Much more than just selling, it's marketing's role to connect with people.
And for that, marketing has to get where people are, right? You need the traffic to your website or blog to communicate with your potential customers.
There are many ways to increase traffic to a website and thereby ensure more quality leads for your business.
1. Optimize your website's SEO
In the context of Digital Marketing, being on the front pages of Google is essential, precisely to be able to communicate with potential customers when they are more open to your solutions.
There is no way we can talk about increased traffic without mentioning SEO optimization. This is the first and fundamental step you need to take to attract the greatest number of people to your blog.
Chances are if you've come this far in an article about increasing traffic to your site, you already know what those three letters mean.
But if you don't know what SEO is and haven't heard of it, no problem!
SEO tactics are many and for your content or page to appear in the first results of Google, there are about 200 ranking factors that are taken into account.
There is no cake recipe, but let's summarize some basic and essential best practices for you to start improving your site's rankings.
On-page SEO
These optimizations are what you can do within your website and content.
To do this, you should perform keyword research thinking about your business persona to find out what she is interested in and how you can benefit from addressing that question or need for her.
If you've never done this process before, we suggest you take a step-by-step walkthrough of a complete keyword search in this post here.
After defining the most important keywords for your business, it's time to produce content focused on them, so that your audience's doubts are answered.
For this, some good practices refer to the inclusion of keywords in the following text components:
- in the SEO title, preferably at the beginning;
- in some intertitle, which must be in the text code between the heading tags <h2> (read more about what heading tags are here);
- it must also be present in a natural and semantic way throughout the text;
- in the meta description (this doesn't influence SEO directly, but it makes more people click on your content).
But beware: there is no point in optimizing your content with keywords used correctly if the content is not relevant.
Google has constantly updated its algorithm so that more and more results on the first pages are the ones that give the best answers to those who do a search.
If your content doesn't help anyone, doesn't give good answers to your persona, if it's not relevant and unique, it will hardly reach the top, no matter what you do with SEO.
We'll talk more about content relevance in the next topic, but now let's talk about off-page SEO, that is, the SEO strategies you do outside of your site and its content.
Off-page SEO
On-page SEO practices are laborious, but simple to be done, as it only depends on you and your team. And there are tools — like Yoast, which can save you a lot of work.
We can't say the same about off-page anymore.
Off-page SEO is based on the quantity and quality of links that point to your page and content.
What does that mean?
The more content pointing to your page or content as a reference, through linking, the more authority you gain with Google and consequently the higher your content gets on the search pages.
So just go out and spread your content link all over the internet, right? Wrong.
The quality of the sites that link to yours is also considered by Google and the trend is that the requirement will only increase, as we can see, for example, with the update of the Penguin algorithm.
Receiving links from any domain that looks like spam and using other practices considered by Google to be dishonest — such as buying links — negatively affect your site's SEO.
So be very careful how to get links. Check out our link-building article and see how to gain relevance and links without getting your site penalized.
Now that we've covered the basics of SEO, you need to keep two things in mind:
SEO is a routine. You need to be constantly updating your content (this is an important ranking factor too!) and be aware of the updates Google makes to its search engine;
SEO requires patience. Nothing in SEO works overnight, it's all about constancy, patience, and lots of links. But it's worth it! Take a look at the case of our blog post that reached the top position in the word marketing and brought in half a million in revenue, to better understand how an SEO strategy works.
2. Invest in relevant content
We've already talked about how relevant content can help contribute to your site's SEO results. When someone enters a link through Google, they just take a quick look and then leave, this is seen as negative by search engines.
Why? Well, Google's goal is for people to find the best answers, and if they leave the site right away and return to the search page, it means that your question has not yet been answered.
And that's where relevant content comes in.
But more than that, good content creates a bond with your persona, informs, educates, adds value to your brand, and empowers your company, encouraging your potential customer to keep your brand in mind when closing a deal.
To find out how to leave your content with excellent quality, check out our storytelling expert's post and learn how to create the best texts on the internet.
3. Invest in social media outreach strategies
Producing great content and hoping people will find it isn't enough: you need to be more proactive.
One of the best ways to increase traffic to your website is to use social media to promote your content!
Twitter, for example, is ideal for quick and tempting links messages. LinkedIn already serves B2B companies and the corporate public.
If your company's promotion is structured on the power of the image, as is the case with the cosmetic, gastronomic, and fashion industry, for example, invest on Instagram or Pinterest.
4. Use Paid Ads
Content Marketing and paid ad campaigns complement each other to ensure good results.
Advertising on social media, banners, and Google Adwords is an excellent way to attract visitors, build your brand, and spread your website among people.
Adjust your paid strategies to your goals: Do you want to increase your traffic or increase conversions?
