Do you want to increase business sales through your website? Are you trying to get more visitors to your affiliate marketing website? Have you tried several methods you saw online to no avail? It’s time to jump off the boat of what doesn’t work and boost traffic by 10x monthly, using these simple tricks.
It is popular knowledge that no website on the internet can make any money without a reasonable audience. Generating traffic to your site is the most important thing you will ever have to do for your website or business.
Digital marketing starts online and ends there. What happens in between depends on the level of hard work and patience you put in. Either that or you’re trying to generate traffic to your site by cheating the algorithms, which can leave your website permanently ostracized.
We have found simple tricks that are highly effective and easy to carry out. You should begin to see a steady inflow of visitors to your website after implementing everything you’re about to read on this page. Before we dive fully into this practice of generating traffic to your site, let’s have a complete grasp of what traffic really is.
What is Website Traffic?
Traffic is the same thing whether it is online or on the road. The simplest meaning of traffic is ‘movement’. On the road, traffic is the movement of vehicles and, sometimes, people. Online, traffic is the movement of people in and out of a website, social media page, and several other internet platforms.
Traffic online also involves the activities of these visitors when they land on your website. Do they just leave immediately they land on your page or do they take the action that you desire? All these have roles to play in determining the class of your traffic.
Types of Website Traffic
Before you drive traffic to your website, it is important that you know what type of traffic you’re driving. It has a lot to say about the class of your traffic. Below are the different types.
1. Organic Website Traffic
If you hadn’t heard that organic traffic is the best kind of traffic, well, you’ve heard it now. Nothing beats knowing that your SEO strategy is actually working in your favor. So what is organic traffic?
Organic traffic simply means the inflow of searchers to your website who simply searched for a keyword and chose to get the information from your site.
For example, when a searcher enters Google and searches for, “Best graphics designer in Cleveland, OH,” if your website is very well optimized and you have great content, your page would be among those that Google suggests on the first page.
If the searcher chooses to get the information from your page, you just earned yourself an organic visitor. This simply means that you didn’t have to pay any fees to get them.
2. Direct Website Traffic
This is another very good kind of traffic. However, it is the kind that comes from returning clients or customers. Let’s say you run a reliable e-commerce business that sells lingerie. As long as you’re able to build trust and competency, your customers will come to visit again. Just as with land-based stores.
Direct traffic simply means that the visitor specifically typed your URL into their browser. Sometimes, searchers exhibit some kind of laziness where they simply just type the name of your business on Google. Google sends them your website and they can visit from there. That also counts as direct traffic.
We have noticed and also written content about how social media helps to improve your search engine optimization. By sharing your website links on social media, your website can receive tremendous followership as long as you’re trusted.
This helps your SEO in a way because search engines are built to understand that the more traffic you get, the more reliable you probably are. The social media traffic is not easy to get. You need to at least have been a force on that platform to be able to drive traffic from it.
Also, note that social media traffic can be either paid or organic. So, it doesn’t matter if you run an advertisement using a Twitter influencer, public relations, or with good old Facebook ads.
4. Paid Website Traffic
Well, since you’re paying for it, it should be easy, shouldn’t it? Well, it’s not always the case. Paid traffic, also known as PPC (pay per click), is a system of online advertising that lets you place ads on search engines for a specific keyword.
So, let’s say that you provide auto detailing services in Cleveland, OH, and you run a paid ad on Google for the keyword “Best Auto Detailer in Cleveland,” Google suggests your ads on the first page so that potential clients can find you.
Now, there’s a good part and a scary part. The good part is that you don’t have to pay for the ads until your potential clients begin to click on the link. It sounds interesting, doesn’t it? This simply means that you pay for the website traffic and not the ads.
For the scary part, you can get 10 thousand clicks on your link and none of those visitors end up making the decision you want. That’s not all. You need to understand that there are other “Auto Detailers” in Cleveland. How do you ensure that your ads come on top of the others in the listing? It is at this point that you need a full-service digital marketing agency.
5. Referral Website Traffic
Referral traffic is simple. You paste your link on another website and have visitors link back to your site. This kind of website traffic is very common and is one part of SEO that is known as off-page SEO. This simply means that you’re generating traffic to your website without doing anything on the site.
