How to Increase Traffic to Your Website – Beginners Guide

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May 15, 2024
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In today’s world, increase traffic for your website and building a loyal audience has become more complex, making it harder to stand out from the crowd due to excessive content and websites on the internet. Competing for the top spot on Google’s first page has become more complex than ever, but every business needs a successful website to be successful.

When optimizing your website to drive more traffic, consider many factors such as high-speed performance, content cleanup, and more, which can affect your website’s traffic.

Make sure your website is high-performing per Google’s guidance

Google’s latest algorithm updates clarified that the new standard for measuring a website’s performance would be its so-called Core Web Vitals, making it clear that the performance of your site is one of the most significant factors in how Google ranks your site—and thus, how many people can find your site.

Here are some key elements for determining high-performing sites:

Does the main content load quickly on a web page? Google suggests that the main content of a web page should load in 2.5 seconds for a good user experience.

Is your site responsive when a user attempts to navigate a page?
Can you ensure that your site is visually stable and minimize the number of unexpected layout shifts on a page?

These questions can be very technical, which is why a website performance audit can be so helpful. Many companies offer a free site and security health check, and a comprehensive audit can help you make data-backed decisions about what the best, most cost-effective ways to improve your site are.

What is a site audit? A site audit typically includes:

Core Web Vitals evaluation
SEO performance check
Site security score

Most audits are free to anyone who signs up, and you should expect to see your results within a couple of business days. Services such as Rebel Mouse, eRanker, and Website Grader provide site audits.

Implement Basic SEO Techniques

Google dominates most online referral traffic, so your website should cater to that. The good news is, creating top-notch content that adds value to your audience is the key to ranking well in search results. Google is highly optimized to find content that’s the best on the web, but there are some things you can do to make sure your content is set up for website SEO success:

Write Long-Form Content: Longer and most importantly original content ranks higher than shorter, aggregated and copyright content. Thorough and reliable posts are the foundation of good SEO.

Produce Quality Content: Google’s algorithm is constantly changing, which can lead to fluctuations in web traffic. It can also cause content creators to worry that their search ranking could suddenly take a dive. But one thing that never changes is that creating high-quality, people-focused content that speaks to your readers is the best way for you to rank highly in searches.

Optimize Your URLs: Short and clear URLs are one of the most effective ways to rank your content on google search engine. This is because Google reads URLs literally. For example, if your article is about the best video production agency in UAE, you may want to make your URL slug “UAE Video Production Agency.” For example rtist.studio/best-video-production-agency-in-UAE.

Fix Broken Links: Make sure all of your URLs work properly on your website. Broken links can hurt your website search rankings.

Use Appropriate H1 Titles and Meta Descriptions: Ensuring your H1 title tags and meta information are set correctly will improve your site’s clarity to Google’s crawler. Third-party SEO tools such as Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and Semrush are also helpful here.

Make site security a top priority

Providing a high-performance, high-reliability environment is critical to the success of any site. This includes having a site that uses technology relying on reliable infrastructure. You’ve probably heard about security breaches affecting thousands of sites, as open-source content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress continually face security risks.

If you run an actual online business, you’ve probably noticed that plugins, a feature of the 2000s, are now a major weakness in your site. Outdated plugins can create security threats affecting hundreds, if not thousands, of sites.

To protect your data, look for a publishing platform with 24/7 support and transparency about how it protects its site network.

Consider adding short-form video content to your website

The popularity of short-form video content has skyrocketed. Consider adding short-form videos of tutorials, guides, and product information to your website. You can even easily repurpose your existing written content into short-form videos.

Once you’ve uploaded your short-form videos to your website, make sure to share them on TikTok and other social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. This can help drive significant traffic to your site. Short-form video content typically runs from one to four minutes. Make sure to include links back to your website in the video.

Create evergreen content

Increasing traffic to your website isn’t just about getting the most out of your content. It’s about sustaining that growth over time. That’s why any website needs evergreen content.

Evergreen content is content that never goes out of style and is based on your site’s core talking points. It’s always relevant to your audience, and you can update it frequently. For example, if you have a blog post called “How to increase traffic to your website,” you can keep updating it with new Google updates, new SEO strategy tips, and deep SEO training.

