If you run a website, you almost certainly want it to get more traffic. After all, why else would you run the site? Whether you operate a business website, a personal blog, an online store, a community organization page, or just about any other sort or website, getting more traffic to your site is likely one of your goals.
How do you get more traffic to your website? It’s a common question and it’s one that doesn’t have a simple answer. There are many ways to increase website traffic. Here are three of the most important factors.
Social Media
Social media remains an important way to get more website traffic. If you have great content and you share this content on social media, this gives your website greater reach online. More people will be able to find out about your site and this will improve your traffic.
Posting content on social media also allows you to gain “social signals.” Social signals are interactions with your content such as likes, shares, comments, etc.
Some studies have shown that social signals can improve traffic to a website. For instance, if popular and relevant accounts are sharing your content, this may improve your website’s authority with search engines and that could boost your search ranking. However, even if social signals do not directly improve your search rankings, they can still increase your website traffic. Having popular accounts sharing your content brings more eyeballs to you page, which is great!
Website Content
Above all, website content is one of the most important factors when it comes to getting more traffic to your website. In fact, it may be the most important factor. Not only is great content more likely to be shared and linked to, but it also helps search engines understand your page.
Search engines like Google can “read” your content and doing this helps it recognize what your site is about, rank the authority of your site, and classify it appropriately.
However, good web content is written for users. It is there to answer questions, provide information, understand your website, and provide value. If your content fulfills these needs, search engines will like it, it will likely rank more highly, and your website traffic will improve.
That isn’t to say that on-site SEO isn’t important. It certainly is. Writing in a clear and straightforward manner – and formatting your content so that it can easily be read by search engines as well as human users – is critical.
If you have great content, you will increase traffic to your website.
Links
While “link building” has fallen out of favour in many circles, getting relevant links to your website still matters. The more relevant and high-quality links that you have pointing to your site, the more search engines will consider your site an authority. This will improve its ranking.
However, the links pointing to your site have to be relevant and they have to be natural. If you try to “cheat the system” by getting links from anywhere and anyone, Google (and other search engines) may consider this suspicious and that could lower your ranking. Even if that doesn’t happen, if the links to your site are coming from all over the map, they’re likely not helping Google classify or rank your site and they’re certainly not helping you attract the vistors you’re looking for.
Think of it this way. If you’re running a recipe website and most of the links pointing to your page are coming from other recipe sites, food blogs, restaurants, etc. and if these sites are all high-quality sites, that could be a big benefit. However, if the links are all coming from a random combination of mechanics, doctors, shoe stores, hockey teams, tool manufacturers, and other irrelevant sites, these links won’t help as much.
How do you get links to your website? One of the best ways is to have high-quality content. If you write informative and interesting articles, blogs, etc. and share them on social media and otherwise promote them, other relevant and high-quality websites will link to you.
As you can see, one key component to getting more traffic to your site is website content. Great website content is crucial. If you want to improve your website traffic and need some help writing this content, please contact us.