When launching a website, one of the most important goals is to increase its traffic, which will, in turn, generate revenue.
Because websites have different niches and goals, there is not a single strategy that works for everyone. However, here are some common techniques that may work for your website and start increasing traffic right away.
Browsing analytics tells you how far people get on your website before they leave. Some organizations recommend fixing issues on a website before getting too much involved in increasing traffic.
Staring at your analytics will not get you more visitors, but just lose the time, that you could spend on optimizing your website for website traffic.
While many other people will tell you to become more engaging right away, I would personally say that this is the biggest mistake.
If your website is not set properly, how can you invite visitors to come over and start analyzing your content?
Not only the design but also the speed and structure of the website matter. These 3 things help your visitors have a decent experience with your website and navigate without any kind of issues.
Table of Contents
1. ANALYZE YOUR COMPETITORS’ WEBSITES
To start analyzing competitor websites, you will need a web page analyzer SEO tool, such as Ubersuggest, Moz, Ahrefs, and many others.
Analyzing your competitor’s websites is a must. When you are getting started with a website, you will need to see how much competition there is to a certain niche.
The more competitive a niche is, the harder it will be for you to rank with a new website on the field.
When a niche has high competition, you can always niche down to something more specific and ensure that your head keywords are not that hard to rank for.
When you are niche-specific, keywords are a lot easier to rank for, because you do not have a broad topic that many websites try to rank for.
A good starting point for newer websites is to niche down a bit and try to rank for the easier keywords, which have a decent amount of searches per month.
Another good thing for analyzing competitor websites is that you can find gaps in their content and pay a writer to create a better version of his content, which can ensure you a better place.
The price cost may always vary because sometimes you will need an expert writer in the field you want to rank for, rather than hiring a newbie.
There are many experts that can write competitive and high-ranking content at a decent price.
2. OPTIMIZE THE SPEED OF YOUR WEBSITE
Website speed matters. Google recently announced its core web vitals update, which inserted mobile-first indexing.
This means that websites that do not qualify with the requirements set by Google, their websites will not be placed in the high-ranking searches.
If you have a WordPress website, perhaps you would want to lower the number of plugins that your website has.
Most of them take too much of your website’s resources, which slows the overall performance.
Optimizing your website speed with WP Rocket or LS cache will speed up your website speed and give a positive signal to Google once bots start crawling your website.
One of the most important plugins to remove and keep away from your website are the SEO plugins. They do not do anything specific other than just take away your website speed.
It does not matter if you put a Meta Description, Meta Title, or follow their bullet points.
They do not guarantee that you will get ranked on the first page in all search engines.
If you want to rank on the first page of Google, then consider removing such plugins from your website and keeping it clean.
If you are a big fan of SEO plugins and feel like they help you to find if you had forgotten to link one article with another, then you can use SEO addons on your browser that does the same job and does not affect the site speed in any kind of way.
Since you don’t have an SEO plugin anymore, you will need to find a way to add a sitemap to the search engines.
A sitemap is one of the most important things and helps your links get discovered if you have a new or large website with a difficult structure.
Actuollo has created a really good SEO sitemap plugin, which is beginner-friendly and all you have to do is install and activate the plugin.
After you had done that, you can head over to Google Search Console and insert your sitemap URL.
Sometimes the problem with your website speed isn’t in your website optimization techniques. You may also find out that the problem is actually with your web host.
A change of your hosting from shared to VPS hosting is always a good idea and can significantly improve your loading speed.
3. REMOVE BROKEN LINKS ON YOUR WEBSITE
Broken links are one of the biggest problems with your website. Once a visitor stumbles upon a 404 page, he may never want to proceed and check out for anything else.
Or perhaps he was searching exactly what he needed, but since your website returned a 404-page error, you have lost this visitor.
Understanding and fixing error 404 pages can definitely improve your website traffic and ensure visitors that they will always see the content, which they searched for.
Sometimes visitors try entering a URL that they remember existed on your page. If you had changed the URL but did not set up a redirection from the old to the new URL, your visitors may again see an error 404 page.
Lucky us, John Godley has invented a plugin called Redirection, which can be easily set and prevent users from entering broken pages on your website.
Another thing that you may take a look at is to set a custom 404 page.
Custom 404 pages can be edited in any kind of way and you can always add the elements needed for your visitors to retry their search.
