Roughly half of the world’s population, or 3.8 billion people, use the internet everyday and over 2 trillion Google searches have been made per day in 2018. This offers plenty of opportunities to drive traffic to your website using lots of different digital marketing techniques.
“Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second”
But how much of this traffic is heading to your business and how can you make sure you get as much as possible?
Paid Advertising
Paid advertisements can be a great way to quickly direct more targeted traffic to your website. Using things like paid search, social media adverts, and email marketing will all help your website reach a wider audience.
PPC
Pay Per Click (PPC) allows you to advertise within the paid listings of the search engine results through services such as Google Ads or Bing Ads. Your business will pay a certain amount of money every time one of it’s ads are clicked on. It can work really well as it pushes your business to the top of the search results – as long as enough budget is allocated to outbid the competing ads. For example, when you type Divorce Lawyer into Google the first top three results are paid searches, you can see this because they say ‘ad’ next to their link.
Paying for your business to appear as one of the top results will ensure more people click through to your website.
“On average, 41% of clicks go to the top 3 paid ads on the search results page.”
With a good strategy in place, PPC can be a great tool for pushing high-levels of traffic to certain areas of the website quickly.
Direct Traffic From Social Channels
Social media channels are another good way to increase traffic to your website through a content marketing strategy. You can look at the different social platforms and decide which would be best for the audience you are trying to target for each piece of content you release.
Get Active on Social Media
While sharing other people’s content through your social channels is a good start, your business should try to regularly post its own content which has been written specifically for the audiences you want to target. This will result in higher levels of engagement with your customers.
Interacting with customers by commenting, answering questions and joining group discussions are all good ways to get people interested and engaging with your business, leading to them looking at your website.
Be Interactive
Commenting on social media posts, images, pages can help to push traffic through to your site. Providing insightful comments on your industries social platforms, blogs and sites is a good way to get the businesses name recognised.
Make sure that comments are relevant and engaging with the audience by answering their questions personally. A good way to engage with people is by answering a question briefly and then adding a link to one of your businesses blog posts to explain more. This is an easy way of getting your website on the post, meaning everyone in the comments can also see this content which should result in more traffic.
Post Content on Linkedin
Posting on Linkedin can be a really good way to get the business’ name in front of the right audience. Linkedin is a great social platform to help boost the traffic coming to your site, as well as increasing your profile within the industry that you work in.
Furthermore, the more followers you have on Linkedin and the more you post great content, the more likely it is that people will be sharing your posts and extending their reach.
On-Page SEO
On-page Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) means optimising your individual web pages so that they rank higher in the search engines to increase the likelihood of relevant traffic arriving on your site. On-page SEO refers to the content on your website pages and also part of the code that can be optimised.
Making sure that your content is optimised for search engines by including content and keywords your audience will be searching for is a very valuable exercise. Factors including image alt text, creating internal links to new content, URL Structure and page titles should be considered to gain as much benefit from the on-page SEO as possible. It does not take long to complete some of the straightforward tasks and after a period of time, search engines will recognise that you are generating good content on your website and will start to reward you with higher rankings. Tools such as Yoast for WordPress websites can help to make sure that this is done properly.
Target Long-tail Keywords
Along with targeting sought after and popular keywords for your sector, you should also consider targeting long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords contain more than one word, at least two and sometimes three of four.
They are used to be more specific with the keyword searches which are less competitive. Targeting long-tail keywords as part of your paid search or SEO strategy is important because they account for a large number of web searches.
Use Internal Website Links
When you are writing and publishing content, make sure that you look out for keywords that can be linked internally within your website. For example, if you are writing an article about optimising content, and you already have an article that explains what SEO is, make sure that you link them together. This will result in a better, and richer experience for the user which will help with retention rates and the SEO of your website.
Get Blogging
A blog can be a great asset when trying to drive customers to your site. This is because your content can be tailored to their exact requirements, maybe giving them answers that they need while also helping them to learn a little more about your business. Blogging is also good for SEO as the content will help your site rank well in search engines for a wider variety of keywords.
When your blog is updated on a regular basis with good, engaging content, it can make a big difference to how your site performs overall. A good blog post that is ranked well on Google will mean that more and more people will come to visit the site to read about the blog post.
Once they have read the post and found the information they need they may then start to browse your site to see if there is any more information that could be of use, or simply because they are just wanting to know more about your business. This means that more traffic is coming to the website to learn, receive answers and to read content which could mean more people getting in touch.
Ensure your Website is Mobile Optimised
Making sure that your site is fully mobile optimised is key if you want more traffic and conversions. More and more users are viewing content on their mobile devices, over PCs.
“More than 50 percent of search queries globally now come from mobile devices.”
Google 2018
Having a well structured mobile responsive site is key to gaining more conversions because people do not want to struggle to see the content on your website properly. They want to be able to get onto the site, find what they want and leave again as quickly as possible. Google also penalises non-mobile friendly website by demoting content in mobile search results, making it harder for people on mobile devices to find your content.
Optimise Your Site Speed
The speed of a website is an important factor to ensure that traffic is able to properly browse your site. Customers will leave the site quickly if they have to wait for too long for a page to load. Make sure that your website is as optimised as possible for quick page load speed by regularly looking at the image file sizes, page structures and the functionality on your site.
Traffic originating from Google and other search engines is always increasing which means that there is huge opportunity to get your website seen by your target audience. Finding and using the best ways to drive traffic to your website is important because it will give your business has more visibility which should ultimately lead to more leads and new business enquiries.
