When business owners are asked how they would improve their website, their answer is always one of two things: More traffic and more clients. To most, it’s obvious that increasing the volume of traffic will generate more leads and more clients. Here are seven tactical tips to increase the number of visitors your website receives on a regular basis.
- Eliminate technical errors
- Focus on the needs of your client
- Publish top-tier content
- Produce fully developed ideas with detail
- Make your content scannable
- Leverage the power of video
- Spread the news
Eliminate technical SEO errors
Without knowing where your website stands from a technical point of view, you can’t be sure about the true impact of your efforts in producing content. When you perform a site audit you get a clear picture of any technical issues your website generates can directly affect your ranking.
An SEO site audit will uncover any broken links, duplicate content, missing tags, indexing issues, page speed, and mobile design issues. Each of the technical errors that are produced in an audit can be linked and related to user experience, which last time I checked is a pretty big deal to Google. If your site produces an enjoyable UX it is rewarded with more traffic from a higher ranking. This means correcting technical errors will create positive ranking signals that contribute to more search visibility.
Meet the needs of your client
Tailor content to your audience by doing the necessary research to find out what they are experiencing firsthand. Surveys, social media groups, forums, Q & A pages are excellent sources of information that provide you with an accurate cross-section of problems and issues frequently encountered by your target audience.
Generate high levels of engagement by serving up content that your visitors can not only relate to but can derive meaning and value from reading. Be the resource on a specific topic by offering solutions to problems that are common among your target audience.
When you’re scanning through forums or social media groups look for conversation threads that begin with questions or have “help” in the title. Here you will find someone experiencing a problem that actually means something in their lives because they have taken the time to reach out for help on finding a solution. If someone has taken the time to reach out about it, there is a good chance that other people are experiencing the same issue.
Publish top-tier content
Use the insight gained about the needs of your clients to produce evergreen content that stands the test of time. An instructional manual or a how-to guide can provide the perfect canvas to incorporate a lot of keywords to attract long-term traffic. A blog post about how to solve a particular problem or accomplish a specific task are an excellent way to drive traffic and increase on-site engagement statistics.
It’s not necessary to publish a minimum number of words but it’s obvious that if your content is less than 500 words you’re not going to get the same result as a 2000 word how-to guide. By aiming to explain topics with highly detailed and fully developed ideas you end up covering more issues that relate to your keyword topic.
Long-form, in-depth pieces of content are more effective in helping someone achieve a specific outcome. The more highly related issues you publish in your article the broader the range is for attracting traffic.
Make your content scannable
When you break up your article with subtitles your content becomes more enticing to someone skimming through to see whether they want to read through it all (79% of people scan through articles as opposed to reading the full article). The more issues they see that relate to their lives, the more likely they are to remain on your page and give it more attention than a quick scan.
Leverage the power of video
Incorporate video in your content to lengthen the dwell time of visitors on your site. Video is the most popular form of content shared across social media (videos get 135% more organic reach on Facebook than images)
When it comes to finding out how to do a specific task or learn about a topic, video is preferred over reading. A video makes digesting content easier than reading which can give you the edge over competing pages who don’t incorporate video by increasing dwell time.
Take advantage of the referral traffic you can receive from Youtube. Youtube is the second most visited website in the world with 1.3 billion users and over 5 billion videos watched every day. Rather than upload a video directly from your computer, publish it on Youtube and embed the video on your page. Leave a link in the description so that when you rank on YouTube for a keyword you receive referral traffic to your site.
In order to rank your video in YouTubes search results, optimize your video for the keywords that you’re using in your content. Use keywords in the title, filename, tags, and description.
If you have other related videos you’ve published include the links to those videos within your description.
Find an audience for your content
Posting to social media can increase the number of visitors on your site and improve your chances for backlinks dramatically.
When you have great content people don’t mind sharing it with their network so make sure that you have a call to action reminding people to share it. Install social sharing icons on your posts to make sharing your page easily.
If your page can give them what they need they will return to your site, share it with their social network and even link to it from their own websites (if they publish similar content). All three possibilities are great for increasing your monthly volume of traffic-especially acquiring backlinks.
Maximizing the traffic to your site means committing to improving your website a little each day. Identify what your clients are experiencing and publish solutions on how you can help them overcome these problems to see higher levels of engagement. Effective solutions translate to more shares, increased traffic and new clients.
Christian Carere is a search engine optimization specialist and the owner of Digital Ducats Inc. Christian works primarily with SMB’s to improve the flow of traffic and increase the number of leads and new clients their website generates.
