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In this article, I’m going to show you the most effective ways to drive traffic to your website. The ultimate goal of every business out there is to drive sales. Sales whether in form of making a purchase, installing an app, registering for an online course, every business would want to see a boost in revenue.
Website traffic is both an important indicator and a driver of business growth. With your website, you can garner so much information about the growth of your business. You can see how well your marketing strategies are working, gather insights about your audience to make decisions, improve SEO and search engine credibility, generate more leads, increase conversions and get more customers.
The problem most people face isn’t about how they can set up a website; it is mostly about getting people to that website, not just any traffic, it should be their ideal customers who will eventually make a purchase.
It is important to know how to diversify ways of driving traffic to your website and not just rely on solely one means, because if that one source fails, it would be very bad for business.
But gaining traffic shouldn’t be just any traffic; it should be people who actively engage with your website. If your traffic is increasing but conversions decreasing, you’re not bringing in the right traffic.
So your goal should be to bring in more qualified visitors to your website, those who are most likely to convert into leads and customers.
Completion is high and marketing is getting tougher. To rise above it all, you’ll need to understand some basic principles and ways this can be achieved in other to gain authority in your niche and drive traffic to your website.
Two Best Ways to Drive Traffic to your Website
The various ways of driving website traffic are categorized into two – paid traffic and organic traffic.
Paid Traffic/Online Advertising
Online ads can instantly drive hundreds, even thousands of visitors to your website. These are paid means through which you can drive traffic to your website; social media advertising, paid search, display advertising, influencer marketing, running contests, and giveaways.
Paid Search Advertising
People searching online are looking for something very specific and will click on the result they believe is going to cater to their needs the most.
Paid search is a form of digital marketing where search engines such as Google allow advertisers to show ads on their search engine result pages (SERPs).
Paid search works on a pay-per-click model in which advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked on. The ad formats used include text ads, which are shown at the top, bottom, or sides of organic search results. This is also one of the most sought after ways to drive traffic to your website
How it Works
Every time someone searches, advertisers compete for the opportunity to display ads. So how do search engines determine who wins? The primary determinants are the bid and the quality.
- The bid; the bid is the maximum amount an advertiser is willing to pay for a click on his ad. The advertiser is charged an amount equal to or sometimes less than the bid. If the ad shows and no one clicks it, it doesn’t cost anything at all.
- The quality; it is quite possible that more relevant ads can win higher spots on the search results page even with lower bids. No matter how high a bid is, search engines will not display the ad if it is not relevant.
The type of ads Google displays depends on what was searched. For instance, if a searcher is looking for a location-based business, you might see promoted pins from Google local listings just as seen in the image below.
If a searcher is trying to find, say a social media analytics tool, the ad displays like this;
Display Advertising
Display advertising is graphic advertising on internet websites that, apps, or social media through banners or other ad formats whose main purpose is to deliver advertisement and brand messages to a site’s visitors.
You can either run display ads by retargeting visitors who have already been to your sites or attract a new audience. Retargeting is a powerful type of display advertising.
Retargeting Ad;
This enables you to show targeted ads to users who have visited your website in the past. Retargeting can dramatically increase your conversion rates and ROI.
This type of advertising works with Facebook pixel. This pixel is a code you place at the header of your website HTML code so that your visitors can get added to your remarketing audience through browser cookies. This code can be customized for different pages and it tracks what each visitor does on a page.
The actions carried out are called events and the pixel tracks these events such as signing up for a newsletter, adding a product to a cart but leaving without checking out.
Google retargeting allows you to stay connected with your target audience even after they leave your site, so you can customize your ad messages in ways that will lure them back to your site. These include online ads in different formats such as videos, text-based ads, banners, etc.
You can display these ads to people who have shown interest in your kind of products when they are browsing other websites and platforms not related to yours.
Display Ad vs Paid Search
- In paid search, the person is searching for the type of product you are offering. But for display advertising, the prospect doesn’t necessarily need to be looking for your product at the moment.
- In search ads, there are restrictions to the format that can be used. They are usually text-based, whereas, in display ads, there are a lot of creative options; different sizes and formats.