Note that this strategy has to be implemented with expertise. To get quality traffic, your link needs to be on a website with enough authority. One that is famous for talking about the product or service you offer.
Now that you’re well versed in traffic and the different types, let’s take a look at some of the simple things you can do to drive traffic to your site.
Easy Ways to Drive Website Traffic to Your Website with our Cleveland Marketing Company
No matter what kind of website you run; be it an e-commerce site, a company site, an affiliate marketing website, or even a site you built for fun, you need visitors to view your content. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need the site. These simple tricks will help you out.
1. Top-notch web design
Whether you like it or not, web design has a huge role to play in the quality and quantity of traffic you get. With a poorly designed website, you can have the most interesting blog posts and the best offers but your website traffic can be a measly 20 to nothing per month.
Users behave uniquely. Their attention simply gets caught by the most fascinating things they find. That is why a user may have come to Google to search for, “How to buy a house” and end up spending 10 minutes reading an article on, “The best kitchen cabinets” with strong interest on the same website.
Indeed, users don’t have the patience to read the entire content of your website. A decent web design job can keep them on the page and several other pages they visit on the website. What are some things to pay attention to?
- Make it easy: visitors who enter your page in search of information only want one thing; the information. Give it to them. It’s as simple as that. They don’t want to think too hard, they don’t want to look too hard. Make it easy.
- Don’t test their patience: if you’re serious about getting traffic to your website, you should be more concerned about optimizing time. There’s no need for another button that says, “Download using browser” after one that just says “Download” on the previous page.
- Go easy on pop-up ads: nothing annoys users more than recurring pop-up ads. You’ll send your audience to your competitors faster than a bad marketing strategy.
- Page speed: your page speed doesn’t only help your users. It also improves your SEO. The faster your pages load, the higher you rank because Google is trying to suggest relevant and reliable content to users.
- Use relatable images: no! We’re not talking about the images in your blog posts. We’re talking about the background images on your pages. A plain black page almost screams, “Fake!” or unreliable.
- Optimize URLs: your URL plays an important role in determining the volume of website traffic you’ll get. Ensure that all URLs contain the topic of each blog post. If the blog post has a very long topic, include only the keyword.
- Mobile-friendly design: web development without a mobile-friendly interface will most likely send visitors bouncing from your site before you know it. You need to understand that some of your visitors are using their phones and tablets. Ensure that your web design makes it easy for them to scale.
Web design is the first and one of the most important steps to driving traffic to your website. A poorly designed website will not see traffic. You won’t even get on Google’s first page with it. Pay a full-service digital marketing agency today and have one built for you.
2. Content marketing
Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your website. This is so because you can see and understand their behaviors to your pages from the metrics.
Content marketing, however, is one of the broadest aspects of online marketing because it is the bedrock upon which most of the other aspects are built.
So what is content marketing?
Content marketing simply involves creating and sharing materials online for the purpose of attracting clients and potential customers to your business or company. The content can be videos, images, or texts but does not explicitly promote any brand.
What you are reading right now is a piece of content that seeks to show you some of the easiest ways to drive traffic to your website and boost sales.
How do you market content?
It’s not as hard as you’ve probably been told. Marketing content simply has to do with your desire to grow your business, brand, or company, using the following ideas:
A. In-depth keyword research
On a normal day, you may never have to worry about keywords and whether you’re using them right or not. But since there are no normal days anymore, especially online, targeting specific keywords is a must and has to be the first step.
Many website owners make the mistake of assuming that their audience would be interested in a topic and then waste hours trying to create content around that. That’s number ‘none’ on the ways to drive traffic to your website.
There are so many free tools for keyword research out there but if you think you need some more accuracy, you can pay for some others like Ahrefs.
Other ways to do keyword research are by typing a preferred topic on Google and paying close attention to the search results. The search results pages always have longtail and specific keywords that you can target.
Why is it important to target keywords?
It’s simple. Your potential clients are searching for solutions to a problem. The more people who type a particular search term on Google, the greater the need to write about it. Just seek to answer questions that they ask.
B. Create content that reflects your brand or business
After you have looked up the search results, create a list of keywords that you want to target and focus more attention on those that reflect what your site or services are all about. Don’t write content just because it’s interesting.
