How Can I Drive More Traffic to my Website?
In the shortest form answer; concentrate on SEO and learn some ways to promote your website.
This turns out to be one of the common questions asked in search engines recently; how can I drive more people to my website. How do I know that? Analytics. I use tools such as the MOZ Keyword Explorer to test keywords before I build anything for my websites. The place I start first though is by analyzing my content to find my keywords and keyword phrases.
Every day thousands of people and companies buy new domain names and launch their own websites and yet if you search on any of the keywords for the products they sell, chances are there are already thousands of websites selling the same thing. With so much competition for position on the search engine results pages (SERPs), how do some websites make it to the top of the list?
What is Paid Search?
You see what I just did there? I published a common question that someone might ask in regards to the topic on the page I am composing. Not only did I ask it in the way it is commonly typed into search engines but I turned it into a headline by bolding it and putting it into <h> tags.
Whenever you search for something in the search engines you will notice that the first things that come up in the SERPs (search engine results pages) are paid ads. The search engines even identify them right away;
Paid search ads are expensive. It is typically the big players in any particular product or subject line who can afford paid advertising. The only way to compete with them is to have enough capital to buy your own ad space at the top of the search engines. But that comes later once you become a big player or if you have a large marketing budget.
What is SEO and How Will It Bring More Visitors to my Website?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a theory and set of best practices for helping your website when it gets indexed by the search engines. These methods work in an optimal way to ensure your website comes up highest in the search engine results pages whenever someone searches for a keyword or keyword phrase, that relates to the products you sell, or the topics of the web pages that you build.
Search engines use pieces of software known as ‘spiders’ that crawl through the pages of your website developing an index (like the index of a book) that explains what your website is about and what features exist to help consumers find what they are looking for.
The spiders are looking for good organizational elements on your site that allow users to find what they are looking for, as easily as possible, and on a wide variety of Internet capable devices. The way your site is organized, the site speed and page load times, the user friendliness of the web interface you design and your sites compatibility with different browsers all come into consideration in the search engine algorithms that decide how high your site should rank for any given search term. The amount of traffic to your web pages and something known as ‘backlinks’ also help to place you in the ranking with search engines for your site specific keywords.
It begins with identifying the keywords and keyword phrases that people most search for whenever they are looking for the products you have for sale on your website or whatever particular topic your web page is about. By analyzing the search habits of the potential customers for your market you can be sure to word the URL’s, headlines, file names, image alt tags and the copy of the pages of your website to promote the highest possible placement in the SERPs.
I find examples of bad SEO all over the Internet. For starters people come up with clever names for their website and web domain that have little to do with the product, service or the topic of the website that they build. That is only a single aspect of SEO however. If you start with a ubiquitous domain name and get all of the other SEO tactics down then you can still be successful. But why not give yourself every chance of success out the gate?
Take for example companies like Amazon.com. It could be argued that the word ‘Amazon’ has nothing to do with online shopping or books and is therefore a bad choice for a company that intends to sell books online. You have to remember that they launched their online store in the early days of the Internet when there was little competition and they quickly became a household name. It was a great idea at just the right time. Now the word ‘Amazon’ is synonymous with online sales and online media, and they continue to branch into new areas of online products. I could write a book about Amazon and perhaps one day I will, but back to the topic at hand.
So How Do I Get More People to Come to My Website?
There is no short answer for this question. The best web developers study SEO all the time watching for the latest trends in search algorithms and staying abreast of the evolution of the search terms for whatever industry they are working in at the time. SEO is a moving target. I’ll give you a very high-level overview of the areas you will need to concentrate on to bring more traffic to your website;
1) Identify all of the commonly searched keywords and keyword phrases for the product or idea you are going to promote on your website and be prepared to use them often on most of the pages of your website, in the file names, in the domain name, in the URL structure and in the web page copy.
2) Create at least 2-3 new web pages per week to promote your product or idea. The pages should be a combination of copy and images. The copy, image file names and image alt tags should be keyword rich and directly answer the questions that consumers have about the product or idea you are selling.
3) While a website is trying to pick-up steam and traffic, a web page has a life span of about 3 months before it needs to be updated. Unless you have a huge launch budget that allows you to promote your website to hundreds of thousands of people from the very start, you will build traffic to your website slowly. This is why it is critical to understand which pages people visit the most and which content keeps them reading on your webpage the longest. Refresh your pages often, especially any that perform poorly.
4) Use analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Hot Jar to understand the traffic to your website and the actions people take on the individual pages of your website. By understanding what pages get the most traffic and where people remain on the page the longest, you begin to understand more about what people are looking for and what kinds of content they like to find on your website.
