to ensure your website has at least 10 quality pages at launch with plans of continually adding new content. This should probably include the standard web pages (home, services, about us, contact us, etc) and a couple of blog posts.
Know your Keywords
Yes, your website needs quality text content, but that should not be seen as license to fill your website with garbage. For your information, garbage is any content that is written with no consideration on how visitors view your business. It may be written in Queens English with fantastic grammar and logic, but it is still garbage.
To build website traffic, you need to write text content that includes phrases that visitors and potential customers would use when searching for the content on the internet. These phrases used by web searchers are called keywords.
Building your keywords starts from knowing your visitors and customers and brainstorming on the keywords they are likely to use when searching for your content on the internet. The result of the brainstorming should them be refined using keyword tools like the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer.
You can use tools from SEMRush, Ahref and MOZ to analyse the keywords your competitor are using and to discover new keywords that will help you drive more website traffic.
Once you know your keywords, use them in creating your content. Add them in important sections of your article like the title, headers, link texts (slug), image alt text, and of course the body of your text content.
To get website traffic, you need to get found first. Visitors will only find you if you use similar words as the one they use when searching the web. So, pay more attention to your keywords for more visitors to your website or blog.
Build Links to your Content
Link building is very important to your website’s SEO. The links pointing to your website affects how easily visitors will find your website. More links to your site will make your website rank higher on search engines making them easily accessible to visitors.
Link building is an ongoing process. You have to make it your mission to build links to your website. The best link building strategy for increasing your website traffic is writing articles (Guest posts) and submitting them to other quality and relevant websites for consideration and publication.
The catch is that you add a link to a relevant page on your website to the guest post. The worst link building strategy is spamming and will hurt your website traffic in the long term.
Other link building strategies include blog commenting, blogging, forum posts and commenting, online directory listings, social media and bookmarking sites, and building link magnets with interesting content and compelling features.
Add a Blog on your Website
Earlier, we met the phrase content is king. Putting content on your website does not end after the initial web design, it is an ongoing process.
Blogging is a great way of building regular content on your website, which will in turn attract visitors to your website and increase your website traffic. Blogs are also link magnets.
A well written blog post will attract links, which will help your link building and make your website rank higher and search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex.
Do a thorough keyword research of your industry and write interesting articles on your blog covering all relevant areas. Blogging will enable you add content regularly, which means regular crawling from search engines. It will also keep visitors coming as they crave for more fresh and interesting content from you.
A Blog is a great tool for building website traffic. If you want to start one, here is our guide on how to start a blog.
Use Search Engine Webmaster Tools
Search engines are one of the top sources of visitors for most websites. To ensure your website gets all the help it needs to rank well on search engines, register with the webmaster tools of leading search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex.
Registering with webmaster tools like the Google Search Console will enable you add your sitemap that will make it easier for search engine robots to find important contents on your website.
Webmaster tools will also enable you spot errors that could be preventing search engine robots from properly crawling your website.
These errors if not spotted and corrected could lead to poor ranking for your website and low website traffic. In fact, having a website without registering a webmaster account is like being on Facebook without having a personal profile.
Engage in Social Networking Sites
Social media is huge with billions of people using these sites every month. So, part of your strategy in increasing your website traffic should be driving visitors to your website from these social media sites.
Build your presence on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, and use them to drive visitors to your website. You can also use social media advertising to build website traffic.
Advertise
Online advertising is also another way to increase visitors to your website. But, the point of your online advertising should be to promote your products and services and not just your website. So, you need to build relevant landing pages to be targeted by the advert.
