Imagine yourself on a beautiful beach or at a high peak with a lovely view. You take a selfie with that lovely backdrop and upload it on social media. However, once you do, you see only 2-3 likes on it. How will you feel? Disappointed, right? Wait, it gets worse. You see another person, not necessarily your friend, take a similar selfie. That is where you get blown away by the fact that the pic received millions of likes and shares. How would you feel? What was so special about that person or that picture?
This is the same feeling an individual or business who is maintaining a website feels. No reach, no views, less awareness or coverage yet their competitor’s website is the talk of the town. Like really… what is so special about that website?
The answer is simple, the individual or the business followed certain parameters that has led to the wide coverage and awareness of their website. This has led to increased readability, sales, customers and profits.
Now the question is what are those parameters or tips that they followed to boost traffic? Well, let us discuss about them.
MARKETING
You have created a website and now it is live. No doubt, you are bound to be happy about it. However, few days or a month after building it, you check and see that there are no visitors and absolutely no traffic. It is nil. What went wrong? Simple, lack of awareness among people. To how many people have you communicated about your website? What have you done in the past few days to increase reach on your website? Practically nothing? Too bad.
Marketing your website is the first big step after building it. If you are running a business, it is obvious you have visiting cards that are given to customers. Have the link of your website printed on your visiting card. Use marketing sites like google ads or Bing ads to market your website link.
Using google or bing ads are an amazing and powerful way of increasing reach or awareness. People have seen increased sales, profitability and readership due to the effectiveness of a google or bing campaign. Moreover, the ad campaigns are entirely based on your budget. It is up to you to decide how much you want to pay and for how many days or months you want to run the campaign. Also, you pay only when the campaign ends and you can stop the ad campaign whenever you want and pay only for the time the campaign was running.
Talk to people about your website. Communication is the key. As a businessman, whenever you go for any presentation or you have sold a product, make it a point to tell your customer to visit your website for more information. Have the link pasted on your laptop or on the shopping bag for people to see.
USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media is a powerful tool for increasing awareness of your business or your individual profile. Sadly, very few people know about this power or are unaware of how to use it. You cannot deny the fact that people are glued to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, and this is the prime reason why businesses world over have tapped that potentiality resulting in massive brand awareness.
How to tap that potential? Both Facebook and Instagram have the option to create a profile page for business and other activities. Once you create a page, you can use this page to promote your website, your products or services, and about yourself and your business. Gaining followers on those pages are one way of increasing brand consciousness. The pages can be easily linked to your website and in turn you can have widgets for both the social media sites on your website for further reach.
YouTube is another tool for brand awareness. It not only gives the option of linking to your website but if well utilized can also increase traffic on your website. Creating short videos on the products or services that you sell is one way of increasing reach and when creating a video, you can provide the link of your website encouraging people to visit the same to know more about your products or services.
SEO – SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
SEO is the talk of town when it comes to website and app traffic. Following certain parameters in terms of proper use of text fonts, usage of low size but high-quality images, relevancy of information posted or communicated… all these ensures that your website has the capability to keep the concerned people interested. For more details on improving SEO, click here => https://www.snagoff.com/blog/top-seo-tips-to-improve-website-ranking-and-boost-traffic/.
BLOGGING
We are all aware of a lot of bloggers who make quite a lot of money out of blogging, podcasting or vlogging. What you also need to know is that a lot of businesses are actually giving blogging a shot by having a blog page on their company website. Why you may ask? I guess you know the answer – INCREASING TRAFFIC.
Let us take an example of a recruitment company. They are involved in assisting companies in terms of recruiting or hiring prospective employees, however, there are prospective employees who are new to this ‘adventure’ of job searching or people who are unsure of how to crack an aptitude test or an interview.
The company can create a blog page that provides information of how to crack an interview. A page can also be created to provide mock question papers for jobseekers trying to crack an aptitude test. What’s more, certain people from the companies itself can be invited to write a page or create a video about their company, their work culture and ethics and their hiring procedure so that interested people can prepare themselves for their job ahead.
You can also be a guest blogger for certain sites which deal with the things that are related to your business too.
For example, if you are a writer running a blog site and you are invited by a leading newspaper or magazine to write an article, this will be a perfect opportunity for you to market your website. Your article can carry the link or address to your blog and sure enough, if your article is a hit, people will want to know more about you resulting in increased traffic to your blogsite.
PARTICIPATING IN FORUMS
Knowledge is power and there are no two thoughts about that. No use in being a walking encyclopedia when you are not even sharing that knowledge.
Now, if you think you can start a blog and share your knowledge, that is definitely a noble idea but again, the real challenge begins – traffic. People need to be aware of your site.
I did speak about marketing your site but there are certain things which do not require a ‘lot’ of money. There are lot of forums or community sites on the internet and people are always looking for answers to questions that even google doesn’t have a proper answer to.
One example would be gaming forums. Certain video games out there require puzzle solving to move to the next area. There are certain players who get stuck on a level and are out of ideas as to how to crack that level to move to the next level.
