The amount of web traffic your business receives is a way to analyze if your brand is catching the attention of consumers - new and old.
When running a business, it can be a challenge to get your website to rank on a search engine.
If you feel that you are doing everything you can to market your website, but the clicks are just not coming in, then it's time to try something new!
Here are seven different ways you can increase your web traffic.
It doesn't matter if your business already has a blog... you need to guest blog on another platform - preferably one that has a larger following than your own. Guest blogging will increase your exposure to a newer audience.
Guest blogging will give you the opportunity to gain new readers for your own site if they enjoyed the content that was presented.
Not only will your guest blog be found on the other blog sites, but many companies promote their articles and guest articles on their social media channels. Another way to get the most out of guest blogging is by linking keywords within the guest blog back to your own blog site. Because again, the whole point of guest blogging is get people to your website and generate the most traction possible.
Convince & Convert shares that when your business guest blogs for another company, especially one with a larger audience, it also allows your business to establish their own credibility because it means your blog was worthy enough to be published on that site.
It is just as valuable to welcome guest bloggers on your own site.
Guest bloggers can be used to your site's advantage in terms of content. If you blog every week, having a guest blogger provide for your site once a month - that's 25 percent of content taken off your hands.
Remember, guest blog on website's similar to the industry you're in. If your business is within food catering, it would not be beneficial to have a guest blogger who writes about cars. Instead, having an event planner write a blog titled, "Event Planning: Hiring a Food Catering Service Guarantees Success" is more relevant to your business and will attract a more relevant audience for your business.
You're already on social media. Tweeting out as much as you can, linking your blogs on your Facebook posts... but engagement is at a standstill. You need that number to go up, but it's just not happening.
First, you want to make sure that your content is "share worthy." Meaning that your content is not only worthy enough to read, but also to get a referral - meaning it is so good that a reader feels that someone else needs to read it. The most shared content are within the topics of breaking news, practical advice, heartwarming stories, and behind the scenes content (Revive Social). This could mean that what you are writing about is significant to readers, but stats show that the form your content is presented in matters too.
Revive Social found that in 2017, posts on Facebook that included photos received three times more engagement than posts that did not have photos. The same year, Twitter showed that tweets with videos within them are retweeted or shred six times more than tweets that have GIFs within them. But overall, tweets that include images were shared 150 percent more than tweets that don't have a visual.
Aside from being up to par on the content your business shares, what are you missing? Is it a social media share button?
A social media share button is a FREE tool that allows for readers and users to quickly and easily share your website link, post, blog, whatever it may be, with friends with a click of a button - literally (Add This). No need for copying and pasting links, the button does it for them and takes them out straight to a platform of their choice. When using popular website builders like WordPress, the work is already done for you and templates for your website already come with share buttons to your readers to use - that's how important having a share button is.
If your website lacks a share button, adding one will increase engagement because it encourages readers to be able to share your content with their friends and followers through a variety of ways (Twitter, SMS text message, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn). To be successful with share buttons, Share This recommends placing your share button where it can be easily seen, you want your audience to be able to navigate it hassle-free.
The Search Engine People reports how an email marketing company increased their user engagement 55 percent by adding a social media share button to their marketing emails.
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Instagram offers a free business profile option that your business should be taking advantage of if it's not already.
Switching to an Instagram business profile allows for users to contact you more easily by providing a "contact" button where users can then choose to call, email, or locate your business. A regular Instagram profile only allows users to get in contact with you by linking them out to your home website from a link presented in the bio information.
Constant Contact explains how another benefit of an Instagram business profile is having instant access to analytics data.
Though this can already be done for free with a standard Instagram profile, a third party program is needed to reveal these statistics. With the business profile, Instagram automatically provides an analytics program through Insights that updates weekly (Constant Contact).
With the help of this tool, you won't need to spend much time understanding which of your posts are gaining the most clicks from users. It will be simple to understand and adjust what to post more of to continue to boost web traffic.
An Instagram business account allows for ad promotion to be done more conveniently with the addition of a "promote" button. Simply create an Instagram post on the Instagram account and adjust the settings for budget, audience, and time period and click the "promote" button to transform your post into an advertisement (Constant Contact). Prior to the Instagram business profile option, businesses had to create their ads using a third party.
These settings are specified to better direct traffic to your platforms that is actually relevant to your business.
Lastly, the Instagram business profile account has added a new feature known as the "shop button." This is beneficial to businesses that sell physical items. The "shop button" allows for your business to post an image that showcases merchandise and for the convenience of users, it is "tagged" with the product's name and price (Andrew MaCarthy). Adding these tags to a post creates what is called a "shoppable post."
The tag also acts as a link, so when a user clicks on it, they are redirected to that item on your main site where the user can purchase the item if they want. This feature eliminates the user having to search for the item that they were intrigued by, and at the same time, increases website traffic by providing your audience with easy access to your main website.
Big Commerce found how a clothing brand "Natori" was able to boost their user traffic from Instagram by 1,416 percent with the use of "shoppable posts," having a total of only 61 "shoppable posts" at the time when the percentage was recorded.
