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Originally Posted On: https://boomcycle.com/10-ways-to-drive-more-google-visitors-to-your-website/
What if you had an amazing website but not enough visitors?
Many businesses have a major problem with website visitors, or “website traffic”. In fact, more than half the business websites out there get fewer than 500 hits per month!
Even if you have great products and services as well as a great website, it means nothing if you can’t bring enough visitors to your site. Fortunately, there are a few easy steps you can take to bring in more visitors each and every month.
Ready to drive more Google visitors to your website? Keep reading to discover everything you need to know!
1. Content Is Still King
For a business, it can be difficult to both bring in new visitors and keep them on the site without good content. Therefore, any digital marketing strategy to increase your own website traffic must begin with creating, publishing and sharing better content.
Above all else, your content needs to be useful to visitors. When they come to your site, visitors want to get answers to their questions. And they also want to know the specific ways your products and services can help improve their lives.
The Importance of Evergreen Content
You can drive a certain amount of traffic with timely articles. However, the key to long-term site growth is to create more evergreen content.
This content is designed to always be fresh, and evergreen content tends to rank well for SEO. As you build up more evergreen content for your site, you can increase website traffic even as you lower your bounce rate.
Incorporating SEO Into Your Content
To really take evergreen content to the next level, you need to make the best use of SEO. Ideally, you can base entire articles around search terms that are searched often in your industry.
Don’t forget the basics, including adding alt text to image and adding social sharing buttons. This makes your content more accessible while making it likelier that someone will share it with others.
A table of contents like you see on this blog, and a “reading time” indicator are also a nice-to-haves.
2. Focus On Links
When you’re creating great content, it’s easy to focus on the words alone. However, if you want to rise through the website traffic rankings, you need to know how to use links the right way to maximize SEO.
Some of this comes from using internal links, which are completely within your control.
Backlinks (links from external websites to your website) are often out of your control, but you can encourage backlinks by creating the right content.
Internal Links
Internal links serve two basic purposes. First, they encourage visitors to stay on your website longer because they can click on these links to get answers to their questions.
Second, more visitors spending more time on your site will cause Google to rank your webpage higher than before, making this a powerful tool in your SEO arsenal.
Feel free to load up on anchor text with internal links to give Google proper context.
Just make sure your internal links are not disruptive in any way. Instead, they should be sprinkled throughout the site to help readers dive deeper into topics in which they are interested.
Backlinking
Backlinks are links to your site that come from other sites. The more credible the other site is, the better the backlink is.
Because you cannot compel anyone else to link back to your site, your best bet is to focus on creating awesome content. Once you establish yourself as an authority in a particular industry or niche, people will be happy to link back to your helpful information. When trusted and authoritative websites link back to your website, it boosts your SEO.
This was the very foundation of Google’s “PageRank” algorithm back in the day, and it’s still a key ranking factor today, especially for niche topics about which Google may have scant information.
3. Get Featured in Google Snippets
When you get right down to it, SEO is all about finding the best way to end up on the front page of user search results. But what if there was an easy way for you to leapfrog over the competition?
One of the best ways to do this is to create content that gets you featured in Google Snippets. Getting a featured snippet may require you to rework some of your content and change your approach to future content. But the end results really speak for themselves.
How Google Snippets Work
Google Snippets sometimes appear for certain user searches. These are short “snippets” of information taken from other websites. Google presents these snippets because they may provide the answers to specific user questions.
Snippets are great because it gives your site the chance to be featured on the first page of someone’s search results. This offers major SEO benefits to any site hoping to increase website traffic. The trick is to include only relevant info and no annoying buzzwords.
How to Get Featured In Google Snippets
You can improve your chances of getting featured in Google Snippets by doing two things. First, fill your content with explicit questions and short, to-the-point answers. Second, make ample use of the keyword you are trying to rank for.
Snippets are triggered by users trying to find information, often in the form of a question. Therefore, you can improve the odds of getting featured by having subheaders with questions like “What Is Seo?” and then a short answer. In this case, when users search for the same questions, they are likely to get a snippet taken from your site.
And Google always places links to the website beneath the snippet. Getting featured in a snippet improves your SEO in a big way by driving more traffic to your website.
4. Optimize For Mobile
Does your website look good on mobile devices? If the answer is “no,” then you are probably turning off more than half of your customers.
