Written by: Umbraco Gold Partner, Prodo
Every marketer's goal is to convert leads into customers, but in order to do that, you first need to drive traffic to your website. Getting users to your website is the first step to being able to nurture prospects into purchasing your products or services.
Whether you’re in the process of building a new website or are just looking for ways in which you can optimise your current website to its fullest potential, we’ve picked out the top 5 steps to growing your website traffic.
A popular way of gaining exposure to your key web pages is by promoting them through paid search and paid social campaigns. By doing this, you’re helping with brand exposure, allowing users to see your most important pages at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) or in their social media feeds because you’ve determined through audience targeting that they’re interested in a similar topic.
If the goal of your paid advertising is to simply drive traffic to your website, that's okay. But if you’re looking to generate more sales from these campaigns, you’ll need to ensure you’re targeting high commercial intent keywords. Of course, the downside of this is that you’re likely to get into a bidding war with your competitors and your cost per click (CPC) could be a lot higher than you would expect. However, if you’re willing to dedicate a healthy budget to your paid ad campaigns, you could see some incredible results.
Whilst paid advertising is a powerful tool at your disposal, it's important to remember that it isn’t everything. You may be able to drive traffic to your website through paid promotion, but retaining users will depend on how well you’ve structured your pages, how well the content is written and how well your website is designed. Users need to find value in your content and services before they purchase, so optimising your service pages should be a main priority prior to setting up any paid promotion.
Many companies today focus a lot of their marketing efforts on website content, blogs and social media platforms, which of course is an important thing to do. However, many can forget the more traditional forms of marketing are still just as effective, if not more, in some cases.
There are many statistics to support this, but if you take into account that email generates $42 for every $1 spent, which is an astounding 4,200% ROI, email marketing is a great investment that can only help drive traffic to your site.
Additionally, the constant movement towards better user privacy has also decreased the targeting options you have with your paid ads. With email marketing, this is not a problem, because you will get permission to send users emails and can thus communicate directly to them when you want to.
Sending monthly newsletters is a great way to engage with your database, provide relevant content and nurture relationships so your brand is seen as a thought leader in the industry - not just by promoting your own products or services, but by sharing helpful information through your blog posts and wider range of content.
A large part of driving traffic to your website is ensuring your pages are optimised for search engines. This means you should be using search engine optimisation (SEO) best practices, such as performing keyword research.
Your key service pages should be targeting a primary keyword, for example “inbound marketing”. Your primary keyword should be used in your title tag, meta description and the first line or paragraph of the body text. This makes it easier for search engines like Google and Bing to understand what your page is about and will help it rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), thereby increasing website traffic.
How you go about implementing these SEO best practices depends on the content management system (CMS) you’re using. For example, Umbraco has a dedicated section within the CMS that allows marketers to focus on on-page SEO optimisation. Umbraco outlines what your page will need in order to be fully optimised and includes a brief description for any users who may not be as familiar with SEO.
One of the biggest challenges for SEO is acquiring links to your website. Backlinks are what can set you apart from your competitors and are often the deciding factor of your domain authority score, and whether search engines will recognise your website content above another.
This is also known as link building or outreaching. By reaching out to other websites within the industry you can often negotiate a guest blog that includes a dofollow link to one of your pages on their website. Guest blogging is known to drive brand awareness and encourage users to click through to your website, simply by providing informative and helpful content that only references your own company once in the entire article.
Other outreach opportunities include reaching out to social influencers to try your products or services and share their views with their followers. This is another big driving factor for your business and can not only encourage clicks to your website, but likely support exponential growth for your social media accounts.
While having a responsive website won’t drive users to your website, it will encourage them to stay. There’s nothing worse than focusing all your efforts into driving traffic to your website if your website lacks the fundamentals of retaining visitors.
The number of smartphone users has almost doubled to 6.3 million since 2016, and with Google indexing websites for mobile first over desktop it's more important than ever that your site is fully responsive for mobile, no matter your screen size.
This is a fundamental step to ensuring your website visitors won’t get frustrated trying to navigate through your site and opt to find a more user friendly experience elsewhere.
If your website is not currently designed or developed to cater for mobile users, you may want to consider a new website. If you choose Umbraco as your proprietary CMS, you can work with an Umbraco developer to ensure best practices are followed when designing your site display on mobile.
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A big thank you and H5YR to Umbraco Gold Partner, Prodo for sharing their tips on this topic!
