16 ways to increase your website traffic

You’ve installed an analytics tool on your website and you’ve been reviewing your website traffic. Now you want to increase the traffic to your site. Where do you start?

Understanding & analysis

Begin at the beginning. Take time to understand your current situation and what you want to achieve.

1. Comprehensively understand your analytics and make informed decisions about what metrics you want to improve. Aim for better rather than more traffic.
2. Know your target audience. Find out why they are visiting your website and what they want to do when they get there.
3. Monitor your website search and analyse the results to make improvements to your content. You’ll learn what people can’t find, what is popular, and whether you are using the right naming conventions for your content.
4. Put together a list of key phrases that you expect people to search on to find your website, make sure these phrases appear throughout your site. Use a keyword suggestion tool to help you make decisions about which phrases to use.
5. Make sure page titles contain the keywords you’ve identified, page titles appear on the search results listing page and will be the link the user clicks to visit your website. This blog post has a good explanation of why page titles are important.
6. Research the competition. Search for your chosen keywords in Google and review the websites that are listed first. What are they doing better than you?
7. Monitor buzz about your brand or subject area through tools like Google Alerts, Twitter and other reputation monitoring tools so you can get the 'lie of the land'.

Content creation

Forget whizzy features, content is the most valuable asset your website has. Always aim for better, high quality content.

8. Review all your content, making sure it is useful, timely and relevant for your target audience.
9. Write content that gets linked to by other websites, for example; useful articles, how-to’s, opinion, statistics, facts and fun stuff.
10. Write a blog, focus on posts that contain the kind of information and news your audience wants to know about. Here's a list of 17 types of posts for inspiration.
11. Write newsletters, focussed on key areas of interest to your visitors, make sure your newsletters have lots of links to additional information within your website.
12. Get involved with the community around your subject or brand. Write comments on other blogs, respond to discussions in forums, and write articles.
13. Create profiles or pages for your brand on social sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Squidoo. Register with online directories and listings site relevant to your sector.

Link building

More links to, from and within your website will increase your search visibility if they are genuine and relevant.

14. Increase the number of links to your website. Put together a list of relevant sites that have the potential to send you traffic and get in touch with them to link to your site. Prioritise sites with a better link 'equity' and make sure the link adds value to your content. You can find some useful link building tactics here.
15. Increase the number of links within your website. This provides a useful route through the information, helpful for people browsing and robots indexing your site. There are a couple of good tips about creating descriptive links.
16. Increase the number of links out of your site. Make sure links describe the destination and are embedded within the content on your page. Link directly to relevant content rather than to the homepage.

Is there anything I’ve missed? Do you have any great ideas for increasing your traffic or have an example of something you’ve done which has helped? I’d love to know what you think.

If you need any help with increasing your traffic or you want to know more please do get in touch.

Categories: Tips and tricks

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