In simple terms, traffic is the number of visitors the website gets; the more people who visit a page, the more traffic it receives. In order to increase the “authority” (approximately, that means the “importance”) of your site, it needs to get as much high-quality traffic as possible, which means that people visiting your page should have an interest in your content and not be artificially lured to your site.

Let’s look at the measures you should take now in order to increase your high-quality traffic.

Analyzing Your site’s Traffic

To understand what your site’s traffic strengths and weaknesses are, look at these statistics:
► The number of unique visitors per day. This varies, of course.
► The average number of pages viewed per visit
► What times the site has high traffic
► The average time a visitor stays on the site
► The most visited and most unpopular pages of the site.

You cam use Google Search Console to gather the statistics you need for your site if you set up a link between it and your site so it can collect your data for you.

Analyzing these traffic statistics, you can understand where your site is below par, and that knowledge will let you define an action plan for improving your site. This improvement will result in increased visitor satisfaction from your better-designed site, which will in turn, result in improved financial results.

Don’t underestimate the importance of increasing your site’s traffic:
• More high-quality traffic lets you expand your customer base;
• High traffic increases your sales;
• Your traffic lets you sell ads on your site if you choose. More traffic lets you charge more for your ads;
• High traffic helps you find business partners, investors, and advertisers.

Your Site’s Traffic Profile

Typically, your site will receive a mix of types of visitors; some of them helpful to you; others, not so much:
■ People who already know your site and are interested in the information or product on the site. These people have shown themselves to be in your target audience. They visit your site intentionally.
■ Visitors that have found your site in the search engines and who clicked on your listing, indicating that they are likely members of your target audience, as well.
■ Users from Social Media that visit your site thanks to your presence (your content, your ads, or both) on the social site. Again, they are likely to be a part of your target audience.
■ Commercial and referral traffic, provided by advertisements and crosslinks. As with people clicking on search engine links, these people are also likely to be a part of your target audience.
■ People who visited your site accidentally. It’s rare, but you will connect with an occasional target audience member this way.

Of course, increasing the number of intentional visitors is your goal. Google Search Console, for example, tells you which pages on your site were most visited and what keywords people searched for to get to your site. That is a clear indicator of the intentions of your visitors, and it should influence your future content decisions.

How to increase website traffic

SEO

One of the oldest and most popular methods of increasing traffic is SEO (search engine optimization). Done well, it lets your site move toward the top of search results. This means that you should work on your content: analyze, select (snd tag) appropriate keywords. It’s also important that your site be as easy to navigate as possible. This can be a challenging task, but it will pay off in the long run.

Don’t stop with SEO, however. There are other ways to improve your site’s effectiveness.

Contextual Advertising

Placing contextual ads on other websites or in search results (for example, with Google Adsense) is one form of paid traffic (as opposed to “organic” traffic that comes from ranking in search results or from mentions in social media or other websites). You pay either for click-throughs to your site or for impressions (your ad’s being visible, whether or not it is clicked on.) While testing your ad with a small ad purchase is always wise (to make sure you have reached a receptive audience), when carefully undertaken, this can be an effective tool for building engagement with your target audience.

One of the most popular tools for creating a contextual advertisement, particularly helpful for local advertising, is Google Ads. With its help, your future clients who click on the ad will get to know about your business while looking for goods or services you offer.

Retargeting

Retargeting (also known as Remarketing) involves showing your ad on other websites but only showing it to people who previously visited your site to investigate your offer. Clearly this group of people is highly targeted and worth your additional outreach.

Retargeting allows you to refer to potential customers one more time and encourage them to come back and make a purchase. Besides that, having your ad on Facebook or another major site lends an air of authenticity to your business, a sort of “credibility by association.”

One of the most popular tools for creating an advertisement is Google Ads. With its help, your future clients will get to know about your business while looking for goods or services you offer.

Referral Traffic

People can be referred to your site through a referral from other online locations. The best referrals come from your customers and followers when they mention your site in a social media post or on their own site. But your posts on social media can (and should) also refer people to your site.

Social Media Activity

Social Media has become a necessity for getting your message out. Everyone from the corner pharmacy to world leaders is sharing their news on the major social platforms.

To be most effective, you need to consider including visual elements in your content. More than half of the content on social media is visual, so the quality of your visual content is critical in getting people’s attention. For example, photo retouching experts at photoretouchingservices.net say that light photos with vibrant colors get 30% more attention.

You can get professional help with assuring your media are of high quality. There are many outsourcers on sites such as Fiverr for all types of media projects.

Email marketing

Email marketing continues to be an effective marketing tool, one of the most effective. As with many other marketing channels, people are overloaded with email, so you need to provide excellent content that stands out from the crowd.

Webinars

People are obsessed with online education today, particularly in light of the pandemic-driven loss of jobs and work at home. If you make a short, but useful and eye-catching evergreen (recorded) or live webinar, it will be helpful for your business. In a webinar, you can use all the same tools you could use in a live presentation (charts, demonstrations, your voice, your physical presence, etc.) The impact will be nearly as great as if you were present in person.

See Run live, automated and scheduled webinars, no ongoing expense for more webinar information.

Guest posting

Guest posting (posting invited content on other people’s websites) is one of the most effective tools for your for driving traffic to your site as it lets you get high-quality backlinks, leading to referral traffic. You are allowed to have an author’s “bio” at the end of your article, which serves as an advertisement for you, your site, and your products. Sometimes, you may also include links in the main content.

If you google “guest posting opportunity”, you can research sites that accept guest posts. Contact them and ask about sending them a guest post. That’s how this guest post came to be published in IM NewsWatch.

There are services that will handle the whole process, including writing the guest post. One example is Adsy guest posting agency.

If you do not have time or skills for writing an article, Adsy will arrange it for you. They offer you more than a thousand trustworthy publishers who will write and publish a post for you. For example, Adsy placed this post for IM NewsWatch for a modest fee: Adsy Sample Mini-Post.

You can choose the publisher you want to use using numerous filters such as language, country, site authority, and cost. When your post is delivered, you get natural backlinks and excellent advertising at the same time. Plus, with Adsy, you do not waste time negotiating with publishers, and you get transparent prices.

Your blog post
➡️ Is placed on DA15-90+ sites with 10,000 or more real monthly visitors
➡️ May increase your site’s ranking due to the additional backlink
➡️ Increases your organic traffic thanks to possible higher rankings
➡️ Brings you referral traffic from your publisher’s website
➡️ Is never removed from the publisher’s site. People may read it for years.

Viral content

The main idea of viral content is to interest the reader so well that they will voluntarily share a link with their social media or email followers. An advantage of viral content is that when it “clicks”, many readers will become your ambassadors, sharing your content with their friends and followers, all at no cost to you.

Unfortunately, creating viral content is somewhat hit or miss. There are no blueprints to making content viral. The best advice is to create content on topics of high importance to your target audience and then place links your content on popular social platforms, such as YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, or TikTok. Or place the original content on one of these sites and include a backlink to your main site below it. If it’s good content, visitors to these popular sites can spread the word quickly, which can bring you a lot of traffic.

There are numerous ways of driving more traffic to your website. We have only scratched the surface. Try them and see what works best for your niche. Even better, try a combination of several methods, which may work synergistically. And remember, there are outsourcers who can help in the areas where you feel a need.

Marie Barnes is a freelance writer and researcher. She is a recent graduate of Columbia Business School. Marie is thirsty for knowledge and is always on the lookout for tips to share with her readers. You may find out more about her on her Medium.

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