Getting people to visit your website and to actually spend time there and come back is the trick that many digital marketers spend many hours trying to figure out. Not only do you need people to make purchases on your website, but Google has started to include your bounce rate in their search engine algorithm. So, what can you do to decrease your bounce rate and increase the number of loyal followers that you have? Here are a few tried and proven tips to help you drive traffic and make it stick.
Know Your Audience
In order to get traffic to stick, it’s important that you’re catering to the right people. If your website is meant for teenagers, but the traffic that you are getting is all from older people, you may need to adjust your approach. Your advertisements on other sites may need some adjusting, or you may need to adjust your content and the focus. In order to understand your audience, do some research on your target demographic. Figure out what they are looking for in terms of content and when and where they spend most of their time online. Once you know this, you can target your efforts to attract them much better than you are doing right now.
Improve Readability and Usability
No matter how much content you create for your site, it’s important that it’s both easily readable and understandable for your audience. Besides the actual words themselves, it’s important that your content pops out with different font and colors to avoid your audience becoming bored on your site.
Your presentation to website visitors is crucial to making your web traffic stick. Having too much or too little creative incorporation on your site can make or break conversions. So, it’s important that every page on your site has a specific purpose to engage your site visitors. Just make sure you avoid using your creative focus to annoy your audience or reduce your web traffic.
Pay Attention to Your SEO
No matter what you do, don’t forget to pay attention to your search engine optimization (SEO). After all, that’s how all your web traffic will discover your site. For this reason, it is incredibly important to spend some time making sure that your website is optimized to work with search engines in the best ways possible. This involves many different factors including using keywords, improving metadata, updating regularly, and more.
To score a higher ranking on the search engine results page, make sure that you have a proper meta description tag that will show up in search results. The meta description is the little introduction that appears under the title of your website on search engine listings. The better written it is, the more likely people are to click on your page.
You should also make sure that you are using keywords that fit the content of your website. These keywords can be placed in headlines, subheadings, and various pieces of content. There are plenty of guides online that show you how to use keywords and help you analyze your page for keywords. However, make sure you avoid keyword stuffing, as this can actually lead to SEO penalties, which hurt your search engine ranking.
Focus on Your Content
Continually producing unique content is crucial if you want your website to maintain relevance and to encourage people to come back multiple times. The type of content that you produce will depend on the type of website you are running. If you are primarily a retail website, you will want to update your inventory and make sure there are thorough descriptions of each product that you sell. But even retail websites can have a blog or an instructional area that you can take advantage of. You can use this area to share videos, images, infographics, and more. Additionally, it’s also important to place a call to action markers on each page of your site. By doing this, your audience has the opportunity to either purchase a product, sign up for a newsletter, or contact you directly.
You should also create specific landing pages for people who find your website from different methods. Landing pages are often used as part of advertising campaigns, so make sure you’re your landing pages match the ad campaign that they correspond to.
Optimize for Mobile Use
With the prevalence of mobile devices and smartphones, it is incredibly likely that the first interaction most people will have with your website will be on their phone or tablet, so make sure that your website will work well with these devices. Nothing is more annoying than trying to view a website with your phone and struggling with not being able to use it properly. Because of the large number of resources available, people won’t try to struggle with your website. They will simply move onto the next one, which means you just lost another potential customer.
Driving traffic to your site is never an easy process, but with the help of our four steps, you should be able to boost your audience in addition to your conversion rates. From improving your SEO to focusing on the importance of your content, there’s no suggestion you can’t put to good use to drive your web traffic and make it stick.
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