Whatever your business goals of being online, getting visitors to your website is one of the key elements to success. If you’re just venturing online with a new presence or finding yourself having to compete in an increasingly online world, knowing how to boost website traffic can be scary.
Don’t worry, there are plenty of different tactics you can try as a small business or startup to get your website in the spotlight. While the results can take time, many of these tactics can be implemented with minimal or no budget.
There are two main groups of tactics, on-site ideas and off-site ideas. We’re going to explain what both of these mean including some practical ideas to get you started. You can find more detailed advice on how to implement a full list of 21 traffic boosting techniques, including the ideas shared below, in our new online guide.
On-site ideas
On-site simply means tactics and techniques you can do yourself on your website. These tactics are ideas that you can be in control of and implement on your own site. Some may require a bit of technical know-how from your web developer, but the key here is making improvements to your own online offering to boost traffic.
What does this mean practically? Well, here are just five on-site traffic boosting tips you could try:
- Blogging: Writing and uploading blogs on your website can help you rank in search, build a mailing list, showcase your expertise and build brand awareness.
- Content marketing: Creating top-quality content is a hugely effective way to reach online audiences. By offering resources your target customers will love and most importantly find useful, you can begin to build a relationship with them and eventually drive conversions.
- On-page SEO: Optimising your content and website for search will help you signpost your site as a great resource for both search engines and potential customers. On-page SEO is about optimising the structure and content of your webpages to make them as relevant, accessible and useful as possible.
- Email marketing: Email is still one of the most effective tools for engaging audiences and boosting web traffic. Creating brilliant and helpful emails and sending them to your customers (with the right permissions of course) is an effective way of encouraging clicks to your site.
- Site accessibility and speed: With more people browsing online and using social media on phones rather than on desktop, making sure your site offers a good user experience is key to attracting and keeping visitors on your website. Make sure your site is mobile optimised and fast to load as minimum requirements.
Off-site ideas
As you can probably guess, off-site tactics are traffic boosting ideas that you can do away from your own website. They usually involve other people and sources and often are about building connections and strengthening relationships to gain web traffic.
Here are five off-site traffic boosting tips you could try:
- Guest blogging: Just as you can write and publish content for your own website you can also produce articles for other people’s blogs. Sharing your expertise on a relevant third-party website opens you up to a whole new audience, enhances your reputation and can lead to a boost in web traffic.
- Video marketing: Video is an impactful way to reach and engage with your audience. Not only is video one of the best channels for showcasing helpful content, but there are huge platforms for being found on (think YouTube) and Google highlights video content in search results.
- Contributing to communities: Getting involved in digital communities in your industry is a free and genuine way to get in front of your target audience. By taking part in discussions and answering questions, you can get your brand known within a relevant community. More of a long-term strategy, this helps to build brand awareness so people will head to your website next time they need something you offer. Remember, this isn’t the place for sales talk, so keep it relevant and most importantly helpful and valuable.
- Social media: Social media is a fantastic opportunity to engage with your audience and, at an organic level, is free. Creating engaging social posts with a compelling reason to click to visit your website can be a highly effective way of increasing your web traffic. There are also paid options to help give your traffic an immediate boost.
- Digital PR: Earning media coverage through PR is an effective way to drive brand awareness and traffic to your site. By crafting interesting press releases you can drive traffic directly to your website from an online article on a news site or other website, or indirectly if someone searches for your brand after seeing the press coverage.
These are just a few examples of both on-site and off-site techniques you can implement to help get more targeted visitors to your website. You can find more helpful hints and tips on each of these, plus lots more in our online guide. Or, if you’re looking for bitesize information, you can download our checklist here.
Most importantly, remember that to really benefit from getting more web traffic, you need to make sure you’re producing relevant and helpful content and that your website is built for users, with mobile-optimised designs and fast loading speeds.
This article was brought to you in partnership with the UK Domain.