C. Create a content marketing funnel
If you really want to increase traffic, you must understand content marketing funnels. The idea is simple. Simply ask yourself, “What level are my customers at right now, and what level do I want them to be at?”
The content marketing funnel is like a pyramid turned upside down. The widest part of the funnel is filled with everyone interacting with your site, business, and company. Most of them don’t add any direct value to you.
As you gradually move down the funnel, the audience is streamlined and that is where you separate clients and customers from regular visitors.
When it comes to increasing website traffic, you should focus more energy on the awareness level. You don’t want to sell anything to your audience at this point. You just want them to be aware of your business and company. You want to bring them in with the free stuff.
3. On-page SEO
If you’ve diligently read this article up to this point, you’d notice that we’ve mentioned SEO over and over again. Online marketing without SEO in mind is almost as good as a wasted effort. Not that your website cannot mistakenly rank without a conscious SEO effort but what are your chances?
According to Wikipedia, “Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines.” Two keywords to note are ‘quality and quantity.’
Search engines simply look for web pages that have the best answers to the search query. This simply means that by optimizing your web pages to search engines, you’re also creating a user-friendly website. A combination of these two will definitely lead to higher traffic to your website.
What are some on-site SEO techniques that you need to cover?
A. High-quality content
It’s not enough to market your content well. Are you putting quality content? Does your content satisfy search intent? If your blog post is just a couple of words strung up together without any focus on user intent, all you’ll be left with is a blog post and nothing more.
You’re probably wondering what the characteristics of high-quality content are. Below are some things to have in mind:
- Correctness: don’t ever answer a search query with what you think is correct. That is the easiest way to go down. Some of your visitors already have an idea about what they’re searching for. Deep research is required.
- Originality: always update blog posts that you have written exclusively for your website. The words need to be your own. The style needs to be your own. On certain occasions, the images also need to be your own. Even if you’d written the article for another website yourself, don’t copy it onto another site.
- Mix things up: the idea is simple. If you have a website that requires more written content, ensure that you throw a few images and videos in. This will help your audience to better understand your topic and also keep them interested. An e-commerce website will find this idea very useful, too.
- Unbiased content: most affiliate marketing websites make the mistake of talking down on one product and overhyping another one because they want the users to focus on the latter. Note that your audience will do deep and intensive research before spending money. If they find out your site is bias, they may begin to avoid you.
- Build trust: make sure that at the end of every article, your audience trusts your judgment. This gives search engines the idea that you’re an authority website.
B. Attention-grabbing meta descriptions and page titles
Looking at the image above, the texts in blue are your page titles. The ones in white are known as the meta description. They’re both as important to your SEO and online marketing strategy as any other thing you might want to try.
Meta description
A meta description is a short description of the content of your web page. Google suggests around 135 to 155 words max. You need to properly describe what you have on that page as clearly and as concisely as possible, including the keyword.
Meta descriptions give the searchers an idea of what you talked about inside that page. Bearing this in mind, you have to be honest about what you’re talking about. Click baits are commonplace for most people but you should leave it out of the picture for now.
Page title
Your page title is what appears on the search engine results page (SERP). It appears in blue and usually contains your keyword and the topic you’re writing on. Your page title should also contain your keyword and your domain.
If you don’t dictate what your page title is, Google will automatically create one for you, which may not be as enticing as you want.
Your meta description and page title has to be as attention-grabbing as any sales pitch you write, only shorter.
How is this one of the ways to drive traffic to your website? It’s simple. Users tend to read your page title and meta description, sometimes unconsciously, before entering your site.
If they don’t find anything related to what they’re looking for, they’re very likely going to skip that post. As they keep skipping the post, Google assumes that you don’t have the solution to the problem and sends you down the SERP and you wouldn’t be driving traffic to your website.
C. Internal linking
Internal linking is one underrated part of on-page SEO that you need to pay attention to if you want to boost website traffic. Linking your pages doesn’t only guide visitors through your entire website but also tells Google that these articles are interrelated and that you have more on that same niche.
This activity lets Google assume that you’re an authority site in that niche and ranks your pages even higher. The higher you go, the more website traffic you garner.
Some things you should bear in mind when building internal links include the following:
- Only link to an article that is related to the one your visitor is reading. One that can help them better understand the topic. One they’re very likely to click on.
