“I want to increase traffic to my blog or website”- The very same question keeps on haunting all the business owners. It has kept me on my toes for a long while. Now, I thought to jot down all the very best strategies for increasing not only traffic but also qualified leads. Read them, share them, implement them and let me know in your comments how they affected your site traffic.
1. Publish right content on a regular basis – 2 long posts around 2000 words is what I suggest per week. Many blogs are having great content but engagement are received for right content only. Share practical knowledge that is useful for the audience right now!
2. Edit the older content present on your site especially blog posts. Stale content will change into fresh content if we keep on updating them. This is what Wikipedia does and see the engagement they receive.
3. Don’t forget to add email subscriber section as it is immensely beneficial for generating even more qualified traffic.
4. Use a darker font on the blog and make it easier for the user to read and grasp the entire essence of your blog posts.
5. The CTA element on the site (the contact form) should be placed at an appropriate position. You can freeze it at the right hand column so that it remains visible throughout the scrolling.
6. Make sure to reduce the number of fields present in the form, the more fields, the lesser the chances of users filling it up. How about going with Phone number and drop down of your services where the potential customer can easily choose the service you are offering. So, just 2 fields are enough.
7. The size of the image used in the posts should not be too large. The only concern is that the site speed should not be compromised. You can make them smaller and add a Pinterest sharing button to them. Also keep in mind the choice of colors.
8. Fact based images are more shared as compared to plain images. So, try adding some facts to your images to increase their readability and shareability.
9. Increase your online industry presence and try becoming contributors on well known sites like Forbes, SEL, SEJ, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz etc. You can build many business relationships from there.
10. Take the help of the in-page analytics section in GA in order to check which areas on your site are generating the maximum clicks. If your main CTA elements aren’t getting enough clicks then change their position until they start to get the required attention.
11. Host webinars and share information in your social channels. This way you will be able to meet industry people and enhance your outreach. Relationship building will start happening and business will grow.
12. Interview local business owners and ask them to share their problems they are facing in their online visibility.They will agree and you will get a chance to consult them. This is an excellent strategy to get more business.
13. Use Facebook Promoted Posts campaigns to host industry related events (webinars) and invite business owners to participate in them. Tell them what they are doing wrong or what is the current market potential of digital media and dollars will start flowing in 🙂
14. Make it easier for anyone to contact you through all the webinars you will be hosting. Display contact details from every possible section.
15. Use ClicktoTweet in your blog content to increase content shareability on Twitter. It helps!
16. Take help of influencers (only genuine people having lot of followers, not everyone) and invite them to publish content on your blog. Influencers will share their written content on their social profiles and this way you will generate lot of social shares for your domain. This strategy is hard to implement as most of the well known influencers are already busy so make it easier for them to contribute content and also offer FREE goodies to them. Influencer marketing this way might generate a lot of publicity for your brand.
17. Use the same style for displaying the top posts as displayed by SEL – . This is an excellent way to reduce the bounce rate of any site.
18. The key to receive awesome social promotion and divert traffic to your site it get as many influencers share your site content as possible. The best strategy will be to make influencers subscribe to your blog content. Once that happens, you will only have to publish content and all the promotion will be received automatically. (See: Increase Brand’s social value using Influencer marketing, What exactly are you missing in your content marketing strategy?)
19. I would also recommend to earn backlinks from Wikipedia. It is hard but FREE. Believe it or not but backlinks from Wikipedia works like a charm in increasing the trust value of any site. I am not asking you to SPAM Wikipedia but instead I am asking you to increase your business value so that your brand gets picked up by NEWS sites and it becomes easier for you to earn backlinks from Wikipedia.
20. There are tons of people available on Facebook groups and communities – take the help of that.
21. Some good sources of traffic are Yahoo answers and local citations present on sites where your competitors are already present. White Spark Local Citation Finder & Local RankWatch are good tools to use.
