How to Increase Website Traffic

The internet is growing at a rate of 571 new websites each minute. This staggering amount of new sites means that your website can easily disappear among the proliferation of more and more internet chatter. So how can you make yourself stand out in the hubbub? And not only that, how can you be sure that the traffic that you are getting is really relevant, finding what they need and choosing your company's products and services to meet that need?

Relevant, high quality traffic can boost your business by driving customers right into your waiting arms. Here's our handy travelogue for you so that you can be sure that you are heading down the right path in making your website work as hard as it can to draw in visitors.

1. On-Page Alterations

Start out by cleaning up your website. After all, if you are expecting visitors, you'd make sure that your house was presentable. It's the same for your website.

• Your website needs to look good to ensure that people want to explore it when they arrive.
• Ensure that your content is engaging, readable, and also optimised for search engines to index it.
• Page titles should be unique and descriptive.
• Images should be high quality but also optimised to ensure that they aren't slowing the site load times down. 57% of users will leave a site if it doesn't load in three seconds.
• Image alt tags allow you to use your keywords, but make sure you aren't simply keyword stuffing to avoid penalties.

2. Off-Page Alterations 

On-page changes can do a lot to improve your Google rankings. Off-page efforts are also important for organic search. You need to ensure that any links to your site are high quality, from directories, press releases, and from people sharing your content on social media.

Changes that you make that impact your SEO are a great way to improve traffic. SEO leads that you generate have an average conversion rate of 14.6%, where outbound efforts like print adverts only have a 1.7% close rate.

3. Paid Traffic

Once you've mastered your organic search results, you can think about pay-per-click. Google's PPC offering is called AdWords, and it's another great tool to have in your arsenal when it comes to generating traffic. It's an easy way to measure your advertising budget as you set a maximum spend and can monitor the traffic that is generated for everything including conversion rates and cost.

4. Create Great Content

Once you have improved all of your search results, you should start to see a slow stream of people coming to your site. But that's not all there is to generating traffic, after all, we want these people to stay on the site, buy something, subscribe to your newsletter, or fill out your contact form.

All of the copy on your site needs to be high quality. It needs to answer the questions that people have when they visit, and it needs to provide descriptive, engaging concepts which show why visitors should choose your fantastic services over your competitors without sounding smug.

You should also have a blog. It's good for SEO and it's a good way to ensure that users can find out more about your company, can see that you know what you're talking about, and get a feel for your brand's voice and ethos.

5. Social Media

Social media is becoming increasingly important, increasing SEO rates and also helping companies to appeal to a wide demographic. You can use social media to share your content, engaging potential customers and get people interested in your brand. Make sure that you are on the ball with whatever platform you choose, whether Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn to answer any enquiries and questions.

By dedicating time each week to ensuring that you are providing people with a good reason to visit your website, as well as taking steps to ensure that the road there is wide and clear, you can see improved traffic for your site. To find out where your website is under-performing why not take a look at our website audits.