Starting a website these days has become easy with platforms like WordPress. However once it is up and running, the next big challenge you have is to bring more traffic to your website.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a marketing guru to promote your website. You can easily increase your website traffic to get more visitors by using some proven best practices.
In this article, we will share some of the easiest and tested tips to increase your website traffic like an expert marketer.
1. Create Audience Profiles to Understand Your Users
Before you start creating content for your website, it’s important to spend a little time understanding your target audience and what they are looking for.
You can quickly build an audience framework by answering the following questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- What problems are they facing that you can help solve?
- What kind of content are they looking for?
- How would they ideally try to find the answers to their questions?
Answering these questions will help you get a clearer picture of your target audience.
2. Do Keyword Research to Plan Your Content Strategy
By doing proper keyword research, you will unlock the following benefits:
- Discover actual search terms people are looking for
- Find unique content ideas for popular search terms
- Learn from your competitors and beat them with better content
- Create a series of pillar-articles to drive steady traffic to your website
3. Learn and apply the SEO basics to your Website
SEO is a set of best practices that help you make your website more search engine friendly. You don’t need to be an ‘SEO Guru’ to improve your website.
Contrary to popular belief, anyone can do SEO for their own websites without hiring an expert. There are plenty of SEO tools and plugins, free advice, and step by step tutorials available that you can use.
We recommend using Yoast SEO plugin for all WordPress websites. It is the most comprehensive SEO and website optimization tool. The free version includes all the SEO features that you will need on your website.
4. Learn to Write Great Headlines
These are the basic building blocks of an effective headline:
- A good headline triggers an emotional response (joy, surprise, shock, curiosity, fear, excitement, greed, and so on).
- It offers users a reward and value
- It promotes the content by including target keywords
5. Make Internal Linking a Routine Task
Here is why internal linking is so important:
- Internal links help Google understand the context and relationship between different articles on your website. It then uses this information as ranking signals.
- Internal links, when placed strategically and in context, can help you increase page views and reduce bounce rate.
- It is harder to ask third-party websites to link to your articles. It is way easier to create links on your own site.
6. Add Images, Charts, Infographs to Create Visually Attractive Content
As human beings, our brain prefers visual elements. We love colors and objects because aesthetics trigger emotional responses in our brains. This makes us more engaged and immersed in our surroundings.
People love looking at info graphics because they make information engaging and easy to consume.
Images in your website posts grab user’s attention and help them focus on not just the visual element but also the text around it.
If you’re just starting out, then it’s important to know that you cannot just use any image you see on the internet. Images are protected by copyright and stealing copyrighted material can have serious consequences.
7. Optimize Website Speed to Load Your Pages Faster
In this era of instant gratification, no one wants to wait for a website to load. If your website is slow, then users will simply leave your website before it even loads.
Search engines like Google also consider website speed and page load time as one of the important ranking factors.
8. Explore Other Social Networks
There are so many social media websites out there, but most of us spend all of our time on a few top platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Obviously, you want to focus on them to drive more traffic to your website.
However, depending on your website topics you may have more success on other social platforms that are less crowded.
For example, if your website is about building businesses, then you may find more engaged users on LinkedIn.
If you run a lifestyle or fashion website, then Instagram may be the platform you should focus on.
9. Continue Learning Online Marketing and SEO
These tips will help you increase your website traffic and continue getting more subscribers.
However as your website grows, you need to learn more ways to grow your business.