How to Drive More Traffic to Your Website

These days, a business can’t succeed without a good website. But there’s not much point in having a website if no one ever visits it. Drumming up more website traffic can help you draw in more customers and make you a thought leader in your industry. 

But getting more traffic to your website can feel like a mysterious and arcane undertaking. No one knows exactly what parameters Google uses to rank websites, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do a lot to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and boost your site’s rankings. Make sure your website is responsive and optimized for mobile. Cultivate backlinks and include internal links on your site. Write a blog, and make sure you’re following SEO best practices in building and maintaining your website.

Ensure Your Website Performs to Google’s Standards

Thanks to recent updates that Google has made to its algorithm, website performance is more important to search rankings than ever before. You should make sure your website loads in no more than 2.5 seconds. It should be responsive to user interactions, and the layout of the pages should be stable so that they remain uniform as users navigate from one page to another on your site. Making all of these adjustments can be rather technical, so you may want to hire an agency to do a website performance audit for you. A performance audit can let you know how well you’re adhering to Google’s Core Web Vitals, as well as giving you an idea of how successfully you’ve optimized your website for search and how secure your website is.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile

Eighty-five percent of Americans now own smartphones, which means that 85 percent of your customers probably want to shop for your products on a mobile device instead of a laptop or desktop computer. Your website needs to be optimized for mobile so that users don’t have to pinch and scroll to see what they want to see. Not only will this make your site easier for users to navigate, but it will help you rank higher in Google search returns because Google prioritizes websites that are optimized for mobile. Use a content management system (CMS) that centralizes mobile optimization. 

Write a Blog

A blog can be a powerful tool to bring in more traffic and keep users engaged with your website. It can even help you build an online community. Blog content gives you the opportunity to work more SEO keywords and metadata into your website, so you can attract traffic from people who might be interested in your products and services. It gives you the chance to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Create evergreen content for your blog on topics relevant to your business, products, and services. Encourage readers to discuss your blog posts in the comments. This can help build community and show Google that users find your site valuable. 

Cultivate Backlinks to Your Site

Backlinks are links leading back to your site from other sites. When you can cultivate backlinks from reputable sites, it will improve your Google search rankings because it will let Google know that users find your site’s content valuable. There are several ways to generate backlinks. You can write longform, authoritative content, like comprehensive guides that other website owners will want to link back to. You can ask other blog owners to let you write guest posts and include a link back to your site in the body copy or in your author bio. You can even participate in web forums and link to your site from there. 

Improve Your SEO

Your site’s SEO helps get your site and blog posts to the top of search returns for relevant keywords. You can do a lot to optimize your website for search, but some aspects of SEO and content strategy are pretty technical, so you may want to consider hiring a Minneapolis SEO company to help.

The most important thing you can do for SEO is to create high-quality content that users will find useful. Write long-form blog posts that are well-written and proofread to remove spelling, grammar, and typographical errors. Fix broken links, and use appropriate H1 tags and meta descriptions for your content. Make sure your site URLs are short, easily understandable, and optimized with relevant SEO keywords.

Include Internal Links

Internal links, or links from one page on your site to another, reduce bounce rates, which means they keep users on your site for longer. The longer a user is on your site, the higher the chance that they will buy your products, participate in your online community, or share your blog posts on their social media. Link most often to the most important pages on your site, so that Google web crawlers can better understand your site’s hierarchy. Link relevant topics together so that users can get the information they need and find more value in your site.

Driving more traffic to your website can really improve your business’s bottom line, and it’s not as hard as you might think. With the right content strategy, you can cultivate a thriving online community, bring in new customers, and strengthen brand loyalty among existing customers.

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