With millions of websites out there, getting users to navigate to your website can be quite a challenge.
While you can spend hours designing the perfect website, if people aren’t able to find it or don’t know that your website exists, your efforts will go to waste. Your website development and marketing strategy is one of the most important documents you’ll create for your business. It outlines how you will go about sending a targeted audience to your website, market your products or services and get them to convert. Your website plays a leading role in the growth of your business.
9 Ways to drive more traffic to your WordPress site
Below are some of the most effective ways to send targeted traffic directly to your site and keep them coming back.
Take advantage of social media
Every online user is registered on one or more social media platforms. It’s one of the best ways to not only create awareness and reach a targeted audience but it’s a great place to share your content, position yourself as an industry expert and promote your products and services. Placing social sharing buttons on your site means visitors can also share your content with their friends and family, and further extend your reach.
Search engine optimization still matters
Your website needs to tick all of the right SEO boxes if you want it to succeed. Creating a sitemap, ensuring search engines can access your website and inserting metadata into the header of your site are just some of the steps that you should be taking if you want visitors to find your site. It’s also important to optimize your content and images before you upload them to your WordPress site. There are some great plugins such as Yoast than can help make this process a lot easier.
Create valuable content
Not only will detailed, valuable content position your brand as an industry expert but it will also encourage search engine bots to crawl your site on a regular basis, and in turn boost your rankings. Creating content also gives you something to share on social media and include in your newsletters in order to drive more traffic to your site.
Utilize rich snippets
Rich snippets add additional metadata to your site so that search engines can display your site differently in their results. Rich snippets can display reviews, ratings or images instead of just the regular text result. It helps search engines better understand the content on your site, gets your brand in front of a more targeted audience and help you stand out from the competition.
Become a guest blogger
When an online visitor reads and enjoys your content, they will make an effort to find more of it. Becoming a guest blogger will help increase your brand’s reach. Include a link to your website in your bio or in the content itself to drive more visitors to your WordPress site.
Grow your email list
By sending out a regular newsletter or an email about an upcoming sale, you’re giving visitors a reason to click through to your website. By encouraging visitors to sign up to your email list you’ll have the opportunity to drive more traffic to your website in the future.
Practice internal linking
Encourage visitors to spend more time on your website by showing them more content that they might find interesting. Link keywords and phrases in your posts to related content in order to increase the amount of time a visitor spends on your website. This tactic can really help boost your monthly pageviews.
Throw a few videos into the mix
Did you know that YouTube has reported a 100% increase in video consumption every year? If you have the right skills and a few good ideas, developing video content can increase your traffic numbers quite considerably.
Improve your website’s speed
If you’re successfully sending people to your website but they can’t access your content due to slow site speeds, you’re losing out on a lot of potential business. A fast site will also send good signals to search engines so it’s in your best interest to test your website’s speed on a regular basis so that you can improve it if need be.
