8 Things You Can Do For Web Traffic This Weekend

Traffic this Weekend

So you want more traffic?

Let me guess.

Your product or service is awesome and if you could just get more traffic, all would be right with the world?

Well the truth is there are many factors that determine your success online. Generating website traffic is only one of them.

That being said, traffic is important. Your website and business won’t survive without a steady flow of targeted traffic.

However, the problem is most people just cross their fingers and hope for more visitors. As the saying goes, hope is not a strategy.

It doesn’t really need to be so hard.

In fact, I’m going to share 8 techniques you can implement over the weekend that will help you tap into some of that traffic that’s slipping through your fingers and get results right away.

You’re about to learn…

Why Most Website Owners Are Doing It Wrong

Generating traffic to your site and converting that traffic into sales can definitely be tricky.

Do you ever wonder what everyone else is doing to get tons of traffic? What are they doing that you’re not? Don’t get caught in that trap.

Consider: They could have millions of dollars to spend on paid traffic. It’s a better use of your time to develop your own strategy that’s tailor-made for your situation.

In fact, [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”@smedio” suffix=””]most people marketing online make one critical mistake when it comes to getting traffic[/inlinetweet]. And that one mistake hampers all of their efforts.

They don’t have a plan.

Think I’m mistaken?

According to a MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey 68% of B2B organizations have not identified their funnel.

If you don’t know how you can bring leads into your business, then how can you convert them into customers?

And like the old saw says, [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”@smedio” suffix=””]“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”[/inlinetweet]

If you don’t develop a solid plan for generating leads, you won’t have a “roadmap” to follow as you execute your marketing. This can lead to you jumping from tactic to tactic without seeing any results.

Once you decide to plan, the impossible task of increasing traffic becomes manageable. The big picture vision lets you break the tasks down into steps that you can tackle one at a time.

Here’s what I mean.

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”@smedio” suffix=””]Driving web traffic is a form of lead generation.[/inlinetweet] What this all boils down to is:  What are you doing to get people interested in you and your business? Mapping out your marketing funnel and strategically planning how to attract the right kind of traffic should be the first step in any digital marketing campaign.

I’ll tell you something…

You Are Not Alone 

There’s a simple reason most marketers struggle with traffic.

They don’t have a well-defined plan for driving leads to their business. And effective marketing requires a strategy.

When you think strategically you don’t get excited just because 10,000 people visited your page. Especially if 9,999 of them weren’t your demographic and left immediately.

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”@smedio” suffix=””]Taking some time to refine your digital marketing strategy now will pay off in spades down the road.[/inlinetweet]

One other thing: Once you get some traffic coming to your website, your ultimate goal should be converting that traffic into sales.

That’s why you can’t rely on the latest gimmick. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”@smedio” suffix=””]If you want to send a steady stream of traffic to your website, fly-by-night strategies aren’t the answer.[/inlinetweet] You can’t “game” the search engines as a long-term business strategy.

Not only that. Reports indicate that many businesses have increased their digital marketing budget this year. If you want to reach more customers, you’ve got some stiff competition.

So you’ll be glad to know…

You Don’t Have To Be a Fortune 500 Company To Be Get More Traffic

It’s important that your company be found at the top of search results. If you aren’t, you’ll be losing a lot of potential revenue. It’s also likely you can’t go dollar for dollar with the “big guys” when it comes to buying traffic outright. When outbidding your competitors isn’t an option, you have to turn to other measures. That’s why search engine optimization, or SEO is so important.

Did you know that:

  • 44% of online shoppers begin by using a search engine
  • 33% of traffic from Google organic search results go the first item listed
  • 60% of all organic clicks go to the top three organic search results
  • 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.

Now I’d like to emphasize something here.  [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”@smedio” suffix=””]70% of the links search users click on are organic, not paid.[/inlinetweet] That means that a big budget is not the deciding factor here.

Now the specifics: Here are 8 different techniques you can implement this weekend to get more traffic.

Here’s What You Should Do

Since we agree that most web traffic is driven by the major search engines—Google, Bing and Yahoo!—and that search engines provide targeted traffic, a.k.a. “people looking for what you offer”, it stands to reason that search engine optimization can be an effective strategy to get more traffic.

And get this: you won’t rank well if you ignore SEO.

So, follow these 8 tips you can implement right away to help you boost your website traffic.

1. Don’t skip the first step

You’ve probably heard over and over again how important keyword research is to traffic generation. But did you listen? What are the specific keywords that your potential customers are typing into the search engines?  If you want to get more traffic, attention and higher rankings you need to know exactly how people find your site. That means investing the time to come up with a few carefully targeted keywords. This will help you focus on a well-defined market sub-segment or niche. Don’t forget about long-tail keywords. They are less competitive to rank for organically and typically account for the majority of search-driven traffic. There are plenty of tools you can use for keyword research, both free and paid.

2. Step up your local SEO

One way smaller businesses can even the playing field is by taking advantage of local search. Local search marketing is highly targeted and most businesses aren’t up to speed with this aspect of online marketing. Incorporate local keywords into your marketing. Claim your Google Places local listing as well as Yahoo Local, and Bing Places. List your business in relevant online business directories and encourage online reviews from sites like Yelp.

3. Make your bait piece more compelling

If you’re offering an “ethical bribe” to attract site traffic, consider offering visitors even more value. Take a look at what other successful websites are offering and compare what you offer. For example, Smedio offers subscribers a free course, “Effective Digital Marketing in 5 Days” and a surprise bonus. That’s leveraging the power of reciprocity and curiosity. Does your bait piece cut the mustard?

4. Optimize your images

Most websites make poor use of their images. You can  better by using your images’ ALT tags to write descriptions and engaging captions and adding file name attributions wherever you can. Once you know how to optimize your images for search traffic, you’ll have a leg up on the competition.

5. Leverage internal links

Internal linking is simply linking one page of your site with another page of your site. This practice helps you gain link juice, rank for your keywords, and helps your visitors navigate your website. One way to use internal links is to add a “related post” link to each post on your website. Not only will this upgrade your site indexing, it boosts reader engagement by offering visitors more content that interests them. You can also link to your old blog posts in the new posts you publish.

6. Create content that drives traffic

If you want to drive traffic to your website, content is the fastest way to get people to pay attention to you. Write a guest blog post for a popular blog. Create a slideshow, video, infographic or some other visual content that is topical and closely related to your industry or niche. Useful, entertaining content that’s easy to share can send a lot of traffic your way.

7. Make sure your website is “SEO-friendly”

Spend an hour or two doing some spring cleaning. Sloppy code will make it hard for you to rank well so remove bad links and fix any HTML errors you find. Double-check all of your title tags and meta descriptions. Get rid of any duplicate content. Remember that your most important content should be in HTML text format so it can be easily indexed by search engines.

8. Play nice with the search engines

Just like their real-life counterparts, search engine “spiders” aren’t that smart. If you want them to crawl your website and find the content that will ultimately attract visitors, you need to help them out a little. A few ways you can do this are building a sitemap and video sitemap and setting up video thumbnails. You can also enable Google authorship, or a “rich snippet”, and link your content to your Google profile. This will cause your face to show up in search results.

Getting more traffic to your website raises the number of prospective customers you can sell your products or services to. Reap the benefits of these 8 white-hat SEO best practices to get more traffic from search engines.

Question: How many of these 8 tactics are you going to put into action over the weekend? Let me know by leaving a comment below.

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