10 Free and Paid Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
You’ve selected a great product or service and designed your store. Now, all you need to do is figure out how to get traffic to your website so sales roll in. Nonetheless, there are many businesses like yours are struggling to come up with current and ingenious ways to grow website traffic.
The issue and frustration that most people face isn’t about how they can set up a website or even start a blog; it’s about how they can actually drive traffic to that digital destination floating about in the bits and bytes of cyberspace. Don’t worry, we are here to help! If you’re looking to increase website traffic through both organic and paid ways, here are 10 methods that are proven to yield results.
1.Paid Advertising
If you are looking for fast results, buying ads is one of the best ways to increase website traffic. Other than that, the advantages of paid advertising are great ways to expose your brand to a larger audience, targeting options with even small budget to get great results, collecting data and results can be tracked and measured to provide you with a better picture of your ROI.
There are several types of paid advertising, and the two most common ones are Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Pay-Per-Impression (PPI); the platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Pinterest Ads and Twitter Ads are the best channels to generate passive traffic to your site.
Google Ads has the most comprehensive range of ad tools, targeting, and analytics capabilities, and without a doubt, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to achieve consistent, long-term results. Facebook ad pricing can be as much as around RM50 per button, or as little as RM5, depending on your situation, but the great thing with Facebook Ad is that you can add an image or video along with your text, so even if people do not click on your ad, it’s still a great way to receive a lot of exposure for free with hundreds of millions of users on Facebook.
2.Social Media and Content
If you might assume the only options you have are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. They are fantastic and essential choices for all types of businesses, but there are other options worth looking into as well, for example Pinterest, Reddit, Google+ and LinkedIn.
It’s not enough just to post content, but you need to create content that’s memorable and cuts through the noise. In fact, useful and memorable content is one of the top ways to grow website traffic. At the same time, you will have to transform or re-purpose your content to a different content format as not every one of your target audiences is a fan of reading text or watching video clips. You could transform your content into infographic, podcast and E-book; thus, this will skyrocket your website traffic in a minute.
3.On-Page SEO
First and foremost, write your buyer personas so you know to whom you’re addressing your content. By creating quality educational content that resonates with your ideal buyers, you’ll naturally improve your SEO. This means tapping into the main issues of your personas and the keywords they use in search queries. Optimizing for search engines alone is useless; all you’ll have is keyword-riddled nonsense.
On-page SEO can help your website rank higher in search engines and bring in more traffic. Some on-page SEO elements include the page title, header, meta-description, image alt-text, and the URL (plus more). Showing up in search engines will generate more traffic for your site.
4.Long-tail Keywords and Searches Are Valuable
In March of 2019, Marieke van de Rakt, founder of Yoast SEO Academy, said that using long-tail keywords was a great SEO strategy. Long-tail keywords indicate a more specific user request and are much easier to rank due to relatively low competition; you can take top places in search results much faster and with less effort. An additional advantage of long-tail keywords is that many long-tail lists include data on gender, age and interests of users. Therefore, optimization allows you to personalize the content of the site and develop a more sufficient content or marketing strategy.
5.Build Out Your Backlinks
A backlink is created when a website links to another website. Backlinks are also called “inbound links” or “incoming links.” Backlinks are another important component to SEO, it helps website to escalate their search traffic and rankings on search engines.
Google brings the average website 50% of their total online traffic, paid or organic traffic, backlinks help search engines determine how authoritative and relevant your website is on the specific topic you rank for. In other words, beyond SEO, backlinks have the potential to drive traffic to your store in and of themselves. Users on those sites may click through and explore yours — hopefully leading to a purchase.
6.Optimize Your Website for Mobile
Is your website mobile-friendly? A recent study reveals that mobile devices account for over 60℅ of all search queries performed on the internet. And with the recent rollout of Google’s mobile-first indexing strategy, Google now favours the mobile version over the desktop version — making mobile version its primary indexing website.
How can you tell if your website is mobile-friendly or not? Google has made the process of checking how well your website loads on mobile devices easy with a tool on the Google Search Console. Simply plug in your website’s URL – Google will apprise you whether it is considered mobile-friendly under its current algorithm. Alternatively, you can plug in the code for your website to test whether a newly developed website is mobile-friendly before it goes live. Therefore, it is a good rule of thumb to make sure your website is mobile optimized. You’re certainly going to increase your website traffic.
7.A/B Testing
So, you are getting traffic to your site but are you sure you’re getting the right traffic? The right traffic is qualified to buy what you’re selling and interested in converting. The wrong traffic…isn’t. It’s essential to allocate the right traffic volume to you’re a/B tests if you are to obtain reliable results.
A/B testing, also known as split testing, refers to a randomized experimentation process wherein two or more versions of a variable (web page, page element, etc.) are shown to different segments of website visitors at the same time to determine which version leaves the maximum impact and drive business metrics.
It helps to solve visitor pain points. Visitors come to your site to achieve a specific goal and not being able to do that leads to a bad user experience. Expectation’s mismatch, confusing navigation, use of too much technical jargon might cause website’s high bounce rate. With the A/B testing, you can redesign your website from a minor CTA text or colour tweak to completely revamping the website to ensure that the most engaging version is served to your audiences.
8.Collaborate with Other Brands
Brand partnerships validate your company and put you in front of a targeted audience. Every brand collaboration should have some sort of digital component, especially if you want to drive traffic to your site. This could include cross-promotion on social media or email, as well as links to your site from theirs.
Alternative is to find guest contributors, get the bloggers, writers or influencers to write for your site or contribute to your content. They’ll almost certainly share that link with their own audience which will increase exposure and cast a wider net for your efforts.
9.Don’t Neglect Email Marketing
Email marketing remains an ideal choice especially for small business owners, it helps to engage audience, develop a readership, and maybe lead to sales. However, there are few common email marketing mistakes you should avoid, such as selling too hard to your customers. Try to find a balance between product/service offers and relevant links to helpful content on your site pages.
On top of that, catering to the needs of each customer is crucial. Think of the process almost as individual email marketing. Customers want to feel like they matter and aren’t just another subscriber on your list. Including personalized greetings in each email is a good starting point.
10.Examine Your Analytics Data
Always keep tracking your website with the advent of tools such as Google Analytics to identify some valuable data. Identify what pages already have traffic, conversions, or results, you can glean insights into what content is resonating. Furthermore, by looking at the geographic breakdown, you can also analyse new potential markets.
Are You Ready to Drive Traffic to Your Site?
Select a few things to try off this list, then tweak as you go based on what’s working. By taking these steps, you may expect to see a growth in website traffic over time. While many of these tactics can provide instant gratification, others will take more time and patience. Then, as your traffic grows, you can take targeted steps to turn that traffic into generating significant online revenue like affiliate marketing.
Rather than simply providing ads to users as a sideshow, affiliate marketing can link neatly with your content. For example, you could have an affiliate relationship with the most trusted Malaysia online casino site, BK8. You’ll likely produce content about sports tip prediction and E-sports which contains unique links to BK8 site. Check out these Top 10 Best Affiliate Program.
Now that you have these tactics in your toolbox, you should be able to put together a simple strategy for getting more people to your site. Remember, though, that this isn’t a one-off exercise. Nor do you have to try everything at once or use only one tactic at a time.
