Business owners, especially those with an online presence, are so caught up at generating leads that they forget something basic. And that is, getting traffic to their websites as effectively as possible. As a website owner, you should know that prospects are online users that first need to visit your website before doing anything else. 

Before getting into action in acquiring customers to your website, you need to know what possible things you can do to increase traffic to a website. There are a lot of strategies to make excellent traffic to your website. However, you have to know the basics of it and improve it from there.

Here are five practical ways you can increase traffic to any website that you own.

Inbound Links

The primary goal of inbound links is to let other websites or contents lead people to your site.

There are three ways you can make inbound links work for you.

• Internal Linking. This may seem quite unusual for you, but linking your new content to other existing content on your website is beneficial. This leads more people to visit different parts of your website and builds more reputation for your website, as people stay there longer. This approach helps visitors navigate through your site with ease.

• Guest Posting. When you create long-form content on other people’s websites, you can add hyperlinks to specific texts to lead them to your website.

• Direct Sharing. If hyperlinking doesn’t work, you can try to ask other people’s help in sharing your website link to other people. It can be through direct messages.

2. Search Engine Optimization

You might have heard of search engine optimization before as a marketing strategy that is popularly known to online businesses. This strategy is commonly referred to as SEO, and it’s one of the most effective strategies for improving online presence. Whether for generating leads or merely increasing traffic, SEO is an indispensable aspect of digital marketing.

In SEO, the primary goal is to rank the highest in the search engine results page. 

The main problem with search engines is that new contents tend to bury old materials down. This makes old websites prone to become forgotten if no one visits their website. Search engines now have algorithms to identify the most updated and most relevant content on the internet.

If your content is not updated and not relevant to the user’s concerns, your website won’t be shown on most search engines results page. To make it visible, you can do two simple things.

• Use Long-tail Keywords. Whether for business or personal purposes, your website will always have a theme. Based on that theme, you write your content to address people’s concerns with your knowledge or services. 

• Your content, you should include keywords that are highly specific to what you want your visitors to know, and that is what long-tail keywords are all about. They are more accurate and not general. For example, instead of using “vacuum cleaner” as your keyword, you can use “vacuum cleaner for thick carpets” instead to make it more specific for your visitors.

• Target High-Volume Keywords. There are various tools you can use to determine whether your chosen keywords have a high-volume search rate or not. It’s always best to use keywords that have the highest volume search rate all the time. This is the main reason why you should choose your keywords wisely.

If you noticed, both of these ways entail selecting keywords for your content. This is because SEO is mainly about content. And to acquire traffic on your website, you need to have the best and most relevant content compared to hundreds of other sites out there.

3. Blogging

If you can’t master SEO, it’s almost impossible to learn other marketing strategies, especially blogging. Familiarizing SEO is the best way forward in making your website known to the digital public. With blogging, you can reach more people, even to those who don’t use search engines much often.

The main goal of blogging is to discuss any relevant issues regarding common concerns of people. When you identify the common concerns of people, you can then present your products or services through the blog. This way, you’re able to connect with various people with similar interests, and possibly genuine prospects.

There are two ways of blogging on the internet. 

• Personal Blogging. This entails making a blog on your own and posting it on your website. You can create a new website mainly for your blogs, or add a blog section in your existing website. Either way, you’re putting your efforts into the content for the people you need to address.

• Guest Blogging. This entails posting blog content on other people’s websites. This benefits both you and the website owner, as it builds an excellent reputation for both sources that they are trusted. The main advantage of guest blogging is that you already have your audience, and all you need is to present your content.

Online businesses maintain a blog regularly because of their effectiveness in increasing traffic to their websites. Together with updated content, blogs ensure that you stay connected with your audience and possible prospects. The more connections you make, the more traffic you gain to your website.

Online Influencers

In digital marketing, no one succeeds on their own. You have to take advantage of reputable website owners out there even if they are, or will become, your competitors. These online users can grow your online influencers for your website. 

Aside from inbound links, you can also make use of outbound links, which are links from your website to other websites with relevant content. If you link to a reputable site, you let search engines know that you are reliable as well. It’s a win-win situation for the both of you, as you add more visitors to both sites at the same time.In this way, you can tell the website owners that you have linked your content to their website. And ask if they can share your content in any way they can. 

How this works is that they share your content and add visitors to your content. Moreover, as people visit your content, they will also visit the other website’s content as you linked that content to their website. It’s not just a promotion for your website, but the other site as well.

Paid Advertisements

Increasing your traffic website dramatically in a short time is not possible, unless you pay for it. Various advertising platforms offer services to many sites to increase website traffic. You can see them on social media, search engines, and other uncommon areas on the internet if you look for them hard enough.

In paid advertisements, you get instant advertising to many reputable websites that ensure visitors in a short time. However, they won’t stay there forever but only for a specified period. This is the main disadvantage of paid advertisements.

The main goal of paid advertisements is to reach many people in a short time. And make an impact that they will remember your website even after it’s gone on the advertising spaces on various sites. 

This would lead you back to optimizing your content for search engine results pages. Paid advertisements are not that bad at all, if you genuinely know what you are doing. This even works well for most businesses, especially those using social media and modern techniques of digital marketing. 

The Bottom Line

Increasing website traffic is not something done successfully in just one night. It requires diligence and a lot of patience. You need to do your research and expand your resources.

Don’t limit your marketing strategies, but always adapt to the trend and what is efficient in the status quo. What may be inefficient before may be proficient in these times. It’s best to keep an eye for people’s activity now and then. Most importantly, learn from your mistakes and improve from there.