6 ways to drive traffic to your website

Website traffic is important for a number of reasons, among which are seeing how well your marketing campaigns are working, gathering insight and information about your audience, improving your ranking when it comes to search engines and generating more leads and customers.

If your website isn’t generating the traffic you want it to, then there are a few ways you can fix that. Here are six of them.

Search engine optimization

SEO helps improve your search engine ranking which will get you higher up the list of results on the best search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Research suggests that the majority of users will select a result from the top five listed on their relevant search while most won’t even bother going beyond the first page of results at all. Ensuring your site is listed as high as possible makes it more visible to those searching for the relevant field or location and will boost visitor numbers to your website.

Ways to improve your websites SEO include producing high-quality content and writing concise meta tags to describe your page and site. A meta description is what appears below your URL in a search result. If a user knows what a page is about and what they are likely to find when they get there, they are much more likely to click on it.

Have a blog on your website

A blog is a great way to both engage with your customers and drive traffic to your website. By writing entertaining and informative articles about the area that your business specializes in, you can get people visiting your blog and from there, potentially browsing the rest of your site for the services and products that you offer.

A blog can also help position you as a market leader or expert in your field. If you blog about something topical currently happening in the world which is impacting your business, for example, a website dealing with a construction company talking about President Trump imposing tariffs on steel exports, then you are offering the world an authoritative viewpoint on a subject they may not know much about but wish to find out more. If they then share that blog via social media, that will then make your business visible to even more people on friends and followers lists.

Writing a blog might seem like a daunting task, but it really isn’t. Services out there like HubSpot blogs make it all the more easier, and it is a worthwhile and effective way to drive traffic to your website.

Make greater use of social media

Want to reach 2.2 billion people across the globe? How about 800 million? Or would you settle for just the 330 million? That’s how many monthly users Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have respectively and they are just three of the social media outlets that now exist. You can use social media and your various accounts on the different platforms to share articles and blog posts from your website. When your followers in turn like or share that post, it will pop up in their friend’s news feeds as well, making you visible to a whole new audience.

Hashtags are another great way to be found on social media. If you’ve written something about the new Major League Soccer season for your sportswear website, by posting the article up with relevant MLS and soccer hashtags, it will appear in the search results of people looking for stories about the MLS. All of a sudden, you’ve opened yourself up to a whole new world of people who share an interest in a product or service you can provide.

Be engaging

While many of us may share posts or articles with the world, how many of us truly engage with the customer? Showing there is a face behind the website, an actual human rather than just words and pictures on a screen can help drive traffic to it.

If somebody comments on a post you’ve made, reply to them. Show them you care. They might have a question about a product or service. If so, you can reply with a relevant link from your website to answer the question. Just make sure it is a genuine answer and will actually help them gain new information or knowledge on the subject they are asking about – nobody wants to think that they are being spammed with links for the sole purpose of increasing website numbers. Clickbait is a bad thing.

Use email marketing

Another great way to stay in touch with your customers is via email marketing. Send out a weekly, fortnightly or monthly email with useful information, news and most importantly, offers. The news and updates can come in the form of links to your blog or articles which will get people clicking through to your website initially.

As for offers, they work as the way of getting people to open the email initially. How often do you receive an email from a company you once bought something but have little to no interest in as their marketing is just full of self-promotion, and so send it to the junk folder without even opening it? If a customer that when they open an email for you, there is a chance they are going to be rewarded by an exclusive discount code or a special offer on goods or services, they are much more likely to open and read it.

Advertise online

An obvious one to finish. How much use are you actually making of online marketing? While advertising in traditional print media or via posters and flyers is all well and good, the effort that it then involves for a customer to get onto your website after reading about it on a hard copy can prove to be too much. With online marketing, they stumble across your advert, click on it and are on your website within a matter of seconds. For all the tips and tricks there are to grow your website’s visitors organically, sometimes a good, old-fashioned, paid for marketing campaign can be the best way to drive traffic.