Publishing Evergreen content is also good for SEO. By creating quality Evergreen content around the keywords you want to win and using smart SEO tactics, you can reap the benefits of regular traffic from searches.

Build up your site’s backlinks

A backlink is a link from another website to your site. If high-quality, authoritative sites link to your website, it boosts your site’s domain authority and helps it rank higher in search engines. Here are a few tips on how you can generate more backlinks:

Post Comprehensive Content: Think about creating a piece of long-form content that serves as an all-in-one resource on a topic related to your brand. For example, if you host a site about digital marketing, you could create a page called “A Guide to Digital Marketing for Beginners.” Comprehensive guides open up opportunities for pages about similar content to link to your guide for more detailed information.

Write a Testimonial: Many sites are looking to add to or create new customer testimonials on their site. If there is a product you like, it’s worth reaching out to their team to see if they would be interested in your testimonial in exchange for a backlink.

Participate in Forums: You might be part of a conversation on the internet that’s relevant to your brand or your website. Join meaningful conversations on online forums to boost your website’s visibility, which, in turn, increases your chances of getting more backlinks from forum members.

Frequently post on social media

Google is the number one source of referral traffic on your site, but you should also be nurturing your social media channels. According to HubSpot, 16% of your referral traffic still comes from social media.

Your audience lives on the web, and social media is a great way to find a natural audience who is already interested in your message and mission and ready to engage with and even share your content. Posting regularly increases your content’s visibility and increases your chances of your posts being liked by social algorithms.

To keep your social media workflow organized, you should create a content calendar. You will also want to add social-sharing buttons to your site. These buttons are graphic images that link to social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, as well as Instagram and Pinterest.

When you post to social, make sure you include engaging or interesting images because this will increase your click-through rate.

Write a guest post for another site

There are many advantages to guest posting on other websites. First, you’ll reach new people who may not have heard of your brand before. You’ll also build credibility with your new audience, as well as Google’s algorithms. Second, guest posts will increase your backlinks to your site, which will help your search rankings in the long run.

If you’re looking for a high-volume, high-quality site to guest post on, consider AllBusiness.com, Medium, etc.

Answer questions on Quora

Quora is a community-based website where users ask questions and other users answer them in a forum format. It has been around for many years and is one of the most popular websites in Google Search. When users search Quora for topics related to your site’s talking points, you can provide them with informative answers that directly link back to your website. Just like guest blogging, answering Quora questions gives your site more exposure to new readers and gives you another chance to build quality Quora backlinks for an extra boost in SEO.

Optimize your site for mobile

More than 50% of traffic to the open web originates from mobile devices, so you need to invest time and effort to ensure your website provides a great mobile user experience. Performance is the most important factor in mobile.

Google has very specific guidelines to determine if a website is mobile-friendly. These guidelines aren’t just good practices. They can also determine whether your pages appear in Google’s mobile search results at all.

The easiest way to make your site mobile-friendly is to use technology that prioritizes the mobile experience. Using a mobile-first content management system (CMS) that puts the mobile experience first will ensure your site’s mobile interface is up-to-date, responsive, and optimized for repeat visitors.

Have a great sitemap for search engines to follow

A sitemap, also known as a web page map, is a file that contains a list of pages on your website. It is used by Google and other search engine crawlers to show how your site’s content is organized. Google’s web crawlers read this file to index your site correctly.

Your site’s sitemap may also contain valuable metadata related to the pages you list. Metadata is data about a web page. For example, when was the page last updated? How often does the page change? How important is the page relative to the rest of the URLs on your site?

If your website’s pages are properly linked to each other, most of your site will be visible to Google’s web crawlers.

You can create a sitemap using Google Search Console.

Send email newsletters

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to increase your readership. While some metrics, such as open rate or click-through rate, may be low, email marketing still ranks among the best methods to reach niche audiences and convert them into long-term followers.

More than 99% of users check their email on a daily basis, and many check it over 20 times per day. Email communication remains the go-to way for most people to get updates from their favorite brands.

The key to building a successful email marketing campaign is to create an email experience that encourages niche users to read your newsletter. You need high-quality emails backed up by technology that allows you to easily convert your site’s content into a dynamic email campaign.