Social Media Advertising
There are billions of people on social media and millions of daily active users across the different social platforms. Consumers are on social media for several reasons; it is safe to say some life there.
These are advertisements served to users on social media platforms. Social networks utilize user information to serve highly relevant ads to a specified set of audiences within a specific platform.
When the target market aligns with the user demographics of a social platform, social media advertising can provide a huge increase in conversions and sales with a lower cost of acquisition.
Using social advertising, you can connect to your core audience, custom audience, and lookalike audience.
Social media ads come in different formats which makes them interesting and interactive, such as photos, videos, stories, shopping post ads, etc.
Most of these social networks provide analytics and insight tools like the Facebook Ads Manager, to track the performance of ads and conversion.
Brand Ambassador & Influencer Marketing
Most consumers are more moved to make a purchase by word-of-mouth than advertising.
They would rather buy a product recommended by someone they look up to (like a celebrity or an influencer) or someone they know in person, like family or a friend.
Paid partnerships with influencers in your niche or running a brand ambassador program is a good way to build brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.
Contest and Giveaways
Partnering with companies that have a large footprint is a good way to drive traffic to your website. Here, you’ll need to give away something of value.
Contests appeal to everyone especially when there is a nice reward to it. A good contest can make people more willing to engage with you, get more visibility, more followers, and more traffic to your site, which helps your e-commerce site or blog grow.
Organic/Free Website Traffic
There are so many free ways to drive traffic to your website, from social media to guest blogging, SEO, Q&A websites, email marketing to content marketing.
Social Media Marketing
As said earlier, social media is the most dominant online platform. Businesses, brands, and creators use these platforms to connect with audiences, to build awareness, increase sales and drive website traffic through publishing great content on social media profiles, listening to and engaging with followers, analyzing results, and running social media ad campaigns which we discussed earlier on.
Social media can massively impact your business and its ability to generate traffic and sales. It is not enough to produce great content; you have to be proactive on these platforms by engaging with your target audience.
You need to create value first then slowly woo them into buying your products and directing them to your websites.
Your website address should be seen across all your social profiles. With platforms that allow external links on posts, you can drop your links on posts that direct them to relevant pages on your site.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is an effective option to drive traffic to your website. Securing guest posts on a few reputable sights in your niche can greatly increase blog traffic to your website.
The first step would be to find websites that triumph in your niche and are open to guest blogging and then reach out to them.
Search Engine Optimization
To drive traffic for your website, it is important to get your website fully optimized for search engines. This involves making adjustments that make your site more suitable to what search engine algorithms like Google, Yahoo, and Bing require.
Studies show that pages web pages found at the top of the first page of search results can earn 50% of traffic. Searchers barely move to the second page to check for more results. So if your page isn’t showing up on the first page, you’re likely to get no visitors through search engines.
Below are tips for good SEO;
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly/responsive. This means the site should be able to automatically resize all its components to fit and look good on all device screens as most people use mobile phones these days to surf the web.
- Set up good internal linking and back-linking structures.
- Optimize your images and site for speed loading.
- Do extensive keywords research for your content and pages.
- Make your site search engine friendly by paying attention to Meta titles, Meta tags, heading, and the copy of your pages. Your keywords or phrases should be found in each of them.
- Use analytic tools to manage the traffic on your site.
- Use an SEO plugin to guide and help you get SEO ready, my favorite being yoastplugin.com
- The contents on your page should be user-friendly. Pay attention to your text structure and writings style.
Q&A Websites
Websites such as Quora are like organic traffic machines. These Q&A sites allow you to answer some of the most commonly asked questions in your niche and what’s great about it is that Google ranks these websites pretty high in search results, so you do not need to do any special search engine optimization here.
Email Marketing
Using current readers and customers who have signed up for your email newsletters is a great way to drive traffic to your website. When you release a new blog post or content offer, you can promote it to your followers/ subscribers for a quick traffic boost. With content-heavy websites, having repeat readership is helpful for traffic goals, conversions, and lead generation. Here is a quick tip on how to promote your website as a musician using Email Marketing
