You can increase sales by attracting more qualified visitors to your site, so “more website traffic” is often top on the wish list for enterprises. However, knowing where to begin or how to do it is the complicated part. In this article, I’m going to share five simple tricks I use in my own work that practically anyone can implement to boost website traffic.
1. Improve old content.
This one strategy may skyrocket your ranking positions on search engines. While creating and publishing new content is important, updating old content can have an even quicker impact on increasing website traffic. The best part is that it typically doesn’t require a great deal of time to update existing content.
Old content eventually loses its position on the SERPs (search engine results pages) due to Google’s freshness algorithm. Each webpage is given a “freshness score” of sorts, and that degrades over time as new content competitors emerge. Other major search engines such as Bing may be following suit.
I’d recommend upgrading existing content to increase your website traffic. Improve quality by adding to each piece of content and/or updating the information. Make sure you improve the target keyword usage for each page as they are updated. Don’t spam, but strategically use keywords naturally throughout the content.
2. Integrate social sharing tools into your site.
Social sharing increases exposure to your content, which can bring in more visitors. Furthermore, some studies have found a strong correlation between social activity and the ranking position of a webpage. The more people share a page, the more traffic it seems to receive from search engines.
Integrating social media sharing tools into your website is a great way of encouraging social shares. These tools allow your company to leverage visitors for promotion whenever content is shared. I’d also recommend that you not only use social media networks to boost your content organically, but use paid promotion, too. Proactively pushing your content to its intended audience spreads it faster.
3. Improve page speed.
Page speed is the time it takes for a webpage to completely load whenever it’s requested. The server response time and overall web hosting setup are important aspects that determine how fast a given webpage loads. A slow-loading webpage impacts conversion rates because, in general, people don’t like to wait.
Search engines also factor in speed when evaluating webpages, and load times are heavily weighted. A lot of websites can increase their traffic by simply improving page speed. I’d recommend doing the following:
• Reduce or optimize the file size of images. This can be easily accomplished with most online or offline image tools such as Photoshop.
• Upgrade the web hosting service. Speak with your web hosting provider about upgrading to something with a fast server response time.
• Sign up for a CDN (content delivery network). With a CDN, each user is served content from the closest data center to their geographical location, thereby improving page speed.
4. Write better headlines.
The headline is probably the most significant aspect of your content. Even the most well-produced content may fail without a compelling title. On a search engine’s SERP, the headline and description of your webpage are displayed to the searcher. That information is extracted from your page’s metadata, a feature for providing additional information about documents.
Also, users rely on the headline and description information to decide which webpage to visit. Optimize the meta title along with your content’s main headline. Improving these can help to increase your click-through rate. The headline of your pages should either be persuasive, intriguing or promising.
Compose several headlines before settling on one. While you’re at it, optimize the meta descriptions, too. The elements that make titles compelling can do the same for descriptions.
5. Improve internal linking.
Internal links establish your site’s architecture and spread link equity. Link equity refers to the accumulated ranking power of your site based on the links that point to it from other websites (backlinks).
Ensuring all your webpages are accessible via hyperlinks within the site is important for evenly spreading link equity. An even spread ensures that each page receives adequate traffic from search engines.
Also, search engine bots follow internal links to discover new pages on your site, so some of your content won’t be indexed without internal links. Additionally, a webpage that doesn’t have a link pointing to it internally or externally is perceived as unimportant by search engines. These pages are referred to as “orphan pages.”
I’d recommend that you audit your site and improve its internal link structure to increase website traffic.
Take Action Now
I have no doubt that you can increase your website traffic using the tips discussed. Upgrade outdated content. Leverage social engagement. Improve page speed. Create better headlines. And internally link to your content. Some work will be required, but these are simple and effective strategies that almost any business can implement.
