So, you’ve registered your domain name and built a website, but no one is visiting it. How do you drive traffic to your web pages?
You could pay for social media ads. You could also spend money on search engine pay-per-click advertising. This will display your website when someone searches for a keyword or phrase of your choosing, such as “free online meeting platforms”, for example.
Alternatively, you can drive traffic to your site organically. There are some small adjustments and quick fixes you can make to your website today to dramatically increase the number of visitors you receive.
By improving the web design and content of your site, you can quickly climb the search engine rankings without spending a penny. This article will take you through some of the top ways to do this.
Create relevant content
You need to create content around all the things your customers search for. Who is your customer? What are the things they search for online? Create content based on this. Be sure to pay special attention to their most important pain points.
By centering your content on the customer’s most relevant problems, you improve your likelihood of ranking highly in search engines. Additionally, you’re getting them to click on specific pages of your website that match their keywords. You can use this to capture email addresses or improve traffic flow to your product and blog pages.
Update your content
Your most important, high-volume pages should always be completely up to date. These are the pages that drive the most conversions every month. Whether you need to update your top content on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, make sure it never becomes outdated. If it does, your search engine ranking will suffer.
Create long-form content
Long-form content has a lower bounce rate than shorter content and engages users for a longer duration of time. If someone is reading content that’s well written and genuinely helpful, they’ll likely stay on the page. The longer they stay on a page, the more likely it is they’ll click on another of your web pages.
In this way, long-form content does more than simply drive traffic. It drives qualified leads to your website, which results in more fruitful sales engagement.
Also, due to the low bounce rate and high amount of time spent on your site, search engines will deem the page valuable and place it higher in their rankings.
If you look at the top-ranked pages when searching for your keyword, you will notice that most of them are long-form content. These pages get the most traffic because they provide detail and unique value. They prove the writer to be an expert in their field.
The best way to create long-form content is to take the time to write comprehensively and provide value to the reader. Your content should provide answers to frequently asked questions, such as “What is QA?”, for example.
You should also provide how-to guides and any other information your target audience may be searching for. These pages could link to other content silos on your website.
Optimize your meta tags
Your meta tags are things such as the page title and meta description of your web page. These are the texts that are displayed when your web page appears on search engines.
Meta tags have a huge impact on SEO and getting traffic to your website. They tell search engines what your web page is about. If you have compelling page titles and meta descriptions, people are more likely to click on your page when they see it in search engine results.
To optimize the conversion rates of your page titles, ensure they are no longer than 60 characters. Lengthy titles get cut short when displayed on search engine results pages. You should also include your main keyword near the beginning of the page title.
Your title needs to reflect the searcher’s intent as much as possible. You could include a commonly asked question, such as “What does queuing mean?”
A good meta description clearly explains what users can expect from a page if they click on it. You should write different meta descriptions specifically for each page on your website. To ensure your meta descriptions are optimized for all devices, keep them below 130 characters in length.
Use LSI keywords
In the past, ranking highly on search engines was achievable by writing the same keyword over and over on a web page. Today, search engines try to build a better picture of what your web page is about.
They do this by looking for LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords. LSI keywords are keywords that relate to the main topic or theme of your page. You might be a video conferencing application, so your page could include related keywords such as “teleconference number”.
These LSI keywords signal to search engines that your page is relevant to what people are searching for. Search engines will place you higher in their results pages because you are comprehensively covering a topic.
Check your click-through rate
To check your click-through rate, go inside of Google Search Console. There’s a report that will show you the click-through rate for the different pages on your website.
If a certain page has a really high click-through rate, you can use it as a template for your other pages. If it has a low click-through rate, compare it to similar higher-performing pages. Try to copy what those pages are doing right.
A simple adjustment, such as capitalizing the first word of your headline, can greatly improve your click-through rate. Other things you can do include using a call to action in your page’s meta description and using keywords in your URL. For example, if one of your services is cloud hosting, the end of your URL might be “/services/cloud-hosting”
Use AMP
AMP, otherwise known as ‘accelerate mobile pages’, is an open-source HTML framework intended to help web pages load faster. Having a website that loads quickly is a factor in ranking highly in search engines. This includes the mobile version of your site. As mobile devices are becoming more widely used, mobile optimization is more important than ever.
If your pages load slowly, you will lose traffic not only due to the lower search engine rankings but also due to users who abandon your site during the loading time.
Use HTTPS
Your website should be secured with HTTPS. This protects the data that gets sent between the user’s device and your website. HTTPS also helps to prevent MITM and DDoS attacks.
Not only is having it a search engine ranking factor, but users are becoming warier of clicking on sites without HTTPS. If your website is not secure, it will undermine all of your efforts to drive traffic toward it.
Get shared on social media
You already know social media can be an effective tool to get people to discover your business. You also know social media can be used to provide effective first contact resolution. However, did you know you can optimize your website’s search engine ranking with the help of social media?
When content from your website gets shared on social media, your website will get indexed by search engines more quickly. If new blog posts and web pages get a lot of social media shares, they will rank highly on search engine results pages and attract more traffic.
If you have shared a web page in the past, and now it has fallen down the search engine rankings, you can share it again. The more you share, the higher you will rank.
Understand EAT
EAT stands for ‘expertise, authority, and trust’. It’s a term from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines that aim to help webmasters understand what Google looks for in a web page.
Expertise is measured by the quality of the content on your website. For example, let’s say your content is about project management tools. If it contains errors or is written by someone with zero project management expertise, it’s not the type of website that search engines like to reward.
Authority can be measured by how valued your website is and how popular it is compared to other sites in your space. This can be improved by generating backlinks to your website. It can be improved more if your content is featured or mentioned on other high authority sites.
Trust is measured by how well people speak of your business or website. Do you have a positive reputation? Do you have good reviews? If people trust and like your business, search engines can be sure your page is reliable. Thus, they will place it higher in their rankings.
Optimizing your website to meet these standards will greatly boost your site’s traffic.
Start implementing these top tips today to drive traffic to your website.