How to get more traffic to your website. That’s a question we hear often. Usually, it’s because people have been working towards their goals and getting some results, but not even close to what they expected.

Sound familiar?

If so, don’t beat yourself up too bad–you’re definitely not alone.

Besides, we’re here to help. Below you’ll find 10 questions to help evaluate your current digital marketing strategy. Plus some suggestions on how you can improve it. Before you know it, you’ll have all the smarts you need to increase traffic to your website.

Let’s Face It, Your Website Needs Some Work

It might not be an easy thing to admit to yourself but, if you’re not getting decent traffic, it might be time to accept your website needs some sprucing up. Maybe some search engine optimization (SEO), a new marketing angle, or perhaps some paid advertising to increase website traffic.

Today’s digital marketing strategies are rapidly evolving. New techniques and approaches are always popping up. It’s hard to keep up at times! Especially for business owners who are too busy running other aspects of their business to study the latest digital marketing trends on daily basis.

However, honing your skills, presentation, message, and marketing strategy will increase website traffic for your brand or business. If you want to bring in more traffic to your website, you need to make sure your marketing strategy is utilizing current trends.

“The companies who don’t evolve are the ones who tend to decline in sales and eventually go out of business. We see this everyday as shopping mall sales shift to online retailers and customers purchase more and more items they need online instead of from a traditional brick and mortar store.”

In order to keep up with the competitive online market it takes focus, planning, strategy, and execution. With that in mind, the first question you need to ask yourself is: Are you willing (and able) to put in the time needed to craft a winning digital marketing strategy?

Evaluate Your Website Regularly

The first step to getting more traffic to your website is evaluating your website. Start by considering the following questions. Remember to keep an open and unbiased mind when answering.

• What does you website look like?
• Does it need work?
• Does it command attention, look professional, present the message you want, and convert visitors to sales or leads?

Websites do not automatically get better over time and without a dedicated strategy to reach the newer, younger customers who are looking for your products and/or services your business won’t evolve.

We recommend evaluating your website regularly. About every 18–24 months. This will ensure it remains fresh and effective in reaching your audience. Additionally, regular website evaluations can ensure your website design, company message, products, services, and on-page SEO remain fresh and relevant to today’s marketplace.

Case Study

A good SEO evaluation example is a recent client who had SEO’d the search phrase “gift box”. Getting about 9000 monthly searches, “gift box” wasn’t necessarily a poor choice, but it wasn’t the best either.

Upon evaluation we found a slight change to the search phrase from “gift box” to “gift boxes” yielded much higher search volumes. In fact, with about 21,000 monthly searches, switching to “gift boxes” resulted in 300 times more traffic when SEO was completed.

In the world of SEO, what the potential clients are searching for matters most. Thus, it’s important to check regularly. The key is to build a website that functions properly. It needs to serve as an extension of your business while your marketing strategy works around the clock to increase website traffic and bring in new customers.

Marketing And Website Design: The Dream Team

The best way to learn how to get more traffic to your website is to evaluate both: marketing and design. In order to increase website traffic, you need great marketing. And once the customer arrives you need a great website that works correctly to make sure the visitor converts to a sale or a lead.

When evaluating your website to get more traffic, take a peek at the organic design of your site. This includes:

• layout
• design
• functionality
• keywords
• content
• on-page organic marketing strategy
• and your outreach strategies

Something to keep in mind: To increase website traffic to your site, the best and most long-lasting method is SEO. It’s the most cost-effective over time. Plus, it’s a surefire way to remain relevant as the internet evolves. That being said, the specific keywords and terms searched for online may change over time. With that in mind, it’s a good to evaluate and reevaluate as time goes by.

How To Get More Traffic To Your Website

10 Questions To Ask Yourself

Now that we’ve learned how marketing and design work together and saw a real-life case study on the benefits of good SEO, it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty. When looking at how to get more traffic to your website we first need to look at your website as a tool that functions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week winning you customers.

To do that, let’s explore the 10 questions below. If you’re serious about getting more traffic to your website, grab a pen and paper to write your answers down.

1. Does My Website Have a Blog?

When you think about how to get more traffic to your website, the first thing you should be thinking is:

 “I know my business, products, services and customer experiences; how can I give these stories to my potential customers?”

The answer is a blog.

The primary way that sales are made is by sharing information. Information can be shared either in person, over the phone, social media, website content, or in print. Your business can use a blog to share information lots of different ways. It can mimic some of the traditional ways with creative blog templates and designs. Although, finding new and interesting ways to present valuable information to potential clients should always be the goal when creating blog content.

As you’re learning how to get more traffic to your website you’ll discover a lot of it is simply creating content that draws the attention of potential customers to your product, service, or website. Anytime you shoot a video, take a photograph, write a story, talk about solving a problem for a customer or talk about your product or service you can create a blog post and use that to draw more visitors to your website.

