Many online marketers these days are too preoccupied with keeping up with the most recent marketing trends or getting bottom-line results that they forget that basic step towards achieving a successful inbound strategy: attracting more visitors to the site. Before you can get those results you need, you have to get strangers to drop by your site first.
While we all know that putting that into practice can get pretty tough, generating traffic is certainly not impossible, as we can see in the success of countless websites out there. Without a doubt, the people running these successful websites know and apply certain approaches and techniques towards increasing their visitors, and they are all pretty basic ones. Yes, you can boost website visitors by getting back to basics, and here are some of those techniques you can certainly use.
1. Keep users in mind when optimising your site
One of the mistakes commonly committed by marketers when optimising their sites is optimising them for the benefit of the search engines. If anything, your website should be optimised for searchers at all times. That means you have to do everything that you can to make sure your website and everything it has to offer serves them well, that they get the help that they need, that they see whatever it is that they want to see there in the first place.
If you have doubts about the benefits of optimising for searchers, chew on this: sites that are optimised for searchers are now considered fully optimised by the search engines themselves. Now, would you still optimise your site any other way?
2. Use the right keywords for your content
Searchers get to your website because of keywords, but before they actually visit your site, the content that the search listing leads to should be of interest to them. To know what searchers would actually be interested in, you would have to know your personas—those fictional characters you created to represent the different user types within any given demographic. They are, after all, the searchers you’re actually trying to draw in.
When you know your personas, you should be able to come up with content about the right keywords that focus on their problems they’re dealing with or the goals they intend to fulfil. Considering that users are actually searching for ways to solve their problems or achieve their goals, you can be sure that searchers will always stumble upon and visit your site if the content you’re offering has the answers they are looking for.
3. Make sure your site has cognitive fluency
Let’s say you’re searching for a good accountant in your neighbourhood, so you type in keywords that have the word “accountant” and the name of your city in it. You know that as you go about your search, you already have an image in your head of what an accountant’s website is supposed to look like. Naturally, you expect it to have a simpler and clearer design, muted colours, a cleaner font and all the information you need. When all your research is done and you’ve made your choice, you realise that the accountant you hired actually has a website that looks just like that image of an accountant’s website that you already had in your head.
That is basically the concept of cognitive fluency. More often than not, sites that provide searchers a cognitively fluent experience by matching their expectations of how a website should look get more visitors, and that is something that your website must have.
If you think your site can use some improvement in the area of cognitive fluency, perhaps you’d like to ask your personas about their expectations about style and formatting. If those expectations are in no way present in your website as it is, perhaps you should consider other approaches to optimising your website.
4. Write relevant blog posts
If your website has a blog, be sure to make only blog posts with topics that provide your readers the answers they’re looking for. Again, your buyer personas should figure into this. Think about the problems your personas are facing and their frequently asked questions, and you will have ideas on what to write about on your site’s blog.
5. Your most relevant keywords should have separate posts
As stated earlier, keywords are what takes a searcher to your site, and the bigger your keyword footprint is on the Internet, the better it is for your website. By keyword footprint, we mean the number of many different keywords that your site is associated with and ranks for. Your website has a much better chance of being stumbled upon if it has a large keyword footprint.
Naturally, one of the best ways of increasing the mark you leave on the Internet via your keyword footprint is to write separate posts for your most relevant keywords. As long as you come up with blog posts that focus on keywords your personas consider most relevant, you will be able to get the opportunity to grow your keyword footprint, rank for those keywords and get more people to drop by your site.
6. Blog consistently
This is actually one of the most basic principles of blogging. To rank better and get the chance for more visitors, you have to make blog posts on a regular basis. That’s because search engines need a reason to crawl your website and have your pages indexed, and regular blog posts give them that reason. Regular blog posting can certainly lead to more traffic, leads, and eventually, customers.
7. Use social media to the fullest
Social media has taken the world by storm, and it’s only right that you use it to attract more visitors to your blog or website. That, of course, doesn’t mean that you have to bombard every single Facebook page or Twitter profile you see with links to your site. That would most certainly be spamming in the eyes of many users and you’ll be running whatever reputation you have.
One great way of attracting more visitors to your website on social media is by acting as a resource for users who are seeking answers for certain questions or solutions for a given problem. If you, for instance, saw a stranger ask for advice about something on Facebook or Twitter and the question is right up your alley, then don’t hesitate to use your knowledge of the industry to be of assistance. Do this whenever you can, and of course, don’t forget to include relevant blog articles or website pages—including yours—to your replies. That way, you can actually help people out, you will be seen by many social media users as some kind of authority on a certain subject, and they will naturally seek you out and eventually visit your website or blog.
You can also keep an eye on the keywords most important to your website on social media, and get involved in any discussion when the opportunity presents itself. With social media monitoring of your most relevant keywords, you will have absolutely perfect timing for supplying your own take on a certain topic, and get people to visit your website.
Attracting people to your website is not a walk in the park, and could take some time, but adopting these simple strategies will at least help make the task a bit easier for you. It can get a bit tedious, but just always keep in mind that bigger traffic means more potential leads that you can nurture and eventually turn into loyal customers.