Importance of Website for a Business
Living in the digital world, a website is now very important for an enterprise, large or small. When you have a company and you don’t have a website, you’re likely to miss a lot of great opportunities for your company.
Many customers are looking online for information that will help them create better buying decisions. In reality, according to the eCommerce Foundation, 88% of customers will search for product information before they make an online or in-store purchase.
This buying behavior trend emphasizes the importance of a website for today’s businesses. If you want your business to be successful in the modern marketplace, you have to get a professional website. Your website is the backbone of your company, supporting all your digital marketing efforts.
The website itself can be used to implement many different marketing strategies to help your business grow.
The web has a much wider scope than any other type of advertising, and as the backbone of your online presence, every type of communication, piece of content, or advertisement that you put online would attract the user back to your website.
Your website will be the core of your company’s online presence; through it, you will promote your business across the world on social networking sites, forums and through pay-per-click advertising programs.
As such, it is crucial that your website gives customers a clear understanding of what your brand is and what types of goods or services you provide.
How to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Free Traffic
1. Get Listed in Online Directories
Another way to boost traffic to your website is to list it in free online directories and review pages. On several of these sites, your profile should include a link to your website, and the active updating of these listings and positive feedback are likely to result in more website traffic.
2. Build Backlinks
A backlink is a link to your website from another website. Backlinks from complementary businesses or industry influencers will not only get your business in front of a larger audience, but it will also drive qualified traffic to your website. In addition, Google picks up on backlinks and will increase its trust in your business if it sees other trusted sites pointing to yours. More trust from Google leads to higher rankings, which leads to more traffic.
3. Post to Social Media
Social media is one of the most popular free marketing tools around, and plays a role in driving traffic to your website. Use Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to promote blog posts and other useful pages on your website. This way you can turn your social media audience into website visitors, and draw traffic from their networks if you post shareable content.
4. Include Hashtags in Your Posts
By adding hashtags to posts that promote your website pages and blog posts, you can extend your reach beyond your network and get discovered by users searching for your products and services. The more eyes on your links, the more free traffic you’re getting to your website.
5. Use Landing Pages
Landing pages are another free source of traffic to your website. These are pages specific to your offers, such as for redeeming a discount code, downloading a free guide, or starting a free trial. They contain the details users need in order to move forward and convert, and focus on one specific call to action, making it more likely to happen. Because landing pages are so specific, you can get very targeted in your messaging, increasing the traffic coming to those pages.
6. Target Long-Tail Keywords
While short-tail keywords are often searched more frequently, it is more difficult to rank for them on search engines. Targeting long-tail keywords, on the other hand, gives you a better chance of ranking higher (even on the first page) for queries specific to your products and services—and higher ranking means more traffic. Plus, as search engines and voice-to-text capabilities advance, people are using more specific phrases to search online. There are many free tools available to help you find keywords to target, such as Answer the Public.
7. Start Email Marketing
Sending out regular newsletters and promoting offers through email is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and can also help to get traffic to your website. Provide useful information and links to pages on your website where they can learn more, such as through blog posts and landing pages for particular offers. Just make sure that you don`t continually bombard your readers with emails or your customers will either disengage with, delete, or unsubscribe from your emails.
8. Guest Blog
Having an industry influencer publish a blog post on your site or turning an interview with them into a blog post can help to drive traffic both through organic search but also via that influencer promoting the content to their audience (see the backlinks section above). This can also help to add more variety to your content and show your visitors that you are active in your field.
Alternatively, you could ask the influencer to mention your business in their own review or round-up post. This method is still free, but you still need the collaboration with the influencer to be an exchange with mutual benefit.
You can also be a guest blogger. Identify complementary businesses in your area whose audience is relevant to your business. See if you can contribute a post to their blog with a link back to your website. Make sure your content is relevant and useful to their audience so that it’s more of an even exchange.
9. Engage Online
It’s free to be active in online groups and on websites that are relevant to your business and community—and it helps you to obtain more traffic. Comment on blogs and social media posts, answer questions people are posting, and participate in conversations about your industry. The more you engage with your community, the more exposure and profile visits you get.
10. Perform On-Page SEO
There are many SEO tactics you can perform on each of your website pages to increase their rank in search engines and get more visitors. This includes producing high-quality content that your audience is searching for, and writing concise meta descriptions for your pages. The meta description appears below your URL in search results. Knowing what a page is about and what will result in a click makes users much more likely to do so. On-page SEO tactics such as these are free, but do take some time.
