Guide To Generating & Converting Traffic On Your Website
Feeling like you’re working hard but getting little to no traffic on your website? Or are you getting traffic, but your conversion rate is low? You’re not alone.
One thing that entrepreneurs and digital marketers crave is traffic and sales, yet it’s the one thing that can be hard to get. You need to know what to do to get your website noticed by the right people. This article will guide you through getting traffic from Google and other search engines and boosting your conversion rates to record actual sales from your traffic.
1. Understand Your Customer
You might have seen this everywhere and probably are thinking, “not again!” but don’t go yet; this is as important as creating a great product. Knowing your target audience is a principle in marketing.
If you create a great product but don’t understand your customer down to what makes them tick, you will market your product to the wrong audience or market your product in a way that would make the right audience hate you. You don’t want that.
Here’s what to do:
Identify your buyer persona.
How do you do that? Here’s a method:
- Do a Google search to find out who would likely use your product or service.
- Talk to people around you and note down their opinions.
- If you have already had sales, note down the characteristics of the clients that bought from you.
- Check forums like Reddit and even large competitors’ comments. For example, Amazon reviews or Starbucks Instagram comments. Look out for people leaving meaningful comments and check their profiles.
When you’re done with that, create a spreadsheet:
- Write a fictional name.
- Write the location and age based on what you have seen so far. The location should be an area you can sell in/to.
- Write their pain point as it concerns your solution.
- Write their goals or expectations.
That’s your persona. Start with that. Your buyer persona makes up who you would like to sell to the most. Building your buyer persona you with writing content that targets the exact problem that persona is having. Given that you get that information from research, you will hit the bullseye or end up close — which is good.
Here’s an in-depth guide on building personas and using buyer personas in marketing.
2. Do SEO Right
I see this often: people thinking SEO is about writing articles with specific keywords repeated a certain number of times. Sadly, many local businesses make this mistake. SEO isn’t about that. That might be the reason you’re not getting traffic.
There are four parts to SEO; technical SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and local SEO. You need to know them to do them right. You can either watch countless Youtube videos and work with them or go to Udemy or any other platform to get an SEO course that covers all those aspects.
Here’s a checklist on some parts of SEO you need to do:
* Perform an SEO audit using a tool like Ubersuggest or SEMrush to find the errors on your website.
- Fix all the errors based on the suggestions in those tools
- Pay attention to the warnings. Fix any that you can.
* Optimize your website speed and performance.
- Run your website through Google Lighthouse in Chrome or Google PageSpeed Insights
- From the results, you will see what needs to be optimized
- Depending on what website platform you’re using or if your website is custom-coded, your options here would differ. If it’s custom-coded, contact your web developer. If you built it on WordPress, there are plugins that can help such as W3 Total Cache, Autoptimize, and Imagify.
* Analyze your competitors’ websites with an SEO tool (SEMrush, Ahrefs, are good here. There are also a ton of others).
- Look out for the content that’s drawing in the most traffic.
- Check the pages that link to them.
- Look at the keywords they rank for.
* Run keyword research on the top keyword drawing in traffic for your competitors.
- Look at the related keywords and synonyms. Pick those with high volume and low difficulty to target.
- For each keyword you pick, run content research using a tool like Surfer or Page Optimizer Pro to check for semantically related words.
* Write high-quality content
- Use the keyword in the last step while writing content. They should give you a guide on the questions that the top-ranking content is answering.
- When writing content, aim to be the highest in quality. Look at the top-ranking content. What areas did they not include? What areas were included in one content but not the next? Take all those missing pieces and gaps and include them in yours.
- Reach out to some of the websites linking to those top-ranking content to let them know yours is the most accurate and recent. Don’t be arrogant about it and note that this may not work if you are not a well-known or high traffic site.
- Create a pillar content that your other content links to.
- Organize the content on your website around a topic, which ideally should be about or relate to what you do. For example, if you run a hairstyling company, your pillar content could be around understanding hair types, how that affects styling, and how to style and protect each type — then building other content like best hair products that can link to that.
*For local businesses, be on all relevant directories, including Google My Business.
- Create profiles on those directories
- Focus on keywords that have your location when doing keyword research for your product or service page.
