How to Increase Website Traffic?

If you have a website, then you must always wonder how to increase and grow your online presence – how to route more traffic to your website and become famous and make your opinion on different matters heard to a wider audience. Websites are the new influencers and many companies leverage their websites to promote their products. However, all this is going to be true for you only if you can increase the awareness of your website among the internet public.

In this article, we will be going over several detailed and much-needed tips to increase the awareness of your website and its content among netizens and increase website traffic to your site to expand your business or for your self-employment.

Table of Contents

What is Website Traffic?

Website traffic is the amount of visitors and visits (sessions) a website receives or in simple words, website traffic is the number of people visiting your website. Here, traffic refers to the users who visits a website. For example, when you visit a website, the communication which happens between your desktop/laptop/mobile and the website server constitute the Website traffic.

This metric is a common way of measuring the popularity or effectiveness of any website. Although there are many other metrics also involved when measuring any website popularity, website traffic is the important metric as this tells how many real users are visiting a particular site.

Now, traffic does not always mean that it is generated by users (human beings) only. Artificial traffic ( non-human traffic) can be generated by using bots. The traffic generated by bots is useful for testing purposes but to measure the popularity of any website, it is important to remove the bots traffic while measurement.

Also, there can be more than one source of traffic such as direct traffic, organic traffic (often known as free traffic), referral, paid and social traffic. Organic is the most popular source of traffic for most of the websites as it is free and highly targeted and if used correctly can give you good profits as well. For eCommerce and Real estates websites, direct traffic is considered more valuable.

Some important terms related to Website traffic

Many people think that visitors, views, visits are all same thing but that is not correct. It’s important to know the correct meaning of all the terms from the start so that you can correctly check your traffic data and make informed decisions.

1. Page views: Whenever a browser loads your website, a page view is recorded in Google Analytics. It means even if a single user reloads the same page of your website, then that would be recorded as two page views. In simple words, whenever the tracking code is loaded in the browser, a page view is recorded. This metric helps in understanding the behavior of users on any site.
2. Visits: A visit is something which is recorded whenever someone visits your website from a referring source and even if the user visits multiple pages of the site, it will be counted as only one visit. That is why usually pageview counts are higher than the visits count.
3. Sessions: A session is the period time a user is actively engaged with your website. All usage data (Screen Views, Events, etc.) is associated with a session.
4. Average visit duration: This is the total time spent by users on your site or the average length of a Session. And higher average visit duration is always better as it means that your users are more interested in your site.
5. Bounce rate: The percentage of single-page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page. A bounced session has a duration of 0 seconds.
6. Returning vs New Users: A new user is someone who has never visited your site before while a returning visitor has visited your site in the past. (Google Analytics uses cookies to track this so, this report is not very accurate as if a person visits your site from desktop and then on their mobile phones, then they will be recorded as new visitors and not as returning visitor).

Measurement of Website Traffic

When someone visits a site, their computer communicates with that site’s server. Every website have at least one web page and every web page is made up of many different distinct files. Whenever the files are served, a hit gets recorded.

A single web page can result in multiple hits as every web page has multiple files (images etc.). Whenever a visitor visits any site, at least one page view is generated but more page views can be generated if the visitor visits multiple pages in a single visit.

Website traffic measurement and monitoring is very vital to every online business success. It’s important as by analyzing the statistics of visitors, it is possible to see how the site is performing and how can it be improved. By studying the website traffic reports, you can optimize your website and provide the best possible experience to your visitors while maximizing the revenue.

Advantages of having a high website traffic

There are millions of active websites present on the Internet today and if you want to get results from your websites like business leads or sales, earning more money etc. it’s very important to have traffic on the website and high traffic means more leads, sales or money.

Note: What are the three most important things a website needs to be successful? “Traffic, traffic, and traffic”.

If your site is not having traffic then it just cannot survive for too long. That being said, there are many advantages of having a website with high traffic such as:

1. More traffic means more revenue.
2. Targeted traffic or people who are interested in what you are offering through your website are more likely to stay with you and/or your business and also refer your website to others as well.
3. More traffic means more brand awareness and more exposure for your website.
4. Other than making money, more website traffic, in the long run, can allow you to expand your business and your business profits, hire more employees, increase your offerings (products or services), open new locations etc.
5. If you have a blog then with higher website traffic you can get sponsored posts, direct advertisers, and ultimately more profits.
6. Conversions, sales, and traffic are related. You just cannot get more sales or conversions without traffic so, with high website traffic, conversions and sales both increases.

How to Increase Website Traffic?

1) Use Social Media

Social is what Email used to be in the old days. People don’t subscribe to newsletters anymore, they would much prefer it if the news showed up by itself on their Facebook Newsfeed.  You have to take advantage of this trend.

Link your website to Facebook by creating a page and grow a following there. Share snippets of your website posts on this page and as your following grows and as your posts are shared and reshared, the number of viewers on your website will grow. Also, be sure to include a Facebook share button on your website posts so that readers can share an interesting article directly on their own timelines, thereby generating even more traffic for you.