22. Try to get blog content featured under in-depth articles section. If you are able to achieve this then tons of traffic will flow into your site. (For more help, see: In-depth article optimization)
23. I would also recommend you to focus on long tail business oriented keywords for your posts. There are tremendous opportunities lying there. If you are promoting an SEO company then consider these suggestions:
– seo for real estate agents
– seo for small and medium businesses
– seo for doctors
– ppc campaign for tech support
– seo for my restaurant etc.
24. Another trick to trap influencers is to mention influencers in your tweets. It works!
25. Try Linkedin Premium – Find right prospects for your brand promotion. It’s a great value for money.
26. You can translate your blog content into different languages. This will bring in lots of new visitors from new countries and from new international search queries. Initially, the traffic you receive might not convert well but after a few weeks this traffic will start giving positive output. This strategy can get you some international clients. 🙂
27. It would be best for you to link your similar posts to each other. This will help to decrease bounce rate, increase page views and give you more chances of conversions. Have a look at the recommended for you section provided by TechCrunch. May be something like this can give you some good results.
28. You can make use of tools like SEMRush and RankWatch that will help you to find what your main competitor’s online presence has been like and suggest you keywords that will give you an edge over them.
29. Take help of content curation tools like Scoop.it and Pinterest to curate content and suggest content to other publishers. This way we can get some additional referral traffic. (See: 50+ Content Curation Tools)
30. Try getting a post featured on the front page of reddit. It is worth thousands of visitors. I know it is hard to get but the trick here is – write an awesome title, submit it on a relevant subreddit and get a dozen of votes for it. Even if the post gets featured on the top 5 posts of the subreddit, you can get a lot of traffic.
31. Start a Google Plus community and get as many followers as possible. The number of referral traffic from Google Plus will increase as the number of followers will increase.
32. Try to get more traffic from YouTube – the trick is to increase subscribers. Some tips:
– Produce more videos
– Categories the videos by Q&A, Interview based, animations, personalized and story based.
– Use annotations in your videos to get more subscribers
34. Produce Guides as a bait to collect leads. For example, produce a post titled “SEO For Small & Medium Businesses – Download FREE Guide” then use a form to collect email id’s/phone numbers of visitors before they can download this guide. Make sure the form has a separate field for “are you a business owner?” YES/NO.”
35. Produce posts to target CEO’s. For example a post entitled “Twitter Marketing Strategy For CEO’s Looking To Improve Their Branding on Twitter” can be helpful to target CEO’s. Once this post is published, send this post combined with a nice email to some CEO’s. Some of them might read the post and get back to you asking for your services. You will need a email database of local CEO’s and a solid email that can do the trick. Also, the post should be written in a such a way so that it persuades the CEO’s to take some action immediately and not to mention that every provoking word must be accompanied with a CTA element so that you start receiving leads.
36. Consider creating flagship content for your blog. This will stand the test of time and help you gain more traffic in the coming months. Here is a great resource to understand what flagship content is all about.
37. A survey reveals that – Facebook posts with less than 40 characters receives 80% more engagement than longer posts. Try adopting this approach and see the increase in engagement happen automatically.
38. Trendemon is a great tool to identify which sources, pages and paths on your site are most effective. This is great from traffic and conversion point of view.
39. Inbound.org can send us some excellent traffic that converts. Try submitting content there and see the level of engagement you receive.
40. Use GWT to find blog posts that are not doing good. Scroll down the page to find posts less than 10 impressions past 30 days. They are posts that Google don’t want to send traffic. Try updating these and you can easily increase some decent amount of extra traffic to your site without a great deal of work. (See: Search Analytics Report in GWT)
41. Check the mobile usability issue section in GWT and try to fix errors if any. Fixing those will help us in 2 ways – keep the site safe from any future filters that Google applies.
42. Tie up with similar niche sites that can send you covertible referral traffic. Buy ad banners from them in as little as $100 per month and you can get an extra 5-10K visits diverted to your site.
Author: Gary Smith
Courtesy: www.markitwrite.com