Build a good link building strategy.
- Reach out to relevant blogs and websites to publish guest posts. I have found that SEMrush is great here; you can also try Ahrefs.
- Try to get links in roundup post.
- Consider sponsored link building if you don’t have so many links. They have a higher success rate because you’re paying for them.
- After a while, you can start chasing after abroken link building and replacement link building.
3. Use Offline Marketing: Put Your URL on Everything
Digital marketing is the thing now, but that doesn’t take away the relevance of offline marketing. Yes, traditional marketing is not dead, contrary to what you might have read.
Place your URL on everything from stationeries to product packaging, mailing labels, billboards, radio ads, presentations, business cards, everything. When you go on networking events, point out that URL in your business card.
The opportunities in offline marketing can be a quality source of website traffic, leads, and sales. Never ignore them. Your target audience doesn’t live online only. There are so many ways to merge your offline marketing efforts with your digital.
4. Build A Winning Social Media Strategy
Social media is more than just posting online. Many brands do this, which is why they don’t get success or can’t tell if they are getting results from social media.
First, check if the social media platforms you are on are the right ones for your audience. Based on your buyer persona research, you can get insights into what platforms they visit more. Also, check your current results. What platform has produced the best results so far? Results here being actual engagements and sales/leads?
Secondly, build a strategy that focuses on showing you as a great brand. To do that, focus on your industry knowledge and customer stories. Showcase how well you know what you do in pictures and videos. Show how well your customers love you through user-generated content and videos/images from your customers.
You can also build relationships with non-competing brands by reposting their social media posts or sharing their blogs on your social media. The companies that you should focus on here are those that your products or services can be used together, for example web development and graphics design. You can also look at those that you could gain things from, like links.
Be consistent in publishing quality content, and use good tactics. If humor isn’t part of your brand tone, use it sometimes, at least. You’re dealing with humans, not robots.
5. Consider Strategic Paid Advertising
Want to drive quick traffic? Paid advertising is still the way. It’s more than just running an ad through Google or Facebook, though. Your ads have to be targeted down to the caption on your visuals.
Build a concept around your target and product. Do your targeting based on the details in your buyer persona. Run remarketing ads; create content around the points your targets left off. Monitor your ads and optimize based on performance.
6. Optimize Your Website For Conversions
To convert the traffic you are bringing in, you need to do conversion optimization on your website. In doing that, focus on website optimization and user experience.
Your website needs to be easy on the eye. If you are not good with website design, don’t design your website yourself. If you have already, get a website designer or someone that understands design to evaluate your website.
Your website shouldn’t be filled with content on every section. Have lots of space as well; white is great; for some brands, black works. Ensure your website loads fast. Remove all unnecessary features.
Take out those many pop-ups if you have more than one on a page. Too many can annoy customers. Ensure that in your pop up, the close button is visible.
Make your contact links visible across all pages, your contact link or book an appointment link can be in your main menu. Also, always use call to actions that call to those contact options. Have a quick response option like a live chat and always have someone that can respond immediately.
If your live chat app has bot automation, even better. With a live chat app like Tidio, you can set welcome messages, abandoned cart discussion sequences, blog reading to subscription sequences, and so on.
Create an in-depth guide or tool that can serve as a lead magnet to get emails. If you’re in e-commerce, you could make it fun by going with a wheel of fortune or a welcome discount from a live chatbot.
Getting the traffic and sales that you want doesn’t have to be frustrating. You can do it. The most important things are understanding your ideal buyer, knowing what to do around marketing, building a great strategy, and implementing that strategy.
Generating Traffic and Improving Your Conversion Rate Is About Consistency Along With The Right Tactics
You may know the right tactics, but you might not see results in your conversion rates or your clicks or traffic from Google and other search engines if you are not consistent.
Therefore, it’s important that you build a great digital marketing strategy that considers all your marketing areas, including your social media, paid search, paid social advertising, search engine optimization, sales funnel, and email marketing.
Build a strategy that’s custom-tailored to your needs as a company and place your customers and content at the forefront if you want to get those clicks from Google and other sources, and improve your conversion rates so that you get actual purchases on your website or convert leads that bring in money for your company.