If you are someone who not only loves playing video games but also have a massive knowledge regarding walkthroughs, why hide that talent?
Make your presence felt on those sites by answering relevant questions.
While answering, you can also provide the link to your website or channel for people to check it out and know more about you.
Be careful though, certain forums or communities limit or do not allow posting such information so be sure to check their policies before doing these activities.
RELEVANCY
Be it searching in google or yahoo, search engines are based on commands that are programmed to give us information equal to or relevant to what you are looking for. Sure, it is fast and no doubt about it but we have had our fair share of information which is totally the opposite of what we are looking for and many a times, outdated information.
Relevancy is an important aspect of website building and updating. The content on your website should be relevant to the current times.
For example, a few days back our locality was facing water shortages. Disturbing, isn’t it but don’t worry, it is resolved (for now, I guess). I curiously checked google for any update regarding this, you will not believe this but I was getting news bits or information that was released 2 years ago. So what if it is government website or news channel, isn’t it a responsibility for them to have the latest update? I did find a latest update which was 2 days ago but that again was not satisfactory.
Your content or information on your website should be periodically checked and updated to make it relevant. Any change in your business policies, have them updated at the earliest on your website. Delay in delivering your products to certain customers, check immediately and have that updated on your site or app to notify them of that delay. Delay from your end and you have a real angry customer all set to register an unnecessary complaint just because you were not paying attention.
You wrote a post on a certain tax policy about a year ago and now, the dept. has made some amends to it, learn about those amendments and immediately have them updated on your blog site. Understand that if a visitor comes to your site and proceeds with his work based on an outdated information, he will not only face a lot of inconvenience but also, blame you for all the trouble. A negative response to your site will lead to decrease in traffic so do not waste time with edits and updates.
PROPER USE OF KEYWORDS
All existing search engines are programmed to search according to what we type. If we type Katrina Kaif, it will show you images of her, her movies, stories or gossips around her. However, if you type just Katrina, the search will be more expansive, you might end up seeing every possible Katrina on this planet including even Hurricane Katrina.
That is the power of a keyword or phrase but again, sadly, a lot of people fail to utilize it too. Your blogsite is a really popular one, however, you noticed that a certain article you wrote has very less views as compared to your other articles.
What could be the problem?
The solution lies in typing a relevant keyword or phrase on google search. You will see that either your post is lying some where in the bottom of the list or doesn’t even come up on search.
The answer is simple – you have not used proper keywords for people to either search your content or be directed to your content.
Keywords or tags are one of the sure shot ways of increasing website traffic. People are constantly searching for something and they are often found playing with words on the search engines to find what is relevant to their search. This is what we need to tap. We cannot read a person’s mind but we sure can understand or gage a person’s behavior on the internet.
Having adequate number of keywords listed or entered for your content or page ensures that the person searching for that information is more likely to reach your page before any other page. Make sure that the keywords are relevant to the post or site to avoid any misconceptions and negativity among your prospective readers or clients.
RAPPORT WITH YOUR VISITORS
People are visiting your site and that is a good sign but your site is still not a person. It is just a tool or program of texts and images to lure a prospective customer or reader. Your website represents you but it doesn’t talk for you.
Let us say you are into food delivery business. An order has been received, it has been confirmed and the delivery was done without any hassles. You are in the believe that everything went well and you got a customer who may order again but no, there is no response from that person again.
You wonder why?
That is when you check your feedback or comments page after like a month or so. The customer has given low rating for the quality of food.
You are selling stuff to the customer but your job doesn’t end there. If you want customers to come back to your shop or your site, you will have to go beyond it. Customer feedback is the perfect report card for any business trying to survive in this competitive market. A lot of businesses actually have a team of aftersales representatives who look into feedbacks or complaints and ensures that immediate redressal is done.
It is ok to make an error in terms of quality or service but it is definitely not ok to ignore it. If a customer has a complaint, get to the root of it and solve it. Be proactive by constantly checking the feedback page for anything that needs attention. However, it is not just about solving errors or issues, gratitude is way of good living. Make adequate efforts to thank the customers for giving you an opportunity to serve them. Rating systems are an in-thing now and is used by various organizations to gage their performance. Low ratings lead to low business.
THINK OF NEW IDEAS
Don’t be angry if I say that there is no hard and fast rule for increasing traffic after I have mentioned a lot of stuff before. Those are certain things that business or individuals do to gain a foothold in the market. The important thing is to develop new ideas of increasing traffic.
Encourage people to refer your website and have unique case prizes for the same. If you are running a channel on YouTube or Facebook, encourage people to subscribe to them and make it a point to thank them if they do. People who livestream actually go to far lengths in mentioning the name of the person who subscribed or donated.
Old techniques of handing out pamphlets or visiting cards are still relevant provided you are ready to incur cost of the same. Mix things up a little to ensure awareness and reach. Don’t remain stagnant. Successful people constantly find new ideas to stay in the race, the rest just disappear because of stagnation.
