Effective Strategies to Increase Website Traffic

Today, everyone is talking about SEO. And why shouldn’t they? SEO is an extremely effective way to generate website traffic. This, however, has made everyone overfocus on SEO and somewhat ignore other means of traffic generation.

It is crucial to learn about these other methods and not rely entirely on search engine optimization. Otherwise, if SEO as your dominant traffic source fails you for some reason, it could mean the end of your business.

In this article, we will discuss how you can increase your website traffic without having to solely rely on SEO. We will take a look at the five key strategies that you can set up right now and how to use them to your advantage.

Emails are not dead

The rise of content marketing has made many companies focus their efforts on attracting new customers through it. So at first glance, it may seem that more traditional marketing methods like email marketing are obsolete. However, this is not the real situation.

Emails are alive and well, still being a great way to drive traffic to your website or promote new offers. Even a moderately successful email campaign can drive a lot of traffic. The key, however, is not to spam people with emails about every single update in your company.

Another strategy for efficient email marketing is to build a lead magnet and a sales funnel around it in order to build an email list for marketing your offers in the future.

The same applies to cold email outreach – one of the most efficient strategies for increasing website traffic. When it comes to cold emails, all you need to know is what to say and how to say it.

Cold emails usually consist of:

  • your name and contact information (website, phone number, position within a company, social media profiles)
  • a particular request
  • customized content targeted at the recipient
  • a conversation starter rather than a request for immediate action

Alternatively, you can search the web for cold email outreach templates if you don’t have the time or skills to customize each email.

Reduce your bounce rate

Due to Google’s RankBrain algorithm, bounce rate is an important ranking factor. A high bounce rate hurts your website rating and it can easily damage your SEO efforts

Bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who leave your website after visiting a single page on it. In other words, a high bounce rate most often indicates that landing pages aren’t too relevant for users.

Luckily, it isn’t difficult to minimize bounce rate. To lower your bounce rate, start by improving your content readability, as bad readability is one of the common reasons why a visitor may leave your website. In particular, large chunks of text scare readers away, so avoid overstuffing your pages with them. On the other hand, UX (user experience) improves when your content is readable.

Another thing to avoid is pop ups – the biggest disruptors of UX. While popups work well for growing your email list, they often have more downsides than advantages, since they annoy users and thus create a much higher bounce rate.

Most people hate when a popup disrupts their reading and may leave a website altogether after seeing a popup. If you still wish to use popups, at least make them as unobtrusive as possible.

Website design

Most companies don’t even think about how to increase website traffic until after the website has been created. This, however, is a costly mistake, since website design largely affects both your ability to increase website traffic and market your website to potential customers.

Website design is about user experience as much as it is about functionality and transparency. Whether your website’s purpose is to offer a particular service, sell products, or showcase a great blog, it simply has to be user-friendly, responsive, and transparent. If not, your traffic is going to take a big hit.

People don’t search for a website that merely offers an affordable service or product they require. Before all that, they need a website that loads fast, has all relevant information clearly displayed, and offers a design that is both functional and appealing.

For instance, images are crucial for website design. When you use white background photography on an ecommerce website, you get pictures of products that both appeal to the customer’s eye and clearly showcase those products.

Also, when you use responsive website design, the user will have a great experience regardless of whether they visit the website from a tablet, smartphone, or laptop. Furthermore, Google openly admits that it penalizes websites which aren’t mobile responsive.

Concentrate on the most profitable traffic source

Not all traffic on your website is equal. Therefore, you need to sift through all the website traffic sources and focus on the most profitable traffic source. You know, the one which brings high-quality web traffic and generates a better ROI than others.

Although this may seem obvious, it is something that is often neglected when trying to drive traffic to a website. While high website traffic can be a great thing, if it isn’t targeted, these numbers are just vanity metrics.

Social media platforms can drive website traffic but this may not be profitable traffic for your website. A thousand untargeted visits are much less effective than a hundred targeted visits working to drive traffic that ultimately results in conversions and sales.

The most profitable website traffic comes from those visitors who are not only interested in your products or services but they have already been searching for a similar solution on the web and are ready and willing to spend their money.

There are a number of different traffic sources such as:

  • organic search
  • social media platforms
  • advertising campaigns
  • referral traffic
  • affiliate websites

You will need to use Google analytics to discover which one is the most profitable for your particular website, which in turn will let you focus your marketing efforts on it.

Choose an effective domain name

Finally, we want to give you a small but pro tip. It boils down to this – use an effective domain name.

Why? Actually, the reason is very simple. Because an effective domain name also increases your website traffic, albeit indirectly.

As we have previously mentioned while talking about designing a website, an average user searches for a website that appeals to them and helps them solve issues in a simple and effective manner. In other words, they are looking for websites that inspire trust. Which means that to increase traffic, we must first increase a website’s user-friendliness and trustworthiness.

Since a domain name is definitely one of the first things a user sees when they visit your website, it is wise to use it for creating a great and long-lasting first impression. Besides, a user often identifies your business with your domain name.

Therefore, it is important to choose .com domains, as .com is the best-known domain name extension on the planet. Over the years, users have become conditioned to type .com at the end of every search query.

Also, make the domain name easy to pronounce and spell. Typos are one of the main reasons for losing traffic. Therefore, you must ensure that people can find your website quickly and easily.

In the end, keep the domain name short – under fifteen characters is ideal. Long and complicated names are more difficult to remember and more likely to be misspelled.