You know you're a marketer when you're in traffic, it's all butt protection, and all you can think about is, "Why can't I get traffic to my website this way?"
If you're having trouble driving traffic to your website, you're not alone. According to a 2021 survey by the Content Marketing Institute, 63% of content professionals are faced with the challenge of finding enough qualified staff to pursue a content strategy, which is one of the main drivers of website traffic.
Between writing a new blog post, posting it on social media, and developing a strategy for a new email campaign, it's hard to look back and see what was driving traffic to your website and what wasn't.
1. Content Creation
Inbound marketing is focused on attracting the right people to your business. One of the best ways to do this is by creating content through a blog.
To create content that will attract the right visitors to your website, you must first know the identity of the buyers you are targeting. Once you know your audience, you can create content that will naturally attract them to your website.But how do you write a great blog post that attracts the right audience? Follow these five steps:
Identify your persona as a buyer: Learn more about your target market. Understand everything from position to point of pain.
Do SEO Research: Learn What Your Search Engine Audience Is Looking For So You Can Serve The Best Content.
Write a draft: First, write a post that answers your audience's questions. Use eye-catching angles to make your posts stand out.
Publish: Publish your post on your blog site. Use SEO tools to optimize your content.
Advertise: Promote your blog posts on social media and email newsletters to generate traffic. The more traffic your post generates, the higher it will rank in search engines.
2. Topic Expertise
Higher Google rankings increase organic traffic to your website. At HubSpot, we use the pillar/topic cluster model for this. Google prefers websites that are known to be experts in the topics they write about.
To be considered an expert, you can create pillar pages, which are basically long blog posts covering all aspects of a topic. Then write "clustered content" or supporting blog posts targeting keywords in a long line that shows you've covered the topic completely. Focusing on long term traffic will help you rank higher in search engines
Christina Pericone, Senior Blog Manager at HubSpot, says, “The pillar cluster model organizes your website content around a single topic and keywords through internal links. This organization helps search engines to easily crawl and categorize all the content you have on a particular topic so that it is easier for you to rank for that search term. If done right, this model will also help visitors navigate your website and navigate linked pages, increasing traffic to all the pages in your thematic cluster. "
3. Organic Social Media
Organic social media isn't a new strategy, but it's still something retailers need to be wary of. A part from posting on social media platforms, you can also use Instagram Stories (hello, drag-and-drop functionality!), Live video, IGTV, or Facebook Messenger. The key to organic social media is embracing new features early on.
For example, Facebook introduced an automated messenger lead generation feature that allows companies to create automated messenger chatbots to link to suggested content on your website. This is a great feature for sending traffic to your website.
It's also important to have a diverse social media strategy and use the right social media platforms - not just Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Platforms like YouTube or Pinterest can generate a lot of traffic to your website.
Henry Franco, HubSpot's brand marketing partner, recommends two things about organic social media. "First, don't spam your audience - users don't have to open your posts, and if you don't offer them value, that's what they will. Know your audience and create content that speaks directly to them," says Franco.
Second, remain active in community management. People love it when brands like them and respond to them - it will humanize your business and keep people coming back for more content.
4. Website Analysis
Let's reverse engineer our thought process a bit. Before driving traffic to your website, it is important to know your target audience. To do this, analyze your website using a platform like Crazy Egg to see where you are losing and gaining visitors. With this information at your fingertips, you can create the right content to drive the right traffic to your website.
5. Influencers
We know customers are more likely to buy from organizations with excellent word of mouth, but how do you get good word of mouth? First, keep your customers happy. Second, work with influential people.
Influencer marketing is no fad. In fact, it is a budget-friendly option for driving traffic to your website. When influential people post codes for discounts, links, reviews, or giveaways, you touch their audience to drive traffic to your website.
6. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO can help your website rank higher in search engines and attract more traffic. Some of the page SEO elements include the bpage title, header, meta description, alternative image text, and url (and more). Search engine traffic generates more traffic for your website.
7. Quality Backlinks
To drive traffic to your website, you need to rank high in the search engines. To rank higher in search engines, you must become an authority in your industry. One way to do this in addition to the topic/cluster model described above is to get quality feedback. Having a high profile website linking to your website gives you more confidence.
Irina Nika, Senior Content Strategist at HubSpot, says, “There are two ways high-quality links can help drive more traffic to a website: increasing rankings and driving traffic from links. On the one hand, backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors for any major search engine. By constantly receiving high quality feedback from relevant websites, you will improve your SERP rankings and see an increase in your organic traffic as a result. "
Nika adds: “On the other hand, feedback can also generate a large amount of recommended traffic. This is what you can expect if you are mentioned on a popular news website. You can also see that links drive traffic if they are mentioned (and linked to) articles that already rank well on high search-level keywords and are getting steady traffic.
8. Content Repurposing
Need content to drive traffic to your website but struggling to come up with ideas? I see. A great way to overcome this hurdle is to redirect old content. Take a blog post that works well and associate it with a video. Or, if you have a podcast that's doing really well, write a blog post on the topic. Using content that is already performing well will further increase traffic to your website.
9. Internal Linking
When visitors come to your blog, your goal is to get them to read from other pages on your website. This is why internal links - links to other pages on your site - are so important. When visitors move to other pages on your website, they are more likely to convert and be attracted to the brand.
For example, you can structure internal connections using the column/cluster model described above. Column and cluster pages are linked together, increasing your website's trust in search engines while increasing the likelihood of conversion.
10. Social Share Buttons
Social share buttons are links that make it easy for your readers to share your content on social media. When your readers become promoters of your content, your traffic will increase. Here's a quick scam to create social share buttons.
How do you get people to share your content after creating your social share buttons? Here are some tips to get you started:
- Ask people to share on social media.
- Build strong content.
- Include cited content.
- Add multimedia like images, videos, infographics and more.