You can’t get around it. If your business has a website, you need people to visit it. More people mean more fun.
But the most important thing to worry about is not the number. You also need people to visit your site and do what you want them to do, like buy your product, sign up for your email newsletter, or download your PDF file.
So, the real question isn’t how to get more people to visit a website; it’s how to get people to visit that will buy something. Also, how do you make money doing it?
This article will help you figure out the answers. It is a simple guide for newbies on how to get more people to visit their websites.
It is divided into three parts:
Basic ideas: In this part, you’ll learn about the most important ideas in building traffic.
Core priorities: This section will tell you what your top priorities should be.
How-to strategy: This section will give you a step-by-step plan that will help you make the most of your time and resources to get as much targeted traffic to your website as possible.
Let’s get started, eh?
Basic concepts
Humans vs. bots
In a strict sense, website traffic is anything and anyone who visits your site. This includes both real people and computer programs called “bots” (which are, basically, computer programs designed to roam the Internet for one reason or another).
Obviously, you care most about the people who come to your site. But you also need to watch out for the bots. Some of them really matter.
For example, Googlebot is a program that crawls your website so that it can be indexed in Google Search. If you don’t give it permission to access your site, you’ll be kicked out of Google and lose the free traffic from this very important search engine.
Other bots, on the other hand, can be bad and could do a lot of damage.
Website security is very important because of this. Even more so as your website’s popularity grows thanks to your use of the traffic-generating priorities and strategies listed in the rest of this article.
But first, let’s think about where the people are coming from…
Sources of traffic
When you think about it, there are almost too many traffic sources to count. Basically, every online file (even ones that aren’t HTML, like PDF files), every chat message, every Facebook post, every tweet, and every game can have a link to a website.
Also, a website address can be typed into any Internet browser on any device that can connect to the Internet.
To make sense of this, it helps to think about website traffic as coming from different marketing channels.
In general, we know these 9 marketing channels by default:
Traffic from “organic search”
This is traffic that comes from the natural results on search engines. People who search for something on Google and then click on a result that isn’t a paid ad are called “organic traffic.”
Traffic from paid search
Paid search is the opposite of free search. When someone clicks on an ad in the search results, this is called “Paid Search traffic.” Pay-per-click (PPC) is usually how you pay for this traffic. It means that you pay every time someone clicks on your ad.
Show the traffic
This traffic comes from display ads, such as remarketing campaigns with Google AdWords, banner ads, and contextual ads.
Referral traffic
Referral traffic is made up of users who click on a link from a website other than a major search engine.
Affiliate traffic
Affiliate traffic is the traffic that comes to your website because of your affiliate marketing efforts, like when people click on affiliate links.
Guide people
Strictly speaking, direct traffic comes from people who type the address of your website into their browser. But in Google Analytics, direct traffic numbers can sometimes be higher than they really are because traffic from sources that Google doesn’t recognize is also counted as direct traffic.
Social traffic
Social traffic refers to visits from social media sites that are not ads, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Traffic on email
This category includes traffic that comes from clicking on links in emails, whether they are part of a mass email marketing campaign or are sent to a single person.
Other
Everything else that doesn’t fit into any of the above.
How many people visit a website
You want to keep track of who visits your website, what pages they look at, how long they stay, and where they came from.
Google Analytics is one of the best ways to measure and analyze how many people visit a website. It is very powerful, and if you don’t already have it on your computer, you should install it as soon as possible.
To see how much traffic is coming from each channel, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.
At the same time, it’s important to know that Google Analytics groups traffic into channels based on the source and/or medium parameters passed by the links themselves.
This means that how well you tag your campaigns affects the quality of the data. If you don’t do it right (or don’t do it at all), your data about traffic may not show the real picture.
So, make sure you read up on how to use Google Analytics and, in particular, how to tag campaigns using UTM parameters.
Tricks to stay away from
You probably noticed from the list of channels above that, with the exception of “Direct traffic,” visitors arrive at your website by clicking on a link.
Usually, the link’s placement and the text (or image) of the link itself (or both) would make it clear that clicking on it will take the visitor to your website.
But some webmasters try to keep their visitors from knowing that clicking on something will take them to a different website.
For example, free video-sharing sites are notorious for using misleading advertising techniques. For example, if you click the play button on the media player, the advertiser’s website will open in a new window. Automatic popups or pounders are another example. In these, the advertiser’s website loads in a separate window.
These and other tricks like them are not good, and you should never use them.
First of all, they are very annoying to your visitors because they get in the way of them doing what they came to your site to do.
Second, these strategies don’t tend to work very well. So, you can quickly get a lot of people to visit your site, but only a small number of them will do what you want them to. Because of this, you have to pay for even more traffic. This not only makes your prices go up, but it also turns off even more potential customers.
Last but not least, search engines don’t like tricks that are sneaky or annoying. If you aren’t careful, using them could hurt your ability to get people to your site through natural search (think Google penalty).
Oh, and you won’t be able to advertise your services using paid search services like Google Adwords because that would be against their terms of service.
There are many kinds of media.
Before we talk about how to get people to visit your website, there’s one more thing I want you to understand. It’s the idea of who owns the media.
When you look at the different places where traffic comes from, you can tell the difference between three types of media:
Earned media is media that you don’t control. These are usually websites, social media channels, etc. that belong to other people.
Paid media are places where you have to pay to be mentioned or linked to. Most of the time, you can get to these places through advertising, like Google Adwords or Facebook Ads.
Owned media are all of your websites, social media accounts, etc. that you have full control over.
Owned media is the one that could be the most important part of your Internet marketing strategy.