The majority of the world now navigates the internet using mobile devices. Therefore, you can optimize for SEO by making sure your site is optimized for mobile. However, it’s important that it still looks good for desktop users as well, allowing you to appeal to as many potential customers as possible.
Responsive Design
The best way to have your cake and eat it, too, is to use responsive design when creating or updating your website. On the most basic level, responsive design helps to resize the content of your web pages to suit the screen size of whoever is visiting.
This approach can help you save time because you don’t have to design separate sites for desktop and mobile. And responsive design ensures that your layout won’t look jumbled as soon as someone views it on their phone.
Graphics, Layout, and Other Considerations
Speaking of layout, it’s important to remember how small a smartphone screen can be. When designing your site, it’s important to take graphics, layout, and other factors into consideration.
For example, you may want to streamline images to improve site loading speed. With certain images, you may want to go with large, mobile-friendly buttons.
5. Updating Your Content
Earlier, we touched on how creating great content is a cornerstone of your SEO strategy. However, you can’t just “fire and forget” when it comes to creating content. To increase website traffic, you need to know how and when to update your content.
Updating content on a regular basis is important because users tend to favor the most up-to-date content. And updating content so that it gets noticed again by Google’s web crawlers can improve your SEO.
How Often To Update Your Content
How often do you need to update your content? The honest question is “it depends on the content.”
For example, you might have content that is best updated on an annual basis. A list of “Best SEO Tips for 2022” can easily become “best SEO Tips for 2023” the following year.
Other content should be updated more frequently. An article on “How To Make the Most of Google Ads,” for instance, could be updated every two or three months as you get more information.
How Updating Content Improves SEO
At first glance, the idea of regularly auditing and updating all of your content may seem intimidating. Why, then, are these updates so important?
One of the biggest SEO considerations Google makes is whether content is relevant or not. It’s only natural to assume a one-month-old article is more relevant than a one-year-old article, so the newer article will move higher up in the SEO rankings.
By updating your content, you can experience the best of both worlds. You can stay higher up in the SEO rankings by tweaking your content, and this will be much easier than creating new content from scratch each time.
6. Use Video Content
These days, it’s clear that video has done more than kill the radio star. Video is now the most popular form of online entertainment. Therefore, any business that wants to increase website traffic needs to increase its video content.
The good news in this regard is that you can create plenty of great video content using only your smartphone. And with the right editing software, you can create the kind of video content that gives you the edge over your competition. After all, embedding videos on your website boosts your SEO even as it lowers your bounce rate.
Different Types of Video Content
There are many different kinds of video content you can create. For best results, you need to pair the right kind of content with your goals for your site.
For example, “how-to” videos are great for increasing site traffic. They offer useful information to viewers, all while helping you emphasize how your products and services can solve certain problems.
Some users really appreciate “behind the scenes” videos that help to humanize your company. And videos demonstrating how your products work are a great way to increase sales by helping customers visualize themselves using those products.
7. Work With Other Blogs
The biggest struggle in increasing your website traffic is establishing your company as an authority. No matter what you sell, you’re going to have a lot of competition. Therefore, you need creative ways to stand out in the eyes of your customers.
A great way to increase your authority and bring more customers to your site is by guest blogging. Once you find an authoritative website in your industry or niche, volunteer to write content for their site (you may consider sending a few pitches as part of your initial email).
As you might imagine, most sites hungry for content are happy to receive informative, well-written articles at no additional cost.
Playing the Long Game
At first glance, guest blogging may sound counterproductive. If you have great articles written, why would you give them away for free instead of including them on your own site?
You need to think of guest blogging as playing the long game. If your own site traffic has been pretty static, putting some of your content on someone else’s site (preferably a big site) can boost traffic in ways just using your own site cannot.
And when you write for someone else’s website, you can include links back to your own pages. In this way, guest blogging is one of the only ways you can directly influence how many backlinks your own site gets.
Finding the Right Sites for Guest Posting
At first, you might worry that there aren’t enough sites out there where you could guest post. Once you start looking into the matter, you’ll find you have way more options than you first imagined.
It can be easy enough to find such sites. Typically, you just need to type out your industry or your niche along with phrases like “write for us” or “submit guest post” to discover your options.
