How to acquire and retain website traffic

More and more retailers are discovering the power of online stores. As a result, the number of online stores is increasing yearly and competition is growing.

Poor website traffic is one of the biggest hardships faced by online businesses, and with consumers being lured in every direction it is not getting easier. The question is, how do we keep and increase the number of visitors to your store instead of losing them to another.

Increasing traffic is all about choosing the right marketing strategy. The type of strategy and tactics you employ depend on what stage your business is in, and further, these tactics revolve around the type of traffic you want to attract.

Here are a few short actionable tips and tactics to drive your marketing strategy forward:

First time acquisition

Spring clean your old content. Using keyword ranking trackers, will help you to add useful content to pages helping them to rank better. Google also prefers updated and new content over old and dusty content.

Speed up your website! A fast website not only results in higher conversions but it will help you gain more organic traffic as search engines are able to crawl your website faster. You can start by optimising image file sizes, page structures and the functionality of third-party plugins. The faster your site loads, the better.

Responsive design. Ensure that your website is accessible and comfortably viewable across all devices. If your products and services aren’t easy to view from any device, you’re missing out on an opportunity.

Social media ads allow targeting and retargeting. One of the reasons social media is so great is because of its highly customisable nature for ads. Facebook ads, for example, allow you to target users by location, education level, industry, purchase history and the pages they’ve liked. Facebook even offers the option to install a pixel on your website that can be used to retarget the users who visit you — users who are far more likely to convert into solid leads and sales.

Using social media for business also boosts your website’s SEO. Search engine crawlers know which pages are consistently earning traffic and which are lifeless, forgotten and ignored.

Target longtail keywords for SEO. Use PPC to target those conversion-orientated keywords that are more specific to your product or services. These keywords often get your content boosted in search rankings, helping you to get a new audience that is ready to convert.

Strengthening your link profile externally as well as internally. The more links you have to your website, the better it will rank. So include links in your content, from relevant websites and from your outreach efforts.

While we’re on a roll with ranking higher – have you optimised your SEO? Although some might think otherwise, this is still a valuable and worthwhile practice. The meta title, URL and description are the three key ingredients of good SEO. Simple but effective!

According to a report from Cisco, by 2019 online video will be 80 percent of all consumer Internet traffic. With information retention being significantly higher for video than it is for text, it can be a valuable asset in both attracting new visitors and making your site more engaging.

Do outreach to get included in email newsletters. Take your content relevant to the audiences or industries of certain companies and reach out to them. You’d be surprised as to how many would be willing to include you in their next newsletter.

Retention

Collect email addresses and send consistent emails. Whether this is a weekly newsletter or a daily piece of content to teach or sell, this is the best way to keep your users engaged. Letting users subscribe to specific content or products also allows for higher and more personal engagement.

Do retargeting advertising. With all the display networks available it is easy to target people who have come to your website and not purchased anything. Ignoring this huge opportunity wasted. An identified consumer is a consumer you can win.

Be socially savvy. It is not enough to just post content, you have to be proactive. Based on a posts success you can either boost or promote it to your custom audiences. Put your content in your consumers face and make sure you don’t get lost in their News Feeds.

Foster a community. Build a community system into to your website through third party solutions or dedicated forums. People want to speak their minds and weigh in on subjects they feel passionately about. But be sure to keep a close eye, ensuring the minimum standards of decorum are being met.

Go head to head with your competitors. Avoid losing your traffic to your competitors by checking what your competitors are up. You can do this using solutions such as BuzzSumo. Find out what content performs best for any topic or competitor. This will allow you to emulate relevant content that will bring traffic to your website.

All 14 tips and tactics considered, we foremostly suggest that you start by exploiting your metrics. Google Analytics is an invaluable source of data on just about every aspect of your website, from your most popular pages, to visitor demographics. This information, when used correctly, is key to informing and fine-tuning your marketing strategies.

As long as you’re not afraid to test new tactics and solutions, you can be sure that they will acquire and retain you plenty of visitors and, in the end, it could be extremely profitable for your business.