Today, social media influencers on Instagram and YouTube have proven to have earned a large amount of trust from followers. So much, that it seems they can be the deciding factor as to why their followers go out to purchase and use a product.
Instagram foodie influencer, "@New_Fork_City" (is named number 1 on Cosmopolitan's "15 Food Instagram Accounts You Need to Follow") was created by three college students who take pictures of the food they eat in New York City and post it to their account with a geotag revealing where others can go to enjoy the same food that the photo is displaying (Cosmopolitan). Their food posts make the food they are indulging in look tempting enough to get their 931,000 followers to go out and try these delicious-looking snacks for themselves.
(Here's a post from their account advertising Hutch and Waldo's avocado toast and many people in the comments talking about going: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo_98Renb3o/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link )
Businesses need to consider building good relationships with social media influencers who have followers that are within the same target audience they are trying to reach.
This way influencers are happy to advertise your business through their social media accounts and allow all their followers to see how they enjoy your business whether it provides a service or a product. The cost of this varies on how much your product or service is worth.
Simply provide one influencer of your choice (or multiple influencers if you can afford to do so) with a free product or service, unless you are lucky enough for an influencer to enjoy your business prior to reaching out.
When they post about it, their followers will be inclined to check your website out to try to understand why the influencer is posting about your business and try to be a part of the "hype."
Collective Bias gathered information from a survey that revealed that 70 percent of millennial consumers make shopping decisions based off peer recommendations. Of these consumers, 30 percent would rather buy a product that is endorsed by someone who is not a celebrity because they feel they are more trust-worthy when it comes to their recommendations (Shane Barker).
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, improvement is important for driving your website traffic. The better your SEO is, the easier it is for someone to come across your website depending on the words they use within a search (Vertical Response).
The way improvement is made is through research. Your business needs to find out what keywords are most popularly used by internet users when they conduct searches. You don't need to be a genius or even hire a genius to figure this one out.
Free keyword software's exist which is a tool that anyone can use to reveal keyword statistics that show how often certain words are searched for.
After gathering the information you need, take a look at the words your business uses within your website's URL link and meta description... how well are the keywords you used ranking? If they are words that aren't really searched for, change them to words that are searched for.
Doing this will allow your website link to be listed higher up on a search page, which means that more people are likely to interact with your link rather than others.
But these statistics are always changing. Google changes its algorithm about 500 to 600 times every year (Rebixit). So in order to keep increasing your website traffic, the verbiage your business chooses to use needs to constantly change to match these algorithms for your website to continue to rank high.
Your email signature is a block of personalized text that is attached to the bottom of all emails that you send out. Many people enjoy putting cute inspiration quotes there, but why not use it to attract more traffic to your website?
This can easily be achieved by entering a link to your website or blog or links to your social media platforms. When adding your business information to your email signature, you want to make sure the design of it matches what your brand wants to portray because this is another way to make a first impression to first time consumers.
Today, marketing pitches can be very aggressive in the way that it comes off as trying to shove a product down the throats of possible consumers. By using an email signature for marketing, Mar Tech Series finds that this allows marketing through email to become a more personal way to market your business.
Your business can then establish a better relationship with consumers through conversation prior to asking them to visit your websites with your email signature located at the bottom (Mar Tech Series). To have the most impact possible, make sure the email that is sent a long with the marketing signature is meaningful to your brand, use it to convince your recipients before they see the pitch at the bottom.
In order for this signature to be put to use, many companies choose to perform what is called an "email blast." An email blast is a business making an effort to consistently send out emails to consumers who already have interacted with the business and to possible new consumers.
To make email blasts most effective in increasing your website traffic, Forbes encourages inserting links to your website through the content of the email.
To the doubters that have left email marketing campaigns on the back burner, Customer Think found that stats from Direct Marketing Association showed that $1 spent on email marketing results in $40.56 in return. Personalizing emails has also produced an increased click-through rate by 14 percent (Customer Think).
Aside from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, Q&A sites like Quora, Reddit, and Yahoo Answers can also serve as a platform that allows for you to interact with possible consumers and get them to visit your sites.
People have questions and you could give answers. Q&A sites are meant to answer the questions of those who are seeking answers and those questions could be answered by your business (Quick Sprout). In creating a profile on a Q&A site, your business could target questions that have to do with your expertise.
For example, if you own a winery, and someone is questioning what kind of meals pair best with Merlot, your business now has an opportunity to provide an answer to this question while adding linked keywords within your answer that links out to your website.
Not only did you help a citizen in distress about what food to eat with their Merlot, but they are going to be appreciative of you taking the time to help them and more willing to visit your website out of gratitude.
Wish Pond points out that answering particular questions that are relevant to your business will increase your website traffic with people who are within your target audience, improving the chances that they will be interested in your business and more intrigued by the links provided.
There are plenty of different ways to attract clicks. By utilizing a variety of methods, your business will reach a variety of people to make up your target audience. In the process of growth, it is important to keep many doors open even if it means exploring new methods. Refusing to venture outside of the strategies your business normally uses will only cause your web traffic number to stay stagnant and hinder your business from growing.
Download your free website redesign checklist today!
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