It’s not always your fault that they visit these pages. Sometimes a URL can be misspelled or the visitor is trying to magically find a certain post, which does not exist on your website.
Setting up custom 404 pages can make your website look outstanding and attract visitors to try and search one more time for another post that you had posted.
4. CREATE A PROPER WEBSITE STRUCTURE
Website structure is a key element. It shows how clean and organized your website is. If you have all the elements on your website mixed up, visitors will never understand your website.
A good website structure means organized content, a clear heading menu without too much stuffing, and categorizing each of your pages.
Including your main keywords in the navigation, mid-tail keywords in the sub-categories, and long-tail keywords for each post can enhance your SEO and start bringing in traffic.
The more specific you become, the better it will be for search engines to understand what your content is about.
People are no longer searching for content by typing in a head keyword because they are going to see many different posts, but will they be the ones they really wanted to see when typing this keyword.
Nowadays everything is about long-tail keywords, which help people find what they need without wasting too much time.
As for your website’s content structure, the best design would be the F-shaped design.
The F-shaped pattern lets designers create a well-organized page and bloggers write more effectively. It is a very simple design, which requires proper structuring, not so much text or images.
5. START RESEARCHING KEYWORDS
Researching keywords is an easy process that has many strategies and can be done by using a keyword research tool, such as Ubersuggest, Moz, Ahrefs, and many more.
In order to start your keyword research, you will need to pick a certain topic for your website and try looking up how many times has a certain keyword been searched.
The higher the searches means the higher competition a keyword will have. Well, this is not happening all the time.
As you can see iPhone Store gets 18,100 searches a month but has a big difficulty. This means it will be hard to rank high for this keyword.
But if you leverage your keyword research and use the right tactics, you may find better keywords and rank for them even faster, without competing with the big websites.
The more specific keywords you provide, the better results you will be getting.
The intent is what matters when choosing keywords to rank for. There are buyers, informational, and many other intents.
In order to choose the right keywords, you will need to know the searcher’s intent.
In order to find what your searchers want and what they type in Google, when they need help is to write down your target keyword and scroll to the bottom.
The related searcher bar gives you feedback on what others search for. While it is helpful for you to target more keywords, it is also helpful for other searchers.
If you make an article on the related searchers, visitors may start finding your website more often and start engaging.
6. WRITE LONGER CONTENTS
Content is king of what they say in this world.
But is it always like that?
While word count is not a direct ranking factor, it still helps you to get a better spot on the first page of the search engines.
The average contents ranking on number 1 have more than 2000 words. Not only do they have the number 1 spot for their primary keyword, but they also rank for hundreds of semantic keywords.
Making your content bigger, does not always mean that you will rank on a high spot, but gives you decent chances of doing that.
If you have your own blog, writing content fast will help you to produce more and get crawled more frequently.
When writing longer content, you will need to structure each heading. You can have only 1 H1 and it should be reserved for the title of your website.
The title should receive the keywords that you wish to rank for but be structured appropriately.
This means that you should not try to stuff too many keywords, with the intent to rank more. This is considered a black hat technique and will result in penalties for your website.
You are not optimizing your website for the search engines, but the users that will come and read your content.
Search engines rank each page, based on many factors, but one of the most important is the actual user experience.
7. OPTIMIZE THE IMAGES ON YOUR WEBSITE
Optimizing the images on your website can significantly improve your website speed and also help your images rank on the search engines.
It may sound silly, but some people actually use search engines to search for images.
Ensuring that your website has properly optimized images can help visitors discover you quickly and perhaps come to your website.
So in order to optimize the images on your website, you will need to decrease the image size, without destroying the quality and set proper the proper alt tags for each image.
A great way to start with the image optimization process would be to use image optimization plugins, such as Smush.
By just installing this plugin, you can directly start smushing images and reducing their size.
This can save up potential space and help your images load even faster.
The free version of Smush can reduce the size of each image and even start lazy loading it.
By lazy loading images, you are giving a command to the browser to not display this image until a user scrolls down to it.
This does not affect the user experience in a bad way and helps browsers load even faster by disregarding images that cannot be seen by a visitor’s eye.
If you opt-in for the Smush premium version, you also get image optimization and change to WebP format.