You can make use of other social media sites like Twitter and YouTube as well. The goal is to reroute the traffic from these popular sites to your own website. You can advertise on Twitter and Facebook and even make short videos on your posts which you can upload on your YouTube Channel and include the more detailed website post as a link in the description. People who like your video will definitely check out your article.

2) Invest Time

If you are serious about your website posts, if your website represents your passion and – most importantly – if your website is the tool by which you want to earn a living for yourself, then you cannot bypass this step. Remember, that a half-hearted effort is worse than no effort at all as it involves lots of time and energy but does not produce expected results.

So take your time and plan out your first few website posts. Take the time and effort to study your target audience and the type of articles they follow and like, take the detailed note of their tastes and preferences and their relative attention span as compared to content.

Remember that you are not the only one with a website on a given subject, but one of the thousands who is rehashing the same news or headline. Hence, it is very important that you cater to exactly what the audience expects and then take your time to deliver it.

3) Advertise your Expertise

It is always better to establish yourself as an expert in your field from the start. People love experts as nowadays almost everyone with the Internet connection and a laptop starts a blog and the quality of content present online is going down… so if the audience gets to see your expertise on a particular topic then that results in trust and more traffic.

4) Don’t Be a Loner

As you are own and maintain a website, you are basically trying to reach out to people through your content. This means that – by definition – you cannot be a loner. You need to socialize with other companies in your niche and even with those who are outside your own product niche. You need to engage with them, comment on their posts and even respond to their articles with your own if you agree or disagree with what they wrote.

Try to collaborate with them if possible on a series of articles or posts. If you are engaging with more popular website owners in this manner it will increase your chances of being noticed by them as well as by their audience and create awareness about the kind of work you are doing.

5) Specialise

We know that writing may be your passion and maybe you want to write about everything that catches your eye, but if you want to increase awareness about your website, then you need to earn people’s respect for your opinions – something that will never happen unless they view you as an expert in one particular field. All the most popular owners of websites and other social media influencers specialize in a particular field and generate content only about that one field.

So it’s important for you to find an area in which you are comfortable and can carry on writing about for the foreseeable future, then make that your specialization. As soon as people realize that you are writing articles on one niche only, they will view you as an expert and the traffic to your website will increase.

6) Focus on SEO

Make use of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO techniques to increase awareness about your website. What this basically means is using keywords in your articles that will make your posts appear near or at the top in Google and other web search results.

But make sure that you don’t use irrelevant or spammy keywords as clickbait as Google has very strict views on this and can severely penalize your site. The keywords and tags you use must be relevant to the content and meaning of your website post.

7) Reply to Comments

Many aspiring small companies make the mistake of assuming that making it big is as easy as writing a single post and going viral. But since you are here this long, we assume that you are not one of them. Make sure that you engage with the people reading your website and be sure not to take comments for granted, especially when you are starting out.

If people have taken the time to comment on your posts, then you need to make sure that you respect that. This will make you more relatable to them. Even popular websites reply to the first hundred or so comments out of ten thousand per post.

8) Add Good and Original Images

Before you start shouting about how adding images has nothing to do with writing, we would like you to ask yourself whether you would want to read a long website post that has no images of any kind and only information? We think your answer will be no.

That is no surprise when we take into consideration the fact that humans have always been visual learners and an infographic goes a long way to clear doubts in such a lucid manner that a piece of writing just can’t. In this day and age, when the majority of people use YouTube and other video sharing social media websites to learn new things, gain information and acquire skills, the importance of visual learning cannot be ignored. While you may be the Shakespeare of your age, the truth is no one really cares.

What people do care about is the content and how it is delivered. Your goal in this respect is to maintain their attention on your website for as long as you can in a manner that is sustainable. Using images from a free stock photography website such as Fotolia enhances the engagement with the post as well as conveys what the post is all about. Make sure that the image you use is high resolution and is related to the actual article you have written. Using an image as a clickbait will only reduce the reputation of your website.

9) Great Content

Ever heard the phrase “mediocrity is common, but there’s always room at the top”? Well, it’s true! You can do everything we have said above, but if your content isn’t good and you are just repackaging old wine in new bottles, then no one will even bother with your website. Understand this, people have very limited time on their hands and unlimited ways in which to spend it.

In this scenario, your content must not only be good, but it must also be perceived by people as worth their time. If you are simply paraphrasing articles from the web and hoping that people will notice you for your use of grammar, then you are about to be very disappointed. Great, relevant content is key to success as a website and to make people notice and be aware of your website.

10) Promote Content

Many established and popular websites would agree that it is often better to promote your old website posts in a new manner using new media rather than creating new ones. While this is not to say that you should not make new website posts, this largely stresses on the fact that the people of the world react more to effective promotion than to anything else. So if you have a website post that was not popular when you first made it, you can try to promote it through new media to increase the popularity and reputation of your website.

11) Attractive Design

A website is a visual medium that is used to appeal to the aesthetic sense of the target audience. In this respect, there is something to be said about making the website as attractive in design as possible. However, care must be taken to ensure that the attractiveness must not come at the cost of intuitiveness of use and friendliness of interaction with the interface. In this regard, the website in question must make use of the latest design templates, attractive fonts, and a user-friendly interface to woo traffic.