You have full editorial control over the content (within the limits of the terms of service, of course), so you can shape it exactly how you want.
In other words, when you actively create your own media, you have a lot more control over what search results come up for which keywords. When done right, this idea lets you take over whole pages of search results, getting most of the traffic for the chosen search terms and leaving nothing for your competitors.
For example, Jeff has almost complete control over the results for his own brand on Page 1:
So, now it’s time to talk about the most important things for building traffic…
Core priorities
When you boil down the whole process of getting more people to visit a website, it comes down to the following strategic goals:
Sources of traffic should be better.
The number of links and mentions should be raised.
Make more people click on your ads.
Everything you do should help you reach one of these goals. If it doesn’t, it’s likely that all your work will be for nothing.
At this point, I could talk about a huge number of strategies, all of which would impress you, but you wouldn’t know how to choose or even where to begin.
Instead, I’ll give you a list of things you should pay the most attention to. This will help you decide what to do. I chose these priorities with new business owners and business owners with little time and money in mind.
Later, I’ll show you how to use these priorities to help you make your plan for getting more traffic. You will see how the work you do on one priority will make the results of other priorities better while reducing the amount of work and resources you need to use.
Without further ado, here are your top three goals for getting more traffic…
Who you want to reach
The first thing you should do is figure out who your ideal visitor is.
Building a customer avatar, also called a “buyer persona,” is a crucial step to your success.
Why?
Because it affects pretty much everything you do with marketing and sales. If you don’t know who your ideal visitor is, you won’t be able to make smart decisions about what kind of content to make, where to buy ads, etc.
A good customer avatar is made up of five main parts:
Their goals and values as they relate to the product or service you are selling.
How they get their information (where do they go?)
Statistics about people (age, gender, marital status, location, job title, income, education, etc.)
Their problems and sources of pain (what makes them want to do something?).
Their possible objections and their part in the buying process (why wouldn’t they buy your product or service?
As you go through this process, it is possible (and likely) that you will end up with more than one avatar. This is fine as long as you don’t make a separate avatar for every small difference.
Also, when you put your customer avatars in order, you’ll probably find that only one or two of them account for most of your business. Those are the ones you should focus on most if you want to get more visitors.
Topics and keywords
Your second goal is to find topics that will give you a good return on your investment (ROI).
Your content strategy and your content marketing will be based on your buyer persona and the keywords and topics you choose.
Why market with content? Because…
Content marketing is the best way to get new leads for the least amount of money. Just think about these things:
Content marketing brings in three times as many leads as paid search or outbound marketing in general. It costs less up front and pays off more in the long run. Also, content keeps working over time without costing you anything extra. Paid search, on the other hand, needs a steady flow of money to keep getting results.
Content marketing is six times more likely to turn people into leads and leads into customers than traditional marketing.
Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing when it comes to getting leads.
61% of online shoppers in the U.S. have bought something after reading about it on a blog.
This infographic should help if you’re still not sure:
In the end, marketing with content works. It is effective, persuasive, less expensive, and doesn’t get in the way.
So, how do you find content topics that have the best chance of giving you the best return on your investment (ROI)?
First, ask yourself, “What problems, questions, or issues do my ideal customers have right before, after, or while they are using my product or service?”
Try to find similarities or patterns that could mean there are bigger topics.
Once you have a list of possible topics, open the AdWords Keyword Planner tool and type in each one, making sure that the targeting settings are as close as possible to your ideal visitor avatar.
Check out other keyword ideas and write down any keywords that could be useful.
Get information on the number of keyword searches (average monthly searches) and the suggested bid price.
Sort the data by relevance to find the keywords and topics with the most searches and the highest bid prices. These are the topics that could make you the most money.
After that, you can move on to the next important thing…
The content
At best, it’s hard to persuade someone who has never heard of you that you’re the best option for them, especially if they don’t even know they have a problem.
For a prospect who is as cold as ice to become a customer, they need to go through three steps:
Awareness – They must first realize that they have a problem and that you have a way to fix it.
Evaluation: Next, they have to compare the different solutions they have access to, including yours and your competitors’.
Conversion: Only then does a sale happen, and ideally, the prospect will buy from you again.
For a prospect to move through all of these stages, you’ll need to give them content that meets their needs at each stage.
To put it simply…
They need awareness-raising content at the top of the funnel (TOFU).
They need evaluation-friendly content in the middle of the funnel (MOFU).
They need content at the end of the sales funnel that makes it easier for people to buy.
…and different kinds of content are needed for each part of the funnel.
I know what you’re thinking: “How will I ever come up with all this content?”
“The good news is that it doesn’t have to be much if you plan ahead.
You see, the key to good content marketing is knowing and predicting what your visitors want and then making the content “assets” they need.
When you have content for different stages of the customer journey, you can reach people who aren’t yet actively looking for your product or service.
This brings more people to your website and gives you more chances to build long-term relationships with them.
Search Engine Optimization
As you work on your content, it should become second nature to optimize it for search engines.
You don’t have to learn about SEO. You don’t even have to hire one. But you should know at least a little bit about how SEO works.
You should know how to use title tags and meta description tags at the very least.
Title tags
A web page’s title is written in HTML code called a “title tag.” It should give a clear and concise summary of what the page is about.
Title tags are a big part of how search engines figure out what your pages are about. They are also the first thing most people see when they use Google or another major search engine to look for something, or when someone pastes a link for them on social media or in their favorite messaging app.
Conclusion
So, there you have it: a clear plan for getting more people to visit your website.
Start by figuring out who your ideal audience is and what your keywords and content topics are.
Then make content and promote it, keeping in mind the above priorities.
Rinse and do it again.
You’re sure to do well.
