The number of websites on the internet has doubled in the past five years and now exceeds 1.7 billion. Making your site stand out in this extremely crowded field can be difficult, but spending a little time doing so is worthwhile and can yield great results. Here we will explore some of the ways that you can increase traffic to your site.
Advertising
Advertising is perhaps the most obvious method of getting traffic to your site. If you have money to spare, paid ads (which can be purchased through Google, Facebook, and other sites) can be very effective, as long as you take some time to target them to your chosen demographic (tools such as Google Analytics can really help you with this).
Make sure that these ads are appearing on sites that are relevant to your target audience, otherwise, they are not likely to be effective. An effectively targeted ad can hugely increase traffic to your site.
Use Social Media
If you do not have the budget for a paid advertising strategy, all is not lost – many social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram enable you to create profiles for free. However, you will still need to put in the hours to get the most out of social media. You should post regular content and engage directly with other social media users.
If you are looking for inspiration on how to use social media effectively to promote your site, check out these 5 epic social media campaigns that businesses used to increase traffic.
Another useful thing that social media can do is enable you to check out what your competitors are doing. Take some time to learn what is working for them and what isn’t. You can also use social media to comment on current events and use hashtags that can bring you your profile to the attention of users who would otherwise not have come across it.
Get SEO-Savvy
SEO, or search engine optimization, is essentially the practice of learning how best to use the algorithms of search engines such as Google to put your site higher up the search rankings for specific terms. SEO is an entire science that we can barely scratch the surface of here, but thankfully, there are many tips, guides, and tutorials online that can help you make the most of it!
Write Engaging Headlines
When it comes down to it, you can use all these clever tips and tricks, but it won’t help you a great deal if users just aren’t interested in reading your content. Hooking in potential site visitors often comes down to one thing: a headline.
While SEO is often an important factor in your headlines, it is also very important to make sure that the headline itself sparks the reader’s interest. Checking out websites such as Buzzfeed can provide plenty of inspiration – its headlines are concise, descriptive enough to let you know what the topic is, yet almost always feature something that makes you want to find out more.
There you have it: four easy ways to increase traffic to your site.