Content is King

With Google’s newest updates, it’s important to have a blog. An updated blog with fresh, relevant content about your business is the fastest, most affordable, effective way to distribute your products, services, and stories to your potential clients.

Sharing your thoughts, ideas and experiences allow readers to talk about, learn, and share your experience. Blogging is an easy way to get more traffic to your website and an excellent platform for conveying information about specific topics related to your business. Be sure you are using it to your company’s advantage!

2. Does my Business Have an SEO Strategy?

Another major player in the game of getting more website traffic is SEO. We’ve already touched on this earlier, but let’s take a deeper look. Most of the users on the internet do not click past the first page of the Google search results. Generally speaking, if the answer, product, or service they’re looking for isn’t right at the top, they’ll do a new search with slightly different wording to find what they’re looking for.

Having a sound search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is very important. Some would even consider it a requirement to get your products and services in front of potential customers who are searching for your business. Building a good SEO strategy and ensuring your website is SEO friendly can save thousands of dollars each month on paid advertisements.

There’s a specific algorithm used to rank all websites on a number of different metrics. Google’s algorithm, for example, has gotten way more advanced over the last three updates. It now relies heavily on content as well as numerous other factors in ranking a website. Believe it or not, the number of words on a page and the number of times each word appears on the page plays a role with search results.

Today, an effective SEO strategy is an ongoing process. One structured around quality keywords that utilize all of the on-page SEO metrics together with a thorough and diverse off-page strategy.

From Keyword To Conversion

Writing your content around related keywords like “how to get more traffic to your website” or “increase website traffic” (as seen on our blog here) enables you to have a target your buyer personas. From there you can fill in the related information that will benefit the readers searching for that specific topic and convert them into a customer.

You need precise keyword placement, competition analysis, detailed linking and tagging strategies, well-executed social media campaigns, proper conversion techniques, focused ad approaches, and dedicated distribution methods to truly create the best SEO picture for each page of your website–not just the blog.

3. What is Our Content Strategy, Do We Have One?

The amount of traffic your website gets also depends on a good content strategy. In order to increase website traffic it’s important you develop content that captures the reader’s attention while reading.

Think of good content a path you can use to walk your customers to a specific goal such as a conversion or sale. Content that has a great title, nice opening paragraph, and a smooth walk through will keep readers focused on the page and a good conversion rate will follow.

On-page content that follows good SEO protocol is highly revered in the eyes of Google’s most recent update. Using descriptive language or more specific terms when describing your thoughts tend to rank higher in search results.

Post Content With A Purpose

Another good place where great content can live is on your blog. When creating compelling blog content you’ll quickly learn getting more traffic to your website typically revolves around focused, original content.

Creativity is your friend when it comes to content. Blogging informative, interesting thoughts and tips your readers can immediately start using often reach a large number of views and yield the best results.

Posting regularly is a good way to please Google’s ranking algorithm. But the real way to increase website traffic is posting with purpose. The more good information you can offer readers, the more readers will come.

Know Your Audience

You need to know your target audience but never place yourself into a box. Your idea of your buyer persona may be one demographic while a large portion of sales or conversions comes from a completely different source.

Be mindful when developing your brand’s voice, your reader objectives, and your distribution channels in order to craft cont that’s compelling to your audience. Your content should be fresh and accessible so it keeps visitors coming back.

4. What’s Your Social Media Strategy, Is It Effective?

Social media is another great tool to increase traffic to your website. Besides email, social media (specifically Facebook) is the number one method for transferring data online. Facebook ads, groups, and business pages, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and, of course, mom’s favorite Pinterest can all be leveraged to yield massive amounts of traffic.

What To Post On Social Media

Begin using pictures, videos, and catchy posts to leverage your personality and build your business online. Clever and interactive hashtag usage can also attract more traffic to your website. As can creating

• attention-grabbing images for ads
• original and interesting photos
• and, most importantly, being present.

Being present is the number one thing for businesses when using social media. In the world of instant gratification, a delay in responding to a potential client/customer could mean losing their attention and them reaching out to someone else.

Businesses benefit from a social media presence that has an integrated message that matches your brand, grabs the user’s attention and then leads them to your website. It’s fairly easy to increase website traffic using this strategy and it helps to build your brand.

A solid social media strategy like this also attracts followers and invites them to share your content with their group of friends. Done correctly, a robust social media strategy can be your Achilles heel of marketing.

Make It Easy To Share Your Content

Another way to promote users sharing your business/brand/content/ideas is by adding social media share buttons in your content. This makes it very easy (one click) to share content from your website to social media. It can also be a simple way to have your team share content from the website.

Remember, we’re social creatures and being social is one of the easiest ways to increase website traffic to your website. Get your team involved–the more the merrier! Have them tweet, retweet, like, share, and post related content on a schedule.