- Don’t fill up the content with internal links. Not less than three and not more than 15 should do. (This is not based on a set guideline. But it’s what works)
- Your links don’t have to contain keywords.
- Add links to the content as naturally as possible. Your links should be all over the content and not the header and footer.
This technique helps users to stay on your website for longer and tells Google that you’re satisfying the users, leading to increased traffic to your website.
Social media marketing is a powerful lead generation tool for driving traffic to your website. It is one of the free strategies you can use for conversion optimization any time any day. Note that you can do paid advertising if you want the results to come faster.
Most marketing agencies use this technique not to only drive traffic to your website but to also get you reasonable visibility on social media.
Most of your potential customers are on social media. There are over 7.5 billion people on the planet and more than half of that population is on social media. How do you reach the ones that may be interested in your products or marketing services? How do you make them visit your website?
Advertising your business and website on social media will help you garner that traffic, especially if you run an e-commerce website.
Some social media tips to consider are:
A. Conduct intensive market research
Nothing beats good old market research. If you must increase traffic using social media, then you must research to know exactly what your audience wants to see.
No! You cannot just post what you think they want to see. You need to be sure that they want to see what you post. If your posts don’t interest your audience, you’ll hardly ever increase traffic.
B. Follow trends
Always look out for trends in your industry and create content out of them. Note that, depending on your industry, your audience may be interested in some fun trends. However, don’t point them away from your business or company.
C. Consistency
Your social media marketing strategy may be free or cheap but without consistency, you may not get anywhere with it. The only way to attract clients to your site is to post relevant content on your social media pages all the time.
D. Always link back to your web pages
Remember that the plan is to increase traffic on your website. How do you do that with social media if you don’t direct and guide your audience to your site?
Note that you don’t have to include links on every post you make. At most, one link in every 5-6 posts will do. As long as you do it consistently, you will be driving traffic to your website that you didn’t think possible.
E. Respond to comments
Before we talk about this, note that your audience may not always write comments on your posts. That doesn’t mean that they don’t engage with what you post. However, when they do drop comments, read them, reply, and answer questions instantly.
This will give them the idea that you’re reliable and dependable, thereby leading them to click on links to your site, which will in turn increase traffic.
F. Post visuals very often (images and videos)
Nothing holds and maintains attention as much as visuals. Most people have read how things are done but also want to see/watch the process. A few videos here and there will always help you keep them interested in you.
At this point, you probably already have some good content on your site. Your next action will be to take steps to become more visible. It’s just a cool advertising strategy.
There are several ways to team up with a bigger name in your industry. One of the important reasons is that it helps your SEO efforts, increases website traffic, and will, in the long run, boost sales.
Let’s say you run an e-commerce site in Cleveland, Ohio. A big move would be to team up with a site that reviews e-commerce websites in your niche. Your potential clients are most likely looking through their site to find the best online store. Below are some things you can do.
A. Guest blogging
The idea of guest blogging is simple. You offer to write a free blog post or a few free blog posts for their website and, in return, they let you promote your website or a few of your pages.
You want to ensure that you make the most of the opportunity by promoting only the pages that you’re sure will interest the readers and make them want to visit other pages. In other words, the pages should be well-linked and connected to other pages.
Doing this will tell Google that, “Hey, this industry leader mentioned this website. They’re probably dishing out great content, too.”
It helps your SEO efforts and SEO gets you right in the face of your potential audience.
B. Ask them to post a blog on your site
You may wonder what difference that would make. It doesn’t matter if you wrote the blog for them. It doesn’t even matter if you did the keyword research for them. Just have them listed on the website as the author.
That’s a big step towards SEO because Google traces everything down to the author. Just ensure that they link back to their website, giving you more visibility and traffic.
6. Email marketing
Most people neglect email marketing when they start talking about ways to increase traffic. Email marketing may not be a direct system but it helps you to group your website visitors.
You can tell which group is still in the awareness phase and which group is already full-blown clients. But how do you get their emails in the first place? It’s not very simple but it is doable.
You simply need to create a lead magnet. Give them something for free. It could be a free course or webinar, a free tool, free service, or an incentive for commenting on your blog posts.