PNG and JPEG images are heavy and take too much time to load on your browser. Using the WebP image format ensures that your browser will load images fast and free up some space on your host.
The smush premium version also offers a CDN, which can take all of your images from your website and load it directly from their CDN with their optimized version.
This will reduce the processes done on your website and load all images externally by accelerating your website’s speed.
8. START A NEWSLETTER AND ENGAGE
If you want to engage more with your visitors, then starting a newsletter is the perfect way to do it.
Visitors often come to websites and if they like the content, they search for a way to subscribe and receive more when it is available.
If you are using WordPress, you can try using MailPoet, which offers a free premium trial, until you reach 1000 subscribers.
MailPoet includes many premade templates for websites and can be set automatically to send a new post, once it has been released on your website.
Not only this, but you can also schedule your emails and specify when you would like them to be sent out to your readers.
MailPoet is a user-friendly plugin, which is easy to set up and can help you to manage multiple subscriber lists and send emails in just one click.
If you are not using WordPress there are many alternatives with the same plans, such as MailChimp.
The free MailChimp plan gives you to have up to 2000 email subscribers monthly and send 2000 emails per day to your subscribers.
You can have more than one subscriber list and manage them however you want.
Scheduling posts can be also done with the free plan and choosing templates is also available.
In fact, MailChimp has more than 300 different templates that are ready to be configured and used in your email campaigns.
9. START A YOUTUBE CHANNEL
Having a YouTube channel and a website is the best duo on the internet. It’s a nice hybrid way to attract more visitors and make so quick money.
YouTube has its own algorithm, which does not require too much thinking and optimizations, while websites do require a lot more attention.
You can basically start out a small tutorial or entertaining channel for your website and create videos on the most popular posts your website has.
A great way to utilize your videos and optimize them along with your YouTube channel would be by using the addon called VidIQ.
VidIQ lets you receive insights on your channel, videos, and analytics, or even check out how visitors are engaging with the competitor’s videos.
Once you get the hang of YouTube and VidIQ you will have no problems ranking and receiving more traffic to your website.
Planning out a schedule on making videos and posting consistently can even give you higher chances of increasing your traffic and getting more time on your website.
10. ENGAGE WITH YOUR AUDIENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media has always been a great way to engage with your audience. I am not talking about Facebook only, but also Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Quora, Reddit, and many others.
Social media is the key to increasing your website traffic, just because there are people out there who might be interested in what you are offering them.
A good way to engage in such websites would be to create a profile and try to be helpful. Don’t go all in and share content, because you will only dig yourself down deep.
For example, Quora is a simple questions and answers website, which is one of the most searched pages in the world.
Creating an account and starting to engage with people by answering relevant to your website’s niche questions can be a good way to start.
First, you need to make a name, then you can start providing your own websites. Or if your website has the question, you can simply add it as a link in your answer.
A bad thing to do would be to say “I have the answer here” and to add the link.
You need to provide quality in your answer and to be descriptive. Then the people will start visiting your website, which will result in a significant increase in your traffic.
For Facebook, it is almost the same story when you start joining groups, but it is totally different when you create a Facebook page.
Then you will need to really put your hands deep and try to engage with the people, without making them like your page or give you positive feedback.
I have never asked anybody to like my page on Facebook and it is working out great for me.
It was so great that I even started my own Facebook group with 16,000 members, who post daily and ask for help if they are full stuck or just need advice.
CONCLUSION
Following the steps to increase website traffic are not that hard. It is a daily routine, which must be followed and never broken.
Once visitors start seeing the quality in the posts and answers you give out, then they will come on their own and engage with your website.
After all, websites are not meant to please the search engines. They are made to please the users.
The main focus of creating a website is for user experience (UX), which is followed by user interface (UI).
So when creating your website you will need to choose the best themes for WordPress websites and use only the most important plugins.
Consistent posting is also a must. If someone tells you to stop posting, you should never listen and follow your own mind. Also if you are in to B2B service industry you can read more about how to do B2B SEO , this article provides a lot of tips for those who does not know much about on how to do it and where to start.
Regular posting helps more of your articles come out on the Search Engines, gives you faster indexing and Google starts monitoring your website more frequently, which is a positive signal.
If you like the article, please do not hesitate to relate to this article on your Blog post or leave a comment bellow if you need any help with your website.
