Everybody Asks: How to Drive Traffic To Your Site
But nobody asks how your site is doing. (Doing great, thanks for asking!) All jokes aside, online marketing gurus, ninjas, and witch doctors have been promising the secret to driving traffic since the Internet, as we know it, was born. Here at Digital Strike, we know after years and years of testing formulas that there really is no magic trick, special sauce, voodoo hex, or otherwise to do so, rather there are several tried and true avenues that must be used in conjunction with each other for holistic site health.
Google Analytics has broken down channels into five main segments in which your traffic can come from, including organic search, paid search, direct, referral, and social. Every change you make should optimize one or a combination of these segments in order to overall bring high-quality organic traffic to your business.
Oh, What is Organic Traffic You Ask?
Organic traffic refers to any session on-site that comes from branded and unbranded queries related to your business as a result of unpaid (in other words, “organic”) search results on popular engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, AOL, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves (Yes, that is still a thing, albeit the company now goes by Ask.com and refers to themselves as a “question-answering service,” much like Quora).
Who says getting traffic to your site has to be all “pay to play” or word-of-mouth? You can increase website traffic without spending a dime, no matter if you’re a large e-commerce site or a small mom-and-pop business! How? Just get your website or landing page near the top of any one of these major search engines. Again…how? The three main factors that affect your ability to satisfy search engine algorithms include:
Learn more about these factors below or contact us to chat about how to drive traffic to YOUR site today!
Here are 3 (Tried and True) Strategies to Drive Traffic to Your Website
1. Driving Traffic to Your Site With CONTENT MARKETING
Your potential customers crave quality content. Having a proper content strategy will involve intelligent market and keyword research to ensure your web pages come up first when users type in search queries related to your business. You cannot keyword stuff anymore like it used to be in 2008. Instead, you must develop content marketing strategies that not only answer questions your potential customers are dying to know, but also answer it in a way that no one else has before. Innovation, relevance, and a bit of sensationalization will make the difference between great content and words on a page that flop.
Here are some examples of content to write:
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Landing pages:
- A landing page is where a visitor “lands” after they click on a link in an email, ad, or anywhere else on the web. It is a page that is dedicated to one topic (usually based on a keyword group, long-tail keyword, etc.) with the intention of having your target audience complete one goal, as opposed to a homepage which might have many goals and encourage exploration of the rest of the site via many internal links.
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Blogging on your own website:
- Up-to-date, relevant blog content that succinctly answers the questions your target demographic is asking will ensure your click-through-rate remains low. Plus, blogging doesn’t just have to be a 1,000+ word “blog” once a week. Spice up the blog section on your site with infographics, podcasts, webinars, and more. You may even start getting subscribers to your blog that can be added to an email list which you can facilitate down the sales funnel via email marketing.
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Guest blogging:
- This is when bloggers write and publish a guest post on a third party website in order to promote brand awareness. Guest posting is a great SEO technique that can have a positive impact on lead generation to your own site.
2. Driving Traffic to Your Site With TECHNICAL SEO
Agencies from far and wide use an array of plugins and SEO tools (such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, etc.) that can help your online presence. These can either be paid or free tools that are meant to give insight into search rankings, on-page SEO site optimizations available, and technical updates, which are seen as signals to the search engines on whether your website provides the smoothest user experience and is technically-sound for search engine crawlers to find and feature the correct web pages.
There are several signals to look for when it comes to technical SEO. To scratch the surface, webmasters should look into:
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Clean URL structures
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Resolving indexation issues in Google Search Console
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Implementing proper schema markup
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Optimized meta descriptions, title tags, etc.
3. Driving Traffic to Your Site With BACKLINKS
Digital PR is an avenue of SEO that frequently goes unnoticed. A solid link-building strategy is more than a race to get the most backlinks to your site—it’s about getting quality backlinks. It may seem intimidating if you’re going up against a competitor with a large number of referring domains pointing at their URL, but it is far more important to have an array of high domain authority sites to mid-low level authoritative sites linking to yours. It’s about the signal the link sends to the search engines, rating your site as worthy of ranking high in the search engine results page (SERPs).
Conducting a smart link building strategy is key to a successful search engine optimization solution. Here are a few common avenues to get backlinks to your site that will help drive search traffic:
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Local business listings:
- Local business listings are online portfolios that contain information about your business, such as your name, bio, phone number, address, hours of operation, and other pertinent information. Many platforms are free tools (such as Google Local, Yahoo Local, Yelp.com, etc), but users must manually add their information or claim their business. This is perhaps the lowest hanging fruit, but certainly the easiest to score!
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Social media marketing:
- Social media can do more than just humanize your brand and directly connect you to your audience. It’s a common misconception that backlinks from social networks are not as effective, but marketers are seeing more and more use out of it, if done correctly. You can leverage your social media presence for backlinks by utilizing hashtags, hosting giveaways, outreach to influencers and journalists who will promote your brand, and more. Popular social media platforms to target include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube channels, TikTok, and more.
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Guest blogging:
- Once again, guest posting on a third party website not only drives traffic and builds brand awareness, but it is a solid link-building technique. While it takes a bit more time and research than simply submitting your business info to a directory, it will be worth it in the long-run. When performing outreach for your guest post, be sure that the third party site not only properly hyperlinks to your website but also the anchor link is descriptive, such as your websites name or the topic keyword.
NEED HELP? CUSTOM-BUILT SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING SOLUTIONS AT DIGITAL STRIKE
When you optimize your site for search engines by building a robust link profile, easily-navigable site structure, technically-sound SEO, and killer content strategy, Google will display you higher in search results—and searchers will naturally gravitate toward your business.
Need help? Not all solutions are one-size-fits-all, so the above avenues will need to be tweaked to fit your business and brand. What we do at Digital Strike is not JUST drive site traffic, but overall grow your business! Contact us today to build a custom solution that will drive leads, push the needle for your business, and take digital marketing efforts to the next level.
Kelly Hebron
Learn more about Kelly Hebron
