Whether you’re just starting out with your website, or a seasoned WordPress professional, I can bet increasing your website traffic is always a good thing. If you are looking for some easy short-term boosts in numbers, simply throw some money at an ad campaign and see numbers jump.
But if you’re looking to boost your numbers organically, and in the long-term, here are just four steps that will make that happen.
Step 1 Know your audience
The key to getting more traffic to your site is to match your content, voice and messaging to the people you want to come. In order to do this, the more you know about your target audience the better. Consider the following points when completing this step.
Build Personas
Have a clear picture of who you are marketing, and therefore, talking to. What are their pain points and what problem are you solving for them? Bookmark this complete guide for defining your personas after reading this article.
Know the Competition
Knowing who else is bidding for your audience’s attention is a crucial part of knowing your audience. Use your awareness of the competition to differentiate yourself and make your website standout more.
Social Listening
Utilize the access social media gives you to your audience. What are they saying about your website (and your competition’s)? Social Listening allows you to obtain more granular data into your target market preferences and to use the information to optimize your online marketing strategy. Better understanding your audience will create the opportunity for you to create more valuable content for them too. This is important for the next step of increasing traffic to your website.
Step 2 Build your Brand Awareness
Now that you have a clear or more refined grasp on who your audience is, it’s time to start inserting your brand into their awareness. Awareness campaigns are the crux of most major brands and websites. You don’t need to plaster ads on local busses to get your audience’s attention (although you can), you don’t even need a huge ad spend budget. Here are some free ways to build your brand awareness.
Content Marketing
Of course, we put content marketing at the top here. Create content of value for your target audience (you should know what that is after studying them in step 1), this will be sure to gain you engagement. You don’t have to stick to one form of content, think podcasts, infographics, video, TikToks! Get creative and meet your audience where they are (in a natural way).
Guest Posting
Some websites might welcome you to post a guest article on their sites, if they think their readers would gain value from what you have to share. Usually in a guest post, you can leave a link back to your website, this will give readers the opportunity to “meet” you and your site for the first time.
Social Media Competitions
Get your brand name out there by running a social media contest with a giveaway related to your website and which might interest your target audience. This is a great way to drum up engagement, build brand awareness and to boost traffic to your website. (It’s also fun for the winner!)
Step 3 Acquire
Once you have gained more awareness for your brand within your target group, you will see higher click-through rates on your posts and content. This is when you see the rewards of your hard work in step 1 and step 2 above.
But just as I said in the introduction, you want high-quality leads who will come back for more. So bring people to your site with the goal of ‘converting’ them to an email subscriber, a customer, or a member of your website, product or service.
Consider your CTAs wisely, so that your new found user is likely to come back for more.
Step 4 Engage
Keep engaging with your visitors, current subscribers, and past customers. It costs the average company 5 times more to acquire new customers than it does to retain existing ones. So don’t forget about your subscriber list and keep your users involved. This is sure to keep them interested in coming back to your website.
As well as engaging with people who have already taken action on your website, you should also engage with your data. Pay attention to where the bulk of your traffic is coming from. Are they coming from guest posts, a particular social media platform or posts, a particular ad campaign, or through organic searches; what are your users searching for? Understanding your users, the cost of acquiring them and where your efforts are best spent will lead you to a solid framework for future and ongoing marketing efforts.
Final Thoughts
Traffic to your site isn’t the most important thing, it’s about what you do with the traffic that counts. Pay attention to how your users are behaving once they do get onto your site. Use this data to make improvements and thus attract more of the right user.
When in doubt, always come back to step 1: Know Your Audience.