Improving your website traffic

Growing your traffic isn’t as simple as adding a few pages and blog posts and waiting for people to come. This may have been true in ‘A Field of Dreams’ (“if you build it, they will come”) but for one, you aren’t Kevin Costner, and two, we aren’t building baseball fields.

You need to be employing multiple marketing tactics on a consistent basis in order to keep growth sustainable.

Here are six quick tips to improve your site’s traffic this month:

1) Create Consistent, Fresh Content

One of the cardinal sins of running a website is to launch your site with only a few pages, a few blog posts, and then not touch it. Yes, we have all done it – life just gets in the way. However, it’s well worth making the time. An active site is instantly going to see increases in traffic for two reasons:

People like active sites
Publishing on a schedule is a great way to get consistent traffic and to allow your audience to know when to expect posts. Inactivity or inconsistent posts is a quick way to lose traffic.

Google prefers fresh content
Google (yes them again!) gives sites that publish regular content higher search rankings, which can make an enormous difference to your traffic.

2) Write a Guest Post

Guest posting is one of the best ways to build your authority in your industry and drive more traffic to your site. Select other sites that have an active blog and accept guest posts in your niche, and ask the owner if you can guest post for them. Your guest post needs to be informative, completely unique and should reflect your brand’s personality. Readers of the site you guest post for will then be encouraged to click through to your site and find out more about you. Guest posting also creates valuable backlinks that again can boost your SEO and increase your visibility on Google.

3) Be a part of the Community

Many people make the mistake of thinking other people in the same industry are the competition when, in fact, those people can be valuable assets when growing your website. Interact with your community by leaving comments on other websites, communicating via social media, and responding to any comments or emails sent to your website.

4) Socialise

Social media is absolutely key for any website – if you haven’t set up social media accounts for at least two platforms, you’re missing out on the opportunity to build a loyal and engaged audience. Success with social media comes down to being genuine and relatable to your readers, and consistency. Post regularly, be honest and personable – not robotic – and you will slowly build an extremely valuable source of traffic to your website.

5) Web Design

Once you’ve got people coming to your site, you want them to stick around. This is where great web design comes in; your site needs to have a fast load speed, a clear and easy-to-use layout, and look great to encourage visitors to interact with your site, rather than bouncing off to another site. If web design isn’t something you have a lot of experience in, working with an established design agency is well worth the investment and can reap huge rewards.

6) SEO

SEO is king when it comes to encouraging high traffic to your website. As effective as social media and referrals can be, there’s nothing like Google to see consistently high visitor numbers to your website. To make sure your SEO is up to standard, a few good places to start include:

• Carry out keyword research for every post you publish
• Submit a Sitemap to Google
• Install Google Analytics on your website to help you track and monitor how well it performs

Not sure where to start or too much bother?

We find a great way of checking your website’s SEO value is to perform a website audit. This is performed on a 100 point scale and provides an invaluable tool which will help you flag up any weaknesses on your website and compare your content against that of your competition. Once armed with the information, fixes can be set in place and your SEO scores will increase.

If you are not sure where to start or would prefer to talk to a professional, please call/email us and we will be happy to help.