Traffic is a key indicator of your website’s success. Whether you are promoting your own product, an affiliate product, or if you’re looking to attract leads, you need traffic to succeed.

Without traffic, no one will see what your website has to offer, thus you’ll struggle to generate conversions.

Thankfully, there are several ways to boost your website’s traffic.

1) Optimize for Search Traffic

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a cornerstone strategy for increasing site traffic. It involves building back links and tweaking a site’s pages so that search engines rank it higher in their index for one or more keywords.

Statistics show that Google processes more than 3.5 billion search queries per day. Using SEO, you can turn these searches into targeted traffic for your site. When planning an SEO strategy for your site, consider the type of keywords for which you want to rank.

This is arguably the most important step in optimizing a website for search traffic. Targeting keywords that are irrelevant to your site will reduce the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.

You’ll have an easier time ranking for keywords that are highly relevant to your site’s content and contain low competition.

Before building back links for your site, you should familiarize yourself with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Google has cracked down on link schemes in recent years, penalizing or even de-indexing offending websites.

To prevent this from happening to your site, avoid black-hat tactics like paid links, hidden links or mass-produced links. Instead, focus on attracting high-quality links naturally through content marketing.

Here are some SEO tips to help your site rank higher in the search engines:

• Include keywords in title tags and meta descriptions
• Add internal links to other related pages on your site
• Create rich, long-form content
• Add keywords to heading tags
• Secure your site by installing an SSL certificate
• Encourage visitors to comment and engage with your site
• For WordPress sites, install the Yoast SEO or All In One SEO plugin
• Add your site to Google’s Search Console for insight into its search rankings

2) Use a Proper Web Design

The way your site is designed will affect the amount of traffic it receives. If it’s not mobile friendly, for instance, visitors attempting to access your site from a smartphone or tablet may encounter usability problems.

According to StatCounter, mobile devices account for 51.95 percent of all internet usage as of February 2018.

With recent developments in smartphone and mobile broadband technology, it’s safe to assume the trend of mobile internet usage will continue.

Therefore, you should design your website so that visitors can access and use it on a mobile device.

You can see if your site has a mobile-friendly design by using Google’s testing tool.

Just enter your site’s URL and click “Run Test,” after which Google will tell you whether your site is mobile friendly. If it fails, consider adopting a responsive web design.

Responsive sites live up to their namesake by responding to the device on which they are viewed.

When someone visits your responsive site on a smartphone, the design will automatically adjust its elements for the best possible browsing experience.

3) Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing (SMM) is another way to boost your site’s traffic. According to a recent survey conducted by Pew Research, 68 percent of Americans have an active Facebook account and 35 percent have an active Instagram account.

As a webmaster, you can use social media to drive traffic to your site.

First, create an account for your site on all the leading social media networks, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. Keep in mind that Facebook requires businesses and organizations to use a Page, not a Profile.

Once your social media accounts are up and running, complete your Page and profiles by uploading images, adding a description of your website and including your site’s URL.

When social media users read your account, they’ll see your URL, and some of these users may visit it to see what your site offers.

In addition to including your site’s URL in your social media profiles and Facebook Page, you can also funnel traffic to your site by posting links.

After publishing a new blog post or article on your site, share a link to it with your social media followers.

If you’ve built a decent following on social media, this strategy alone can drive huge amounts of traffic to your site. Just remember to share links to content that your followers are interested in reading.

4) Content Marketing

Perhaps the most effective strategy for boosting website traffic is content marketing.

According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), webmasters who publish 16 or more blog posts per month generate 350 percent more traffic than their counterparts who publish four or fewer blog posts per month.

Content marketing is the practice of publishing, sharing and promoting a specific type of content for a specific audience.

It’s classified as an inbound marketing tactic because it attracts visitors naturally. In comparison, outbound marketing tactics like direct mail or email advertisements contain commercial messages that directly promote a business’s products or services.

So, how does content marketing translate into visitors for your site? When you publish high-quality content on your site, Google will likely reward you with higher search rankings.

After all, Google wants to provide the best internet searching experience for its users, so it only makes sense for Google to rank websites with high-quality content higher than sites with little content or low-quality content.

Content marketing also attracts back links. If another webmaster finds your content and believes it could be useful for their audience, he or she may link to it from their own site.

Each new back link creates a new gateway through which users can find and visit your site.

5) Advertise on AdWords

While SEO and content marketing are low-cost ways to boost website traffic, you shouldn’t overlook paid advertising solutions like Google AdWords. Using AdWords, you can pay to drive high-quality, targeted traffic to your site.

AdWords is a pay-per-click (PPC) marketing platform where you create ads — text, image or video — that are displayed in Google’s search results as well as its partner websites.

AdWords is great because the default cost-per-click (CPC) model only charges you when someone clicks your ad.

When setting up an AdWords campaign, choose keywords that are highly relevant to your site’s content. If your website sells or promotes cybersecurity software, for example, choose keywords like “anti-malware,” “cybersecurity protection” and “antivirus software.”

The key to a profitable AdWords campaign is choosing highly targeted keywords and creating small ad groups that are closely related to those keywords.

Of course, AdWords isn’t the only paid advertising platform that can boost your site’s traffic.

The Microsoft-owned Bing Ads is another platform to consider using. Bing Ads allows you to create CPC ads that are displayed in Bing Search, Yahoo! Search and other channels.

With a little bit of searching, you can often find coupons for $200 in free advertising credits for new Bing Ads users.

6) Add Images

Incorporating images into your site’s content will not only make it more visually appealing; it will also boost your site’s traffic. If you’re skeptical, check your traffic logs to see how visitors found your site.

While most of your site’s traffic probably comes from organic listings in Google Search and Bing Search, you may discover a substantial amount of visitors coming from Google Images as well.

Like the text on your site, Google will crawl and index your site’s images. Rather than indexing them in Google Search, however, it will index them in Google Images.

This means your website will appear in multiple locations: Google Search and Google Images. One study even found that web pages with images receive 94 percent more views than text-only pages.

Before uploading a new image to your site, though, you should optimize it so that it doesn’t slow down visitors’ load times. High-resolution images contain large amounts of data.

And when you upload too many of them on the same page, it can bog down your site’s server.

A simple solution is to run your images through an optimization tool like Optimizilla, which compresses and shrinks images to create a smaller file size.

These are just a few ways to boost your site’s traffic and experience a higher level of success with your online ventures. You can also explore other strategies like email marketing and guest blogging.

Feel free to post your comment below. An email address is required but it will not be shared with anyone, put on any list, or used for any kind of marketing, just to alert you if there are any replies. Thanks and happy hunting!

PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published March 21st 2018