There are approximately 1.14 billion websites worldwide. 17% of them are active right now. Now, with over 252,000 websites being created every day, the question that arises is “What should we do to make our website stand out?”
To answer this question, let’s talk about the objective with which websites are built. Your website is your digital address where visitors come to see what you are doing. If they find that your offerings solve their problems, they become your clients.
Now finding your website is as important, if not more, as having a good one. Here are three website principles that you need to drive more traffic and not let them bounce off.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a key factor to increasing traffic to your website. This strategy helps your website be found and appear in the search results when a user is looking for services that you offer.
The efficient way to make the most of SEO is to employ the key elements that include the URL of your website, the page header or the title, the image alt-text and the meta description. These basic things, along with other SEO strategies, let the search engine crawlers notice your website and relate it to the keywords that the users are looking for.
The implementation of the keywords in the proper places on your website. When the keywords are inserted strategically in the content of your website, it indirectly contributes to the local SEO which makes your website more visible to your potential customers and increases the traffic to your website. While strategically inserting keywords, you must be cautious of not stuffing the keywords and hoping that will drive more traffic. Doing so will affect the flow of the content to the point that it no longer makes sense.
Along with the key elements of SEO, there are also SEO tools and learning how to make the most of these tools helps you understand your website and then analyse the data to figure out the right strategy to drive more traffic to your website. Ahrefs, Google Analytics and SEMrush are such SEO tools that assist you to monitor the traffic to your website.
The other factor of the SEO that helps you to increase traffic to your website is its technical use. The backend of your website focuses on the technical infrastructure of your websites such as the crawling, page speed and indexing. It contributes to the organic growth of the traffic to your website by 50% in a month. Technical optimising includes such things as having an XML sitemap so the crawlers know how to travel your website, and fixing broken links by redirecting them.
Content
Another website principle you must follow by heart is ensuring that every piece of content you put up on your website should add value. Whether it is a blog or a video or even a form to capture leads, make the content appealing enough so that your website visitors notice it.
The organic growth of your website increases with appealing social media content and strategic utilisation of video marketing. Be it podcasts, Instagram reels or Facebook posts or YouTube shots, link these to your website so that people know where to go.
However, the content of your website needs to be relevant to contemporary times and topics should also be evergreen. Your website should include ebooks and blogs that will generate business leads and also increase the click rate of your website.
Blogs are a great way to answer the questions of users that are looking for online. They contribute by promoting your website and making people aware of what you do. Writing blogs periodically helps to keep your website up-to-date and bring relevant traffic to your website.
When your website includes pieces of content that would help your potential customers reach a solution to their problem, it eventually increases the click-through rate of your website thus increasing the traffic to your website.
Having valuable and relevant content increases your website’s appearance on social news sites like Reddit or Quora. These platforms work wonders for both the business and the customers through an organic approach. When people find your content valuable they will want to share it with others which will increase your traffic flow. Other website owners and bloggers may also find your content valuable and may reference your site by linking to it from their site or blog post. This would make you stand out as a subject matter expert and a credible source, which in turn you would most likely rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP).
Mobile Compatible Website
In today’s world, a computer is available in every household, be it a desktop or laptop. However, a quick and sudden check on a topic or information while travelling or at a social gathering is convenient through smartphones.
Such instances give a vivid picture of why there is more web traffic found on smartphones. A study of ‘desktop vs mobile’ by Statcounter shows that mobile devices have 50.48% more web traffic compared to desktops. Whereas, immobile devices like desktops account for 46.51% of the total web traffic. Devices like tablets contribute 3% of web traffic. To drive the importance of a mobile compatible website, Google has begun using mobile-first indexing. This means they predominantly use the website’s mobile version for indexing and ranking. This does not mean that if you don’t have a mobile version of your website, you won’t get indexed, it just means you won’t get ranked as high and possibly end up in the second page.
So, making your website compatible with mobile devices like smartphones is an utmost necessity. It increases the reach of your website to potential customers much more quickly and immediately, as well as rank higher on the SERP. So, be it tablets or smartphones, the traffic at your website increases.
Finally, with the internet being the ultimate path to marketing, getting familiar with how to exploit such resources to their full potential for your business is necessary. Then implementing the right strategy to increase the visibility of your website to the world and your potential customers become comprehensible and easy.