All companies are chasing the same KPI (Key Performance Indicator) when it comes to their modern online marketing efforts, and that’s to increase website traffic. Typically, a business’s website will state their core values, mission statement, company origin, and, of course, their products. In order to make any return on investment, it’s important to have a thoroughly developed digital plan to funnel potential customer towards your website. Although, when a company is in its early years of development, it may be downright impossible for an owner to focus on marketing strategy due to all their manufacturing and distribution obligations. Here are seven simple, inexpensive, and effective methods to quickly boost your company’s website traffic.
Create Memorable Content
Video is the current king of online content marketing as it provides businesses a huge opportunity to attract website visitors. By creating informative, professional, and to-the-point video content that explains your company, it incentivizes online users to engage with your brand. Once your video is created, it can be repurposed across multiple different social channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. With YouTube, in particular, the opportunity to add your website links directly to your video description allows for totally free organic traffic to navigate to your website.
Other forms of content marketing include still images, podcasts, blogs (which we’ll touch more on later), gifs, and much more. Depending on where your customers are online, a different content type may be necessary to better communicate with your target audience. Try several different content types and regularly create new content to keep your brand fresh.
Optimize Your Google Business Profile
An optimized Google business listing brings 7-time more visits to a company’s website than when compared to an incomplete listing. This powerful tool allows your brand to show up for relevant searches and better helps users quickly understand basic facts about your company. Your Google business listing also enables your business to be found in mobile searches, which is even more of a priority than desktop traffic is nowadays. Given how quick and simple of a task this is, don’t pass up the opportunity to update your Google business listing!
Regularly Post to Social Media
The best thing about social media is that it’s absolutely free to create an account and start posting company content. Social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn host millions of active users everyday. Your company can organically grow their social following by regularly posting engaging content, such as still images and videos. Researching relevant hashtags, encouraging users to engage with your content, and ultimately motivating them share your content with their own followers are all great methods to organically growing your social presence.
Utilize Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the absolute best inexpensive ways to increase website traffic. A study on email marketing shows that for every $1 spent, email generates $36 in revenue, suggesting an insane 3,600% return on investment. A company’s email marketing list generally builds over time and is composed of your reoccurring customers, allowing you to speak directly to your most loyal customers. Email marketing gives company’s the opportunity to offer unique product discounts, share content, behind-the scenes insight, send newsletters, and even reward your most loyal customers with company specials.
Original Blog Posts
Some would say that the method of regularly posting blogs to your website is the absolutely singular best way to increase organic website traffic, and I’d have to agree with them. Companies that blog get 55% more website visitors when compared to websites that don’t. Additionally, businesses that blog are 13-times more likely to generate positive return on their investment. Being a free method to organically build links to other notable websites, there’s just no excuse to not blog in today’s digital landscape. The whole point of your website is to build value to the customer, and hosting informative original blog content is an effective way of doing this. Be sure to write engaging titles, incorporate videos, embed visuals, and insert quality links throughout your blog.
Focus on Link Building Strategies
Part of the reason why blogs are so effective at driving website traffic is due to its ability to build quality links. Backlinks are hyperlinks from other website domains that link back to one of your landing pages. This is an excellent way for other audiences to navigate to your website, and for search engines to better understand the relevancy of your content. External links are hyperlinks which navigates to a separate website domain. Data suggests that external links provide the best information for Google to determine the popularity of a webpage. Finally, internal links are hyperlinks that allows the navigation of one landing page to another within the same website. This helps search engines better understand your website, resulting in improved rankings in relevant searches.
Accumulating backlinks naturally takes time and patience, although this is the absolute best way to improve search ranking and acquire mutually-beneficial relationships with other companies. Additionally, link building extends much farther than just search engines. Through social media, it’s important to encourage other users to link back to both your social profile as well as your website.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A roughly 75% of users don’t proceed past the first page of Google, which is why appearing on the first page in search rankings is such a coveted spot. Quality keyword research is the cornerstone of any organic search effort. Organic traffic is a long game requiring a steady drip of quality content that’s highly relevant to your company. Consistently creating more blogs, articles, and landing pages around keywords that show opportunity is a great way to rank higher. It’s also been proven that long-form content (landing pages with 1,000 words or more) perform much higher in search rankings. SEO takes 6-months to a year to get right, particularly if you’re a new company or rebranding. Rather than week-by-week improvements, which will inevitably waver up and down in search traffic, we want to see incremental month-by-month improvements.
A higher rate of website traffic means more customers for your business! In addition to all the above tactics, there are many more methods to growing website traffic. With the evolving online market of organic and paid search practices, it’s important to be up to date in order to stay ahead of competitive websites. With this in mind, one tactic has always stayed tried and true, consistently creating high quality relevant content will always remain the bedrock of acquiring satisfactory online traffic.