Each tool has advantages and disadvantages, as well as better and worse features for each objective. So, think carefully about what you want before you swipe your credit card!
Facebook Ads has been an affordable alternative for those who are starting investments in marketing, and one of its advantages is to choose the daily value we want to invest in and allows a high segmentation.
Remarketing on social media
The remarketing is responsible for generating feature ads in browsers each time we access a website and do not conclude the expected conversion.
If you've already searched for a product in e-commerce, didn't find it in the option or expected price, and postponed the purchase, you've certainly come across ads for the same product out there!
Now imagine the full potential of ads running on Facebook, one of the most used sites in the world?
Remarketing on Facebook ensures a good increase in conversion rate and customer loyalty.
Customers who are unable to purchase your item at the time of viewing the ad will be able to follow your page looking for more offers and news in the future.
To start your Facebook remarketing strategy, you will need to install a social network tracker on your website in order to track customers who have visited your website.
The advantage is that you can start tracking with a small audience of at least 100 people.
Remarketing on Twitter works the same way as on Facebook. Install the code on your website so you can “follow” your website visitors on Twitter.
The big difference is that Twitter needs a larger minimum audience: you can start advertising when you have an audience of 500 people.
But to gain customers even on Facebook or Twitter, you need to do your homework with dedication! Here are some essential tips to convert more with the help of Facebook remarketing!
Customized Audiences
The relationship between Facebook and companies is somewhat complicated.
If the social network is the largest in the world and offers a number of resources to find the ideal customers, it also increasingly limits the organic reach of company pages.
Investing in Facebook Ads, therefore, ends up becoming mandatory.
But it doesn't end there. Audience competition has increased, and ads don't always work well.
So before you reach into your pocket, make sure you're talking to the right audience. Hence the importance of customized audiences.
Customized audiences allow a company to advertise to a segment of users that it determines and delimits. This audience can be leads, customers, or users who have a similar profile to your persona.
If you have a list of collected emails, you can import a list of emails into Facebook and have it advertise your products or services to those people.
As with Facebook, you can target Twitter users on mobile devices through a simple email upload. However, you must have at least 500 users within your custom audience.
See here our practical guide to starting a campaign with uncomplicated Facebook Ads!
5. Create Different Types of Content
The magic formula for understanding what your audience likes and innovating is to vary the size and format of your content.
Thus, you make it attractive to different reader profiles.
Interspersing short and long posts with videos, infographics, and tests ensures a more engaging space on the web and the curiosity of your readers.
6. Write Titles that Convert
The titles and intertitles are some of the most important elements of your content. Without a catchy title, even the most complete post will be discarded by the hasty reader.
Take the BuzzFeed example: before posting the articles, the site team writes at least 20 different titles, until they choose one that attracts the most readers.
And the strategy has worked! After all, already in 2014, the listing site had gained 1 in 4 Facebook readers.
7. Post Content on Other Platforms
You might have thought seeing this headline: "But I want to drive traffic to my site, why will I post my content on other platforms?"
This thought makes some sense because it is through the content that you attract people to your domain.
But when you use other platforms to promote what you write on your blog, it invariably attracts people to follow your blog and see more of your amazing content!
One of the most interesting platforms for this is LinkedIn Pulse.
LinkedIn Pulse
LinkedIn has become much more than a platform to find jobs. According to a HubSpot survey, LinkedIn traffic generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate, reaching 2.74%.
The rate is 3 times higher compared to Twitter, which has a number of 0.69%. On Facebook, the rate is 0.77%.
LinkedIn Pulse allows us to discover trends and popular articles according to our interests. There, you can monitor the most popular content and sign up to receive email notifications.
And you don't have to be an influencer to publish on this platform! You can link your blog content to LinkedIn Pulse. To access this tool, access the Interests menu in the main navigation of the social network.
You can also take advantage of it to generate engagement within the discussion groups. In these groups, it is possible to publicize your posts, debate, and find out about your market.
Medium
Another alternative platform is Medium, which can generate traffic to your blog if you post your texts there.
If you're not familiar with this tool yet, Medium works like a mix of Reddit, Tumblr, and Pinterest, where text content is posted and disseminated according to tags and subject-divided collections.
In other words, people who do not access your blog may have contact with your content and end up going to your page! It is certainly a source of traffic that cannot be missed.
The important thing is that you test as many alternatives as you can and analyze the results well, which brings us to the bonus topic.
Bonus: Test, Analyze, Repeat
Effective marketing is testing. The increasingly consolidated trend of Growth Hacking is there to show that.
And to increase your website traffic is no different, use Google Analytics to make sure your tactics are working, to find out which posts perform best and where your website's traffic is coming from.
Post a Comment