Buy ads on platforms that make sense for your site

Similar to email newsletters, advertising on third-party platforms is a great way to target hyper-target audiences. However, you don’t need to buy ads across every platform on the internet. Instead, focus on targeting your ad spend on platforms that are most relevant to your content.

For instance, if you run a website about a video editing agency, you might want to focus your ad spend on Google and Pinterest, rather than on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.

Don’t forget to be methodical when it comes to audience targeting. First, think about how you want to target your audience with your ad. Then, focus on how you want to measure the performance of your retargeting campaigns. Retargeting campaigns target people who have already interacted with your content or website in the past.

It’s important to keep in mind that you’ll need to pay attention to the cost and effectiveness of your ads on third-party platforms, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, as they can become expensive.

Decrease your site’s bounce rate

At the moment, your site’s bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing just one page. Google Analytics 4 will define the bounce rate as the percent of sessions that are not engaged.

The best way to combat high bounce rates is to provide a high-quality user experience that encourages readers to stay and read more.

A/B testing is a great way to measure the impact of your improvements to your site’s user experience. For example, if you test a new layout on a small portion of your site’s traffic, you can observe how the new layout affects page speed and the user experience. Then, you can compare the results to your site’s current bounce rate and see how you can improve it.

If you pay attention to your bounce rate and set a goal to reduce it, you should notice an increase in your overall traffic.

Increase internal linking

External and internal links will help your site rank in search results. External links are links that direct your readers to other pages on your site that are related to the topic. This increases context for your readers and hopefully keeps them on your site longer.

Internal links help you structure your site for Google’s indexing. For instance, you can link your most important pages multiple times to give Google a better idea of the hierarchy of your site.

Having a strong site architecture will improve your site’s ranking and hopefully increase your average time users stay on your site. If a site is easy to navigate, users are more likely to stick around. This is the key to user retention.

Optimize content for maximum share ability on social

In today’s digital world, social media isn’t a priority unless it’s an integral part of your overall business strategy. The most effective way to leverage social media is to make it easy for your audience to discover your content wherever they are, including on social media.

To make sure your content is optimized for social, you’ll need to:

Publish content that’s mobile-friendly.
Use mobile-friendly media such as Facebook Instant Articles or Web Stories to reach your audience.
Use content calendars to keep your post frequency consistent.
Post conversation-providing content to encourage engagement.
Use third-party scheduling tools such as Sprout Social or Buffer to keep your content organized. Explore CMS platforms that offer social CRMs integrated directly into your editing interface.

Get rid of bad content on your site

If your site has been around for several years, it’s likely that you have an archive of content that is not useful. It’s important to periodically perform a content cleanup to make sure that Google is indexing the best version of your site. Here are some common kinds of bad content to look out for:

Duplicate Content: Duplicate content occurs when the exact same or similar content appears across multiple URLs on your site. This can confuse Google’s crawler because it won’t know which URL to prioritize.

Short Content: Google doesn’t have an official word count for what qualifies as quality content. Some shorter content may perform well if it provides meaningful value to users. However, short content that doesn’t fully meet Google’s quality guidelines may struggle. Ensure that shorter posts on your website are well-written and relevant to the search phrases you want to rank for. Also, consider including long-form and substantive content on your site.

Licensed Content: Licensed content refers to articles that have been republished through a legal agreement, such as a copyright license. While hosting some licensed content can benefit your site, be cautious not to have too much that can easily be found elsewhere on the web. This could risk your site being outranked on Google by other sources.

Typos: Google frowns on content with typos because it assumes that the quality of the content is not very good.

Use a modern CMS

In today’s saturated market, creating high-quality content is only half of the battle. Many factors influence web traffic, whether it’s attracting new audiences or retaining loyal visitors. To drive high-volume traffic to your site, your content must be backed by technology that meets all the criteria.

Make sure you prioritize technology that focuses on performance and usability. Also, ensure you have an editorial tool suite and intuitive technology that helps unlock new growth across your site, search engine, and social channels.

What Rtist Studio Do?

At Rtist Studio, we specialize in creating high-performing websites tailored to your business needs. Our comprehensive SEO services ensure your site ranks high on search engines, driving organic traffic and boosting your online visibility. From website design to SEO optimization, our team of experts is dedicated to helping you achieve your digital marketing goals. Partner with us to elevate your online presence and achieve sustainable growth.