Knowing how to drive traffic is important for every business because any marketing effort requires an audience to see it. Many businesses struggle with attracting new customers, and part of this is because they aren’t driving new traffic to their website.
Whatever you’re doing (or about to start doing) to drive traffic – make sure you’ve set up tracking! A website analytics system such as Google Analytics will help you keep track of what works and what doesn’t.
Analytics provide you with the reports on how your site visitors behave and who they are with important information such as age, gender, and location. They can also tell you how visitors landed on your site (traffic source) and what the most popular content on your website is. You can then use this information to make informed marketing decisions to help grow your efforts.
Read our top tips for driving quality traffic to your site below:
Optimise your website for searchers
When we say optimise your website for searchers, we don’t mean search engines! Great websites aren’t optimised to suit the search engines – they’re optimised for the people using search engines to find things.
Therefore, make sure you’re thinking about the searches who will be finding your site. What are they looking for, what do they want to find on your site and what information are they trying to find? Optimise the content on your website to answer these questions.
Creating for searchers will also mean that search engines will consider your site to be fully optimised, so it’s a win-win. If your website is designed with searchers in mind, then search engines will follow.
Provide quality content
Content creation is a type of inbound marketing that focuses on attracting the right kind of traffic to your website. Identifying your buyer persona is vital to coming up with content that will draw the right audience.
To come up with content that will attract the right visitors to your website, you should know your buyer persona. Once you know your audience, you can create content that will attract them to your website.
When you supply good content, traffic will follow! To get started, you can read our beginners guide to content marketing here.
Get social
Social meeting isn’t going anywhere, so it’s time to embrace it. With over 3.5 billion users and growing annually, there is a huge audience to be utilised. Driving traffic to your website from social media is very possible.
When it comes to social media, people don’t want a hard sell. You can’t post endless links to your website or products and hope for the best. To be successful, it’s important to build value with your audience. This is where content marketing comes in again!
While posting valuable content on social media is a great step, posting it at the right time is even better. For each different social platform, there are set times in a day when people are the most active. Do a bit of research and schedule your content so it’s posted at these times to drive higher engagement.
Online advertising
One of the quickest ways to drive traffic to your website is by using online advertising. The most popular choice for small businesses are usually Facebook or Google Ads. With Google, you can run pay-per-click or retargeting ads. While on social media you can run ads or sponsored posts.
However, if you want to drive traffic using ads, it’s important to plan what you want this traffic to do. And perhaps most importantly, how you’re going to ultimately generate revenue from this traffic! Because you must pay for online advertising, you need to ensure you’re getting a return on your investment.
Make sure your offer is enticing enough, and you can convert ad views into traffic. Then focus on converting this traffic into sales with a great sales page or free offer. Start small and then scale once you find what works for your business.
Make the most of email
Email marketing can provide a fantastic opportunity to drive traffic to your website. For example, you can drive traffic by emailing people about your latest blog or promoting an exclusive offer.
Did you know that you’re 6 times more likely to get a click through from an email than on Twitter?
Making the most of email marketing requires an email list that you can contact. If you haven’t already done so, create a lead magnet to collect email addresses. This will help you to grow your list and in turn, grow your potential audience. If you’re not sure where to start with email, you can read our beginners guide here.