11. Learn from Your Analytics
Google Analytics is free to use, and the insights gleaned from it can help you to drive further traffic to your website. Use tracked links for your marketing campaigns and regularly check your website analytics. This will enable you to identify which strategies and types of content work, which ones need improvement, and which ones you should not waste your time on.
12. Produce Video Content
Statistics show that marketers who use video grew revenue 49% faster than those who don’t and 92% percent of customers say that visuals are the most influential factor in their purchasing decisions.
13. Add Social Share Buttons
It’s not that search engines take into account the amount of attention your website is getting on social media. But that can amplify the actual ranking factors, and adding social sharing buttons doesn’t cost you anything. Not adding them to your website posts is missing out on a huge opportunity to increase organic traffic.
14. Add New Content Weekly
Regular activity on your blog allows you to accelerate your growth – the more content you have, the bigger your chances for ranking on multiple search results. Plus, as you start establishing your presence, you can teach your audience to expect new content at a certain time.
If you can’t manage to write new articles weekly, hire a content writer.
Take some time to plan out a real content strategy and use some type of content calendar. Your content production shouldn’t be an afterthought.
15. Keep Your Content Up-To-Date
Oh, and one more thing – if you want to remain a relevant player in your niche – upgrade old content. Search engines like fresh and new content and upgrading is a great way to boost a page that’s not quite ranking.
Here are some great ways to upgrade outdated content:
– Add media – images, infographics, videos
– Remove obsolete information
– Back up your content with more external sources
– Interlink with newer content to boost your site’s structure
16. Create FREE Online Courses
If you want to establish your site as an authority in your industry, creating a free online course might be just the way to do it. Plus, you’ll get to include lead generation forms for everyone that wants to sign up! Depending on your skill set, knowledge, and the nature of your business – find a topic you think will be relevant to your customers. Of course, this should be a topic on which you can provide useful and in-depth knowledge.
However, if you want to create a quality online course you do have to think about production costs, so plan ahead and think about whether investing in it at the moment makes sense for your marketing strategy.
17. Create Quizzes With a “Share Results” Feature
Why are quizzes effective marketing tools?
When users finish a quiz, they get shareable results and if they find these results interesting or funny they are likely to share them on their social media accounts, spreading the word and attracting more website visitors.
18. Brand Partnerships
Another way you can tap into new audiences and drive them to your website is by partnering up with brands. Solid brand collaboration can be built on:
– Mutual promotion
– Shared projects
Partnering up with other brands on a shared project can lead to audience crossover – and the brands don’t necessarily have to be in the same exact niche.
Other Paid Methods of Generating Website Traffic
- Social Media Advertising
While with search advertising, you’re paying to show up in the top spot for relevant searches, with social media advertising you are paying to show up in relevant feeds. With both forms of advertising, you can specify the type of audience in front of which you’d like to appear, but with more psychographic data, social media offers superb targeting.
2. Display Advertising
Display ads are branded banner ads that get placed on relevant websites. If you are a fitness business and your ad appears on a webpage about athletic gear, your ad is likely to drive relevant traffic to your site.
3. Retargeting
Retargeting ads can appear on websites or social media feeds. They are placed in front of people who have already visited your site once, and who are therefore more likely to return.
Avoid Instant Website Traffic Generators
There is such a thing as free website traffic but there is no magic button or tool that just magically generates it independent of your own efforts. If you’re considering an automatic website traffic generator of any sort for your business (paid or free), here are three reasons to avoid them:
• Auto Website Traffic Generators Can Hurt Your Rankings
Google can detect spammy behavior, gets suspicious of spikes in activity, and monitors how users are interacting with your website. Using an automatic traffic bot or generator is likely to attract the wrong kind of attention from Google which will hurt your reputation with them and thus your ranking.
• Your Traffic Won’t Be Targeted
The ultimate purpose of getting more visitors to your website and ranking higher on Google is to increase the number of people who interact with (and hopefully become customers of) your business. If your visitors aren’t targeted, they aren’t likely to engage with your website, and you’re more likely to see your lead and conversion rates decline.
• Your Site Could Get Banned
If your website is attracting bot traffic, you run the risk of getting blocked from online advertising platforms or, even worse, getting removed from Google. Cheap website traffic is not worth it! Take the time to build up high-quality and sustainable traffic to your site.
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