Try assigning social media tasks to one team member each day of the week. During that day the team member must visit the company’s social media pages, find a topic that they like and retweet, share, like, comment, or somehow interact with the post. Sharing by team members helps to create a constant presence for your business on the timelines of large areas of users.

When it comes to how to get more traffic to your website using social media, it is important to become a thought leader. Thought invoking posts can add real weight to your social media presence. And when leveraged alongside your business, establishing yourself as a thought leader can result in an excellent strategy for you to increase website traffic.

5. Do You Have a Conversion Strategy?

Every website should serve a purpose beyond being brochureware. After you increase website traffic, your website needs to be a welcoming environment where visitors are encouraged to evaluate your business and become comfortable enough to convert into a lead.

Learning how to get more traffic to your website is great but we also want to make sure that we’re directing the traffic correctly. To do this, your website needs integrated calls-to-action (CTAs) to drive the right conversions in the right places.

You need to know when an on-page action (or micro-conversion) should be solicited, and when a revenue-driven conversion (or cha-ching conversion) should be offered. This is how the conversion funnel functions, turning visitors into leads and/or sales.

6. Is Your Website Responsive?

Every business needs their website to be fully functional and accessible across all platforms, screens, and devices. This includes smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

Why spend time and money learning how to get more traffic to your website when the website doesn’t load from their device?

More sites are accessed via smartphones than any other device and fewer and fewer customers are using traditional laptops and desktops to access the internet.

The best way to ensure that your site has the ideal layout based on the viewing device is by building it on a responsive grid system. This will enable your website to be available to a much wider audience, boost your SEO (yes, Google actually penalizes sites that are NOT responsive!) and help “future-proof” your site. A literal “win-win-and WIN!”

7. Can You Update Your Own Website?

The term “CMS” means content management system. A CMS is a tool used to make site updates, such as adding new pages, posts, making any product changes, and the like. But not every CMS is accessible or easy to use—and we all know what that means. If no one in your company knows how to access the CMS to handle the necessary updates and correct issues, someone will need to be hired to handle each task.

So, you’re either constantly calling in (and paying for) someone to do these simple tasks or you’ve given up altogether and your website’s content has become a fossil. And guess what that does to your Google ranking? Can you say “free fall?”

The right CMS should be a user-friendly, easily maintained, open source solution. The best choice used by more companies than any other CMS is WordPress.

8. Can You Measure the Analytics of Your Website?

Understanding how visitors interact with your website is essential. When you begin to increase website traffic, you can easily measure the volume with Google Analytics, Sprout Social, HubSpot, Moz, and others.

These tools combined can measure every metric that matters. For example:

• traffic volume
• traffic sources
• bounce rates
• exit pages
• top pages
• time spent on website pages
• and numerous other metrics that can be evaluated to create a more targeted marketing campaign.

Want to know how to market better and how to get more traffic to your website?  The key is not only looking at your analytics reports but knowing what they mean. You should learn how to effectively evaluate and pivot your marketing when necessary to convert more visitors and continue to increase website traffic. Superstar marketing is being able to respond to these metrics and meet your expectations with your online marketing campaigns.

9. Do You Have an Updated or Appropriate E-Commerce Platform (if applicable)?

Everyone has something they can sell online, or at least they should. A lot of companies have tried, but many are not going about it the right way. The best method to sell online is to utilize an e-commerce platform that is:

• easily updatable
• has integrated analytics
• supports product structure for SEO
• allows good product organization and categorization in a manner that suits your needs.

The e-commerce solution you choose should support specific payment and shipping methods. It also needs to allow room for scaling and growth. At RoboWP our e-commerce platform of choice is WooCommerce.

10. Are Your Website’s Visuals Stale or Dated?

The goal of website redesign is to design your website with full functionality, expandable core capabilities, and a look and feel that will be great for years to come. Design styles and sensibilities tend to change about every 24-36 months. This means your website’s aesthetics will need regular attention and updating. As a company grows, updated images and the design or products/services should improve, shift and relate to customers the growth that is taking place behind the scenes.

A good example is how gradients on your call to action buttons might negatively impact your conversion rate by visually “dating your website” in the eyes of your potential customers. Be sure there is a constant push to improve UI design.

We recommend a bi-annual design evaluation, touch-up (if necessary), and a pair of fresh eyes to keep your website’s look fresh. A website is like a house, the interior needs ongoing modernization over time, but the foundation will likely remain for years.

Get Ahead Of The Competition

To capture more leads and stay ahead of your competition begins with learning how to increase website traffic and then using this checklist to identify what your website may be missing to reach more potential customers. We are here to help! If you would like some tips and tactics from an award-winning digital agency–let us know. We LOVE sharing what we’ve learned and what works in generating traffic, leads, sales, and long-term clients.

RoboWP is committed to offering assistance with any of these tasks. We have in excess of 20 years of experience in digital marketing, SEO, blogging, website creation and we take pride in staying on the cutting edge when it comes to digital ads and social media marketing techniques.