5) Promote your website and web pages on social networking and on industry specific websites where the consumers looking for the product, service or idea you are promoting are most likely to go. By creating quality content that people want to read you will begin to generate ‘backlinks’ to your website which help to raise your website trust factor in the search engines.
6) Include hyperlinks that use keyword rich anchor text that links to highly-regarded quality external authorities to support your opinions and ideas as well as internal links that link to the other pages of your website. Make sure that there is no more than one hyperlink to each destination on any given page and there are no more than 100 hyperlinks on any given web page or your page could be marked as ‘spam’ by the search engines.
7) Promote your site with paid advertising such as paid search and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns that use your popular keywords and keyword phrases to drive more traffic to your site in the hopes of creating more backlinks and creating a greater trust score in the search engines. This type of advertising is known as ‘search engine marketing’ (SEM).
8) Technical SEO deals with the specifics of how your site is built. In addition to using good keyword content it is important to optimize your site for performance. Site speed and page load times are also a consideration for search engine ranking. If your website loads very slowly or your web pages load very slowly then your time on site (TOS) will be low with a high abandonment rating. Your site also has to be responsive (it has to be compatible with different devices such as smart phones and tablet computers). Most of the search engines will not even list your site if it is not designed with responsive technologies such as ‘Bootstrap’.
I already do all of those things and still the traffic to my website is low.
Often a project comes across my desk without clearly defined keywords or keyword phrases. Clever writers compose tongue-in-cheek articles hoping that entertaining banter and subject matter will get people’s attention and bring them to their websites to read. They give little thought to the keywords that bring Internet searchers to their sites believing the content only has to be entertaining.
Quality content is not just entertaining. There, I said it. If you are simply a blog writer hoping to bring people to your site so that you can garner advertising dollars then perhaps this is all you really need? But surely even bloggers concentrate their efforts on one particular area such as travel, finance, healthy living, relationships or something more specific than just everything.
But if you’re trying to promote everything (I have met people who are) then you will have a long road ahead of you. Even if this is your goal you should concentrate on driving one or two kinds of traffic to your site at a time. For example. this year tackle attracting the travel and finance crowd and then next year consider the healthy living and eating aspects of travel and finance, and so on. You should have some kind of logical progression to your plan.
Chances are though you have a product to sell or an idea to promote. Even if you are a blog writer you will benefit by attracting the greatest number of visitors to your site with good SEO strategies that involve optimized keywords and keyword phrases to a specific customer base.
If you believe that you have followed every best practice where SEO is concerned and have little to show for your efforts then it is possible that you are in an overcrowded market with the particular product, service or idea you are selling. This doesn’t mean you should necessarily consider a different product, it means you have to find a unique way to market your product that nobody else has thought of yet. This is one of the few times I might recommend an outside SEO agency to help.
If you have the budget there are many companies who will help you with the SEO to promote your website but be warned; there really are no hidden secrets or backdoor relationships these SEO agencies have that aren’t widely known throughout the Internet. Also, in hiring an outside agency to help you with SEO it is possible that you or your coworkers could become complacent about SEO, thinking that it is somebody elses job. Fixing the SEO on a website has to be a group effort and a company-wide focus. If you are going to hire an outside SEO agency then be sure to work closely with them and try to learn as much as you can about what they do so that one day you can be better SEO skilled yourself.
What Can I Do to Get People Coming to My Website Quickly?
There really is no quick fix where SEO is concerned. It is typically a long slow climb in the SERPs before you reach the top of the heap, if at all. If you have enough money then you can do lots of paid search campaigns and other forms of paid advertising to drive traffic but if your funds are limited then studying the best SEO practices is going to be the quickest path to success for your website.
Concentrate your efforts on discovering new keywords and composing new high quality content that is keyword rich for your website. As with most things in life, quality is better than quantity. Producing a bunch of fluffy content with little regard to keyword analysis beforehand will do little to drive more traffic to your site.
I have seen many websites with thousands of pages that rank very low in SERPs because the writers simply did not analyze or concentrate on keywords and keyword phrases to bring the traffic in.
What Else Do I Need to Know About SEO Besides Keywords and Keyword Phrases?
There are many other aspects of SEO that I have not touched upon in this short blog article. Entire volumes have been written on the topic of SEO and best SEO practices. Stay tuned to my blog channel here to learn more about the latest emerging SEO strategies and best practices.
For further reading consider some of my other blog articles;
Internal Links - The Do's and Don'ts