Most small business owners dream of increasing their online income. However, the majority of them don’t know how to do it right. Yes, it is not a big deal to run a website. The question is, “How to get traffic that will bring you customers?”
The internet is full of offers promising “Get free traffic!” But do these offers work?
Unfortunately, these are usually empty promises and nothing more. You should understand that “free traffic” is a bait. This traffic won’t bring you positive results. Keep in mind that gaining “organic traffic” from Google is a tedious and time-consuming process. Thus, it can’t be “free” as well.
It is important to know how to grow traffic on your own. Yes, you will have to spend lots of hours in front of the computer screen. Yes, you will get the results over time. But you won’t be scammed with getting low-quality traffic for sure.
Implementing the following seven simple steps, you will push up your website on Google and make your online business lucrative.
1. Spy for Competitors’ Keywords and Use Them for Your SEO Campaign
Keyword research is one of the essential elements of SEO strategy. If you know nothing about SEO, it will be challenging to accomplish this task. The primary challenge here is to find out what keywords will work for your SEO.
Don’t think too hard on this. “Borrow” the keywords from your competitors.
Let’s assume that you own a small business like selling laptops and other gadgets. Your aim to get lots of customers online and sell the items in the area where you live. The first thought that comes to your mind is the keyword “buy laptop in the UK” but what other keywords could fit you?
According to the keyword “buy laptop in the UK” your main competitor is a company “PC World.” Your next step is to see what keywords this website targets and borrow them for yourself. Site Explorer tool from Ahrefs will help you here.
2. Stick to “Right Words” in Your SEO To Acquire Quality Traffic
You should realize that you don’t need “any” traffic. Your aim to get relevant one only. How to reach this goal? Optimize your website using right keywords taking into consideration searcher’s intent.
Let’s view another example. This time I will do keyword research for some other website from “gadgets” niche. In our case it’s Laptopedirects.com. To identify the keyword that brings most of traffic to this website, I go to “Top pages” report.
Stick to “Right Words” in Your SEO To Acquire Quality Traffic
You can see that the first position brings 63,000 traffic per month, ranks for over 1, 500 keywords. The top keyword is “laptops direct” here. Follow the same steps and you will be able to compile a list of keywords to boost your traffic.
3. Avoid Keyword Stuffing and Use Long-Tail Keywords
Yes, long-tail keywords have a low search volume, but you can generate a substantial amount of traffic using them. But, how to adjust your content to the long-tail keywords?
A core principle of using long-tail keywords is optimizing your content to a particular topic, not separate keywords. Google is smart enough and to understand the synonyms grouping individual keywords into topics.
What does it mean? It means that a single page can rank for huge amounts of long-tail keywords. Thus, produce relevant and high-quality content based on a particular topic.
- 4. Revise and Update Outdated Content
Don’t think that the more content you produce, the more traffic you will get. No way. If nobody reads your content, you won’t get any traffic.
Also, you can’t write content blindly. You must know what topics your target audience is interested in. However, you can get back to the topics that have already brought you tons of traffic.
How can you use old content to your benefit? Add some fresh tips to the post and publish it again. Google ranks the updated content higher.
If you have some doubts as to this strategy, here is how it works. We have published a post that covers the ways and tools for analyzing competitors, and it attracted about 50,000 visits per month. It was a signal to us that we should give this post another goes. We updated it. And here are the stats. As you can see — we got the results we expected.
5. Communicate with Your Customers
The main goals of content is providing users with useful information and bringing your website traffic. However, if you want to get quality traffic, the content you create must give answers to the questions your potential customers ask.
This simple but effective strategy helps us gain more traffic at Ahrefs. Let’s see “Top pages” report for Ahrefs blog. We try to create content that gives our customers answers to the questions they have. Thus, the most of our posts are “how-to” guides.
But how to know what questions do your customers have? Keyword generator tool will help you with this. Use “Phrase match’” report and put down a word you want to get content ideas for. The report gives me the list of nearly 383K keyword ideas “how-to.” I think it is an impressive result!
6. Using Paid Social Media Promotion
Social media is an excellent way to draw traffic. Despite the fact that there are lots of different social media platforms on the web, you should focus on the main ones. Let’s quickly skim over these platforms:
Facebook is a social media platform that is widely used for interactive and business purposes. You can create a group that would represent your product and attract interested users.
Twitter is an awesome place to share the latest news about your product and service.
LinkedIn is a must platform for building business connections.
Pinterest is the best solution for those entrepreneurs who run a visual-related business.
I advise you to think about advertising on social media channels. The ads on social media are cheaper in contrast to the PPC campaigns on Google.
7. Don’t Take Every Tip About Growing Traffic at Face Value
Do you remember what I said at the beginning of the post? “You don’t need any traffic; you need only quality traffic!”
And it is for a good reason. You can find bags of advice on how to generate traffic. But are all of them applicable to your business? You should take into account the niche you work in and all the specifications it has. Afterwards, do A/B testing of the methods you liked the most and make your own decision.
Sergey Aliokhin