There’s no shortage of ideas on how to get more traffic to your website. A quick search will bring up all kinds of tactics:
- Write more content
- Repurpose content
- Send more emails
- Write guest posts
- Promote content on active communities
- Get involved in a Facebook group
- Build backlinks
- Optimize your best content
On and on the lists go, giving you bite-sized ideas that make sense on the surface. But you’ve tried it all before.
Getting traffic to a website is easy. Getting the right traffic is more difficult. High-quality traffic has the ability to increase your ROI. It’s a winning strategy, one that will help you build your business over time.
Where do you start?
Build an Optimization Plan for “Searchers”
When you hear the term “searchers,” you might think of SEO. Somewhere in the process, marketers started thinking in terms of creating a website for search engines, forgetting the fact that people are behind the searches.
People don’t care about the ranking process. What they do care about are the results. People want quality information that educates, entertains, and informs. They want to find what they’re looking for and feel like their needs are being met.
Can that mean different things to different people? Of course. But if you approach every marketing strategy you take on as if you’re talking to your best customer, it can change your focus.
Think about your best customer.
- Who are they?
- What are their demographics?
- What are their interests?
- What motivates them?
- What do they search for?
- What excites them?
- What makes them buy?
If you don’t know, ask them. The more in tune you get, the deeper you can go while building your strategy. Start small. Select one thing and learn how to do it well. This will help you pick up clues about your perfect customer and let you really get to know what they want.
Once you connect with one person, they will like and share, letting those around them know about you. You’ll grow organically over time.
Dig Deeper
A Deep-Dive Into Understanding Keyword Research
This Is How You Define Your Target Audience On Social Media
Speak Their Language
As a business owner, it’s easy to get stuck inside your own terminology. A plastic surgeon may fill his site with content all about rhinoplasty. Yet with just a little research, it becomes evident that people overwhelmingly search for “nose jobs” instead of rhinoplasty. You can miss out on a wealth of opportunity by not speaking a prospect’s language.
It’s easy to do. You’re an expert at what you do. You know the lingo. You speak the language, understand the nuances. Do your prospects and customers?
The more complex the processes, the less likely your customer will ever go that deep. They care about end results. That’s what they’re looking for when they search for you. Are you selling who you are by proving your expertise? Or are you giving people what they really want?
As you figure out these ideas, it will lead you to new keyword potential. You can build new content around what people are searching for, instead of ranking well for your expertise—things few people type into the search bar.
Use Social Media
I know, this seems like an old tactic. You’ve known about social media for years and have built profiles on all the major accounts. But you’ve never had a lot of results.
Done the right way, however, it’s one of the best ways to increase your website traffic. That’s because you’re meeting people where they like to hang out.
Right now, the average user spends about 29 minutes on Instagram each day. With 500 million active users, that’s a lot of potential customers just waiting to notice you.
Are you thinking, “Yeah, but …” The numbers have always looked good for social media; that’s why every business now has a profile on all the major players. Yet statistics show that 26.43 percent of Instagram users have less than 1,000 followers, and just 8.2 percent have more than 50,000.
Guess what? You don’t need a lot of followers to do very well on social media. What you do need is a plan.
Your social media plan should cover things like:
- When to post
- What to post
- Testing strategies
- Influencer connections
You also need someone who understands social media well and who can help you achieve the results you’re looking for.
Influencer marketing is growing at the moment, and it doesn’t take a big-name influencer to get results. In fact, many brands can achieve significant growth with targeted influencers with smaller accounts. Even a small influencer with less than a thousand followers can send a lot of visitors your way if they are fiercely connected with their followers.
Be Consistent
Some of the most influential online marketers in the world will tell you the key to their success is consistency. Even as they were starting out, they created a plan and stuck with it. They posted to their social media accounts and sent out emails regularly, even if nobody was there to read it but their families.
Everyone starts small. What wins is consistency. If you know your audience is on a specific platform or needs a certain type of information, be the one to provide it. Set up a system. Get good at connection. Then do it again.
And again. Never give up. Never stop. Because eventually, they’ll start to find you. And you’ll have the content they’re looking for. You’ll keep showing up. You’ll answer their questions as they ask them.
They’ll rely on you, buy from you, refer to you. And that’s how you’ll get more traffic to your website. Once it starts to work, you’ll be amazed by the results.
How can we help you create a plan?