Send them emails about your business, company, new blog posts, services, and many others. But do it strategically. Depending on how enticing the content of your email is, you’re definitely going to be generating more traffic to your site without paying for advertising.
7. Monitor your competitors
Yes! It is time to see what it is that your competitors are doing that helps them stay ahead of you. What SEO strategy do they have in place? Who did they team up with? What do they post? How are they advertising? You need to consider all these and more.
When monitoring competitors, you want to make sure that you pay attention to only those sites that appear on the first page of search results. Any website that goes below that probably is on the same level as you at this point and is not relevant.
Note that your competitors could also be the authority sites you want to team up with. Just make sure you’re not shooting yourself in the leg.
8. Update and repurpose your old content
Most bloggers make the mistake of thinking that they need to create a fresh blog every time. How draining is that? How many keywords are you hoping to exhaust before you stop?
Sometimes, your old blog is more relevant to your success than ten new ones. Check them out to see which ones are lagging in terms of traffic. Optimize them and bring them back to life.
You might notice that some of your posts are no longer relevant and the keywords don’t get a high search volume anymore. Simply group these pages and merge them to form one long-form post. The good part is that it is free. You don’t have to pay a content writer to do it.
Google will naturally favor long texts that answer several questions.
9. Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is a system of generating traffic that you have to pay for. The good news is that you don’t have to pay for the service until you get results.
Basically, what PPC means is that you advertise your website with Google, targeting a keyword. Google suggests your page to anyone who types a keyword that is related or relevant to the page you have advertised and if they click on it, you pay a sum.
It’s simply paid search engine results that help you increase traffic without putting too much effort into SEO.
Before targeting keywords, note that Google charges differently for different keywords. Ensure that you are aware of the price before going ahead.
10. Hire our digital marketing agency, Cleveland
A qualified digital marketing agency may be your straight ticket if you want to increase traffic. The reason is that a relevant digital marketing agency has a team of experts that handle all the different aspects listed above.
Whether it is content marketing, web development, social media marketing, email marketing, or any other marketing strategy for that matter, a reliable digital marketing company, Cleveland will have you covered.
Before choosing a digital marketing agency, here are some insights that will guide you.
(I). One that has a relevant history of success. Testimonials should you see what previous clients say about them.
(II). Choose a digital marketing agency that works with a team of experts in the different aspects of digital marketing.
(III). Read reviews.
(IV). Are they transparent with campaign results?
(V). Do they handle every project like it’s their only one?
(VI). Do they communicate effectively?
(VII). Is the agency in your locality? You don’t want to be in Cleveland and work with a digital marketing firm in another state or country. At some point, you should be able to meet with the company.
To move your website and business to the next level, you should work with Milia Marketing. Our dedication to the business has helped us achieve great results.
Not only do we have a long history of success with every project we undertake but we also seek to offer our digital marketing services with extreme expertise.
We have the best team of web developers, social media, email, and search engine marketers on every project. Our Cleveland marketing company is listed as the fastest-growing digital marketing company in Cleveland. That is a quality you can trust.
Be our guest. Send us an email or give us a quick call today and let our team handle your business growth for you.
Website Traffic: quality vs. quantity
It always comes down to a question of what class of traffic are you driving. Let us take a look at these two classes of traffic to have a better understanding of what you should aiming at.
A. Quantity Traffic
Quantity traffic refers to the number of visitors you get on your website. They don’t have to do anything for you or with your company. They just have to read your free posts and any relevant information you have to offer. Google Analytics will help you see what your audience is doing on your site.
B. Quality Traffic
Whether you’re using paid search engine advertising, or any of the free tools, as long as the traffic you get is interacting with your company, it is referred to as quality traffic. They make purchases, share your content, drop reviews, and many others. At this point, you can already see their responses to your services, and Google Analytics may not really be a big deal.
So, at this point? Which one do you need? The answer is simple. You only need quantity. Your company or business is probably still in the awareness stage. You want to garner a relevant number of visitors before you begin to sell your services to them.
Conclusion
Staying afloat online takes a lot of expertise, experience, and patience. These tips are simple things you can handle but they take time, especially if you’re doing it yourself.
Work with a Cleveland marketing company that has had success after success offering these services to their clients. That is the easiest way to ensure that you can go about your business while still growing your brand online