We recommend not trying to blog on every qualifying site that you find. Instead, try to narrow things down to sites that seem to have a similar demographic to your own. This will go a long way toward driving more traffic to your website.
As a general rule, having backlinks on more popular websites will do more for your SEO. So when you reach out to guest post somewhere, you should make sure the size, quality, and authority of that site will reflect well on your own site.
8. Create a Faster-Loading Site
Making your website load quicker is a great way to increase traffic. That is because Google favors sites that load quickly and even offers a free Google PageSpeed Insights feature to help you figure out what you need to improve.
Making your site load quicker instantly makes it more mobile-friendly as well. And the site loading quickly can reduce your bounce rate, which helps to promote both brand awareness and sales.
There are several different ways to improve loading speed, including everything from optimizing your images to using a content distribution network. As always, if you are having trouble getting the technical results you need, it may be worth reaching out to digital marketing experts with experience in this regard.
More About the Importance of Page Speed
Still on the fence about creating a faster-loading website? If so, it’s important to understand the benefits that a faster load time offers to your site.
The biggest benefit is that a faster-loading site reduces your bounce rate. In general, visitors to your site are relatively impatient. If things are taking too long to load, visitors are likely to hit the “back” button and take their business elsewhere.
Another benefit of a faster-loading website is that it improves the perception of your brand. When customers see a good-looking site that loads in only a few seconds, they will see your brand as trustworthy and reliable.
The final benefit of a faster site is that it naturally improves your standing in Google’s website traffic rankings. So improving how fast your pages load will both bring more people to your website while keeping them there longer.
9. Creative Ways to Reuse Content
Sometimes, it can feel pretty exhausting creating content for different channels. Sure, you need to create great content for your website, but effective digital marketing also includes things like videos, emails, infographics, and more. How can any single business keep up with all of this while still optimizing for SEO?
One of the best ways to do this is to find creative ways to reuse content. When done the right way, this approach minimizes the amount of effort you have to put into content while maximizing how many visitors you get to your website
From Blogs to Videos (and Vice Versa)
Earlier, we touched on the importance of creating video content. Not only is this the kind of content that users love, but Google favors sites with video content for SEO purposes. In some cases, your video may even appear on the top of a user’s search result.
With all that being said, you may have difficulty coming up with ideas for video content. Rather than reinventing the wheel, one of the best things you can do is to transform existing blog content into video content. The new video can be a companion piece to the blog on your website, and you can also share that video via social media and email marketing to bring more visitors to your site.
This same process works in reverse as well. If you already have multiple videos but are short on blog content, you can use the content of your videos as a springboard to start writing blogs. The extra writing is still a lot of work, but it’s much easier than just starting with a blank page.
More Visual Ways of Reusing Content
Reusing content works for more than just videos and blogs. For example, you can turn the information from a blog into a helpful infographic. Afterward, you can share that infographic across social media or email even as including the graphic on your site boosts your SEO.
While video content is the current gold standard of video content, keep in mind that your users love images of any kind. When you go to update or reuse content, look for opportunities to add images that your site visitors will understand and respond to.
10. Social Media and SEO
One of the questions we often get is whether social media has an impact on SEO. And the answer is both “yes” and “no.”
Simply having a presence on social media does not have a direct impact on your SEO ranking. However, the more social media users share links to your website, the better your SEO will be. In this way, links to your site across social media function much like backlinks function across the rest of the internet.
How To Get Social Media Users To Link To Your Site
There are two steps to getting more social media users to link back to your site. The first step is creating the content these users have been looking for. And the second step is to make sharing that content very easy.
For example, remember when we mentioned that users love imagery such as infographics? You can create a helpful infographic relevant to your niche or industry. And when you include social sharing icons, it makes it easier for those who love your content to share it with others.
Additionally, you should seek out other organic ways to link back to your website while using social media. This can include everything from sharing links on your own page to sharing them in user groups online. Either way, the more links you have pointing back to your website, the more you can sit back and watch your organic SEO improve!
Get More Website Traffic, Starting Today!
Now you know the best strategies to increase website traffic. But do you know who can help you really put your business on the map?
Here at Boomcycle Digital Marketing, we specialize in SEO, paid ads, site management, and so much more. And we are here to help businesses just like yours reach their full potential while reaching as many customers as possible.
To discover what we can do for your business, all you have to do is contact us today!
