Still struggling to generate any sizable amount of traffic to your website?
You can publish the most informative, well-written content in your respective niche, but it’s going to help unless people actually see it. The good news, however, is that you can increase traffic to your website by following some simple steps.
Post Links on Social Media
Try to get into the habit of posting links to any new content you create on social media. Assuming you have a following of loyal users, some of these users will likely click the link to access the content. Subsequently, this will drive an initial burst of traffic to your website, and it may even have a viral effect if the user shares the link with his friends and family.
Be Mobile-Friendly
It’s a little-known fact that more people now access the Internet on mobile devices as opposed to desktops and laptops. Websites that fail to cater to this ever-growing demographic of Internet users will suffer the consequences of fewer visits and possibly even lower search rankings. If you are looking to boost your website’s traffic, make sure it’s compatible on both desktop and mobile devices. Google has a helpful Mobile-Friendly Test tool that will identify compatibility errors and provide instructions on how to fix them.
Create a Sitemap
If you haven’t done so already, create an XML sitemap of your website. Sitemaps act as roadmaps for search engines, guiding them to each and every page within the website. Rather than “hoping” that Google is able to find and indexes all of your pages, you can show them exactly where the pages are located.
“Using a sitemap doesn’t guarantee that all the items in your sitemap will be crawled and indexed, as Google processes rely on complex algorithms to schedule crawling. However, in most cases, your site will benefit from having a sitemap, and you’ll never be penalized for having one,” wrote Google in its explanation of sitemaps.
Guest Posting
Another safe and effective way to drive traffic to your website is guest posting. This tactic involves writing and submitting posts to relevant blogs, in which you can include a link pointing back to your own website. Guest posting is a win-win for everyone involved. The blog benefits from the free, unique content (always a good thing), while you benefit from the backlink and increased exposure.
Publish New Content Frequently
According to a study conducted by QuickSprout’s Neil Patel, publishing six high-quality posts 6x per week instead of the previous 5x per week increased his traffic by 18.6%. Does this mean your traffic will increase by exactly 18.6% if you bump up your posting to 6x per week? Not necessarily, but you should play around different frequencies to find the magic number that works best for your website. I know that over the past 30 days we have been publishing about 6 articles per week here on Pixel along with some additional guest posts and over that 30 day period we have cut our bounce rate in half.
You will probably notice that more than one of these items is based on creating content and content is probably one of the most time consuming elements of maintaining a fresh website. Many business owners find themselves perpetually short on time, if you are one of these business owners you can also look into cost effective service providers to help create your content or even guest post outreach.
