Driving the right traffic to your website is essential to growing your business. Creating a well-designed, easy-to-navigate and shareable website is step one in competing in today’s digital world.
With so many places to go online, how can you get your target buyers to your site? More to the point, how can you drive traffic to your website in a profitable way? Add consumers’ concerns about disinformation and misinformation to the mix, and the challenge for digital marketers becomes that much greater.
Rising above the noise, establishing a trusted presence and figuring out how to get the right people to your site is critical in today’s digital marketplace. A well-designed, easy-to-navigate, informative website is an important starting point, but it means nothing unless you can attract your ideal buyers to visit and then move them through your sales funnel and convert them into paying customers.
Postmedia has curated a list of top solutions and strategies to help drive your ideal buyers to your website.
Put Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to work
Creating a website is table stakes for businesses in today’s digital world. Done well, a website can be an equalizer for smaller businesses competing against huge multinationals. It is the online face of your business and necessary to grow sales — but only if you can figure out how to drive traffic to your website.
Optimizing your content for search engines is a powerful way to boost organic traffic. Start by digging into Google Analytics to learn the search terms people are currently using to land on your website. Are they using specific terms or broader characteristics that relate to you? Use these keywords and phrases throughout your website to make it easier for more people to find you.
Use Google Search Console to find out how often your website appears in search results and determine the search terms that are most effective in driving visitors to your site.
Here are a few more SEO best practices:
- Create detailed descriptions of your products and their benefits.
- Craft a strong page title, a.k.a. a SEO title, that will make people want to click on your website when they’re looking at search results.
- Add blog posts, articles, customer reviews, videos and other content to your site to boost your search rankings and attract more viewers.
- Optimize images and video for mobile. Add alt text to describe images.
- In addition to high-intent and popular keywords, target long-tail keywords, which account for the majority of web searches.
- Keep track of analytics data, such as who your visitors are, how they’ve found you, and the posts and pages that garner the most interest. Use this information to develop your marketing strategies.
Tip: Establish yourself as a trusted authority. Answer questions on Quora and link back to your site using keywords.
Invest in paid advertising
Create a paid digital media strategy based on precise targeting parameters.
Paid advertising can include:
Banner ads, also known as display ads, are clickable advertisements embedded in web pages and use images to attract visitors to the advertiser’s site.
Paid search is a cost-effective way to promote your products by placing text or shopping ads on search engine results pages. Since it works on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, it’s easy to measure and manage paid search ad campaigns. More importantly, it allows you to target people with intent to buy what you’re selling.
Paid social media ads can take the form of PPC advertising, branded content and display ads. Advertising on Facebook or Instagram, for example, gives you access to a global audience that meets your specific targeting criteria, such as gender, interests and education level.
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance marketing can help you expand your reach to new customers by paying commissions to affiliates for bringing customers to your site.
Partnering with other businesses in joint promotions to expand your reach and drive new visitors to your website.
Influencer marketing is finding popular influencers in your niche or industry. Their endorsements could open the door to huge, new audiences.
Tip: Direct visitors to a dedicated landing page featuring a registration or sign-up form. Collect the data and use it to send personalized emails and promotions.
Leverage email
Email marketing is a proven and still effective way to drive traffic to specific pages on your website. It can take the form of a simple update or reminder about a product or service. Or, it can involve regular email newsletters designed to keep your brand top of mind by pointing readers to relevant articles and promotions on your website. Promotional emails can turn the spotlight on special events and sales.
Tip: Use the data you’ve collected about your customers to segment your email audience and provide personalized versions of your newsletter and promotions.
Create strong content and share it
Understand who your customers are, their interests, challenges, and how your products and services can help them. Use this knowledge to develop a wide range of relevant, engaging content that will help them in some way.
This can include regular articles, blogs, surveys, photos, video tutorials, webinars and infographics. Remember: the better your content is, the more interested visitors will be in your brand and the more likely they are to share it with people in their networks.
Tip: Keep your content fresh and up to date to stay visible on search engines.
Share your web content on your social channels and create content specific for social. In both cases, link back to your website. Posting useful video tutorials or demonstrations to YouTube will help drive organic traffic to your website.
Instagram is another great place to post visual content that will build interest and engagement. Develop high-quality photography that tells your brand’s story.
Add social media buttons, such as “Click to tweet,” to your website content to make it easy to share.
If you’re a B2B company, then your buyers and decision makers are on LinkedIn. It’s the top social platform for lead generation, which is why 94 per cent of marketers distribute content on LinkedIn. Use the primary content you’ve created for your website to develop unique, high-quality, value-added posts for LinkedIn’s publishing platform. Link these posts to the corresponding content on your website.
To further amplify your brand and drive people to your website, be an active community member on these social platforms. Answer questions about your LinkedIn posts, participate in discussions, create surveys and polls, and interact with your followers in other ways.
Tip: Use Google’s Page Insights Tool to ensure your website is ready for mobile.
In today’s always-on digital environment, an engaging, mobile-ready website is a must-have — but that will only get you so far. Driving the right traffic to it is essential to growing your business.
