THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO INCREASE TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE
What is Website Traffic: Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a website. It is measured in visits, also called sessions. Website traffic is very important. The more people see your site, the more potential customers you will have. You need traffic to generate leads and to generate customers. The number of visitors generated to your site becomes the number of opportunities your business has to give an impression, generate qualified leads, share your brand and build relationships. Types of Website Traffic Organic traffic: Organic traffic refers to visitors that land on your website from unpaid sources, which are essentially free traffic. How is Organic Traffic Generated When a user makes a search on a search engine such as Google for a particular term, the user has a variety of result displayed in a specific order. The first three results are usually paid ads that have a cost for each click the website gets. Below that you have the rest of the result listed in an organic ranking The higher a website ranks for a keyword, the more organic traffic it gets. That’s because people are more likely to click on the first results they see on the results page. Direct Traffic: Direct access (direct traffic) to a website occurs when a visitor arrives directly on a website, either by typing your website URL into a browser or through browser bookmarks. False Direct Traffic Allocation In the context of Google Analytics, false traffic is defined as one or more fake hits sent to your GA property. False traffic is any activity that doesn’t come from a real user with genuine interest. It can include accidental clicks caused by intrusive ad implementations, fraudulent clicking by competing advertisers, advertising botnets and more. However, the main cause of this false traffic is spam bots. Causes Your website is still using a non secure connection (http://). One or more URLs of your marketing campaigns are incorrectly tagged Not all URLs of your marketing campaigns are tagged Google Analytics tracking code is missing on one or more pages Your website may be getting fake direct traffic from spambots Referral Traffic: Referral traffic is the segment of traffic that arrives on your website through another source without searching for you on search engine such as Google, this can be through a link on another domain. Email Marketing: Email traffic in digital marketing is the kind of traffic that comes from your email marketing campaigns. It is the number of people who visit your website after clicking a link you’ve provided within the email. Types of Email Marketing Campaign Promotional Email: A promotional email is a commercial broadcast that usually offers incentives to drive sales and revenue for a business. The main goal of this form of email marketing is to convince customers to make a purchase. Acquisition Email: Acquisition Emails can help your small business acquire customers who have opted to receive your emails but have not yet converted into customers. Lead Nurturing Email: A lead nurturing email is an email that marketers send to move users from the consideration stage to the decision stage of the lead funnel. Social Network: Social traffic refers to traffic coming to your website, mobile site or mobile app from social networks and social media platforms. For example, if a consumer clicks on a promotional Facebook post and then arrives on your website, this will be recorded in your analytics reports as social traffic. This type of traffic can be paid or organic. Paid Social Traffic: Paid social is the practice of investing in paid ads and marketing with the goal of targeting specific customers. Marketing leaders often use paid social to increase marketing efficiency and capture new subsets of customers. Organic Social Traffic: Organic social media include posts that live on your company’s profile page and can be seen by your audience without paid promotion. It uses free social media tools to build and engage with an online following. How to Check Website Traffic; Measurement Tools Why Should you Check your Website Traffic: By checking and following up with your website statistics, you can easily know how your website is performing. Your website traffic data will show you the number of visitors that come to your website the larger the number of visitors to your website the better, it will also show you where your traffic is coming from, how visitors engage with your site and what digital marketing strategies are working. Why Should you Check your Competitors Website Traffic: Analysing your competitor’s website traffic statistics can reveal a lot of helpful information. Competitor traffic analysis is a digital marketing best practice that companies use to investigate competitors and improve their websites’ performance. Constantly knowing the pulse of your industry and niche, and what your competitors are doing, makes it easier for you to come up with new ideas. Just like you can learn from their failures, you can figure out their strategy and keys to success, which keywords they are ranking for and which channels are driving them the most traffic Best Tools to Check any Website Traffic Semrush: Semrush is an all-in-one digital marketing tool. It lets you run site audits, discover new keywords to target for PPC and SEO, as well as monitor the competition. Pros Semrush provides assistance with PPC campaign including lots of useful data. Although it provides a large quantity of data, its interface is laid out in a logical fashion; and graphs and data visualisations make it easy to understand the metrics provided. Its site auditing feature gives you an easy-to-follow set of instructions on how to make concrete improvements to the technical SEO and on-page SEO aspects of your site. Domain analysis is easy to perform as you get everything you need to see laid out clearly in one place. Cons Reports such as keyword search volume and paid search insight are often inaccurate. All Semrush plans only come with one user account and buying additional seats is expensive. Because the Semrush interface is not ‘responsive’, it’s hard to use the tool on a mobile device. Semrush only provides data for one search engine, Google — some competing tools, provide data from quite a few others. Google Search Console: Search Console is a tool from Google that helps developers, website owners, and SEO professionals understand how their site is performing on Google Search. This tool gives you a complete picture of how your site is viewed by the search engines. Unlike other tools; Google Search Console only allows you check your own website stats as you would be required to verify your domain ownership. Once you add your site to Google Search Console, you can start viewing your website data. How do you add your Site to Google Search Console Sign into your Google account. Make sure you’re using your business (not personal) account if it’s a business website. Go to Google Webmaster Tools. Click “Add a property.” Choose “Website” from the drop-down menu and enter the URL of your site. Make sure you’re using the exact URL that appears in the browser bar. Click “Continue.” Pick a way to verify you own your website (HTML file upload, domain name provider, HTML tag, GA tracking code, or GTM container snippet). If your site supports both http:// and https://, add both as separate sites. You must also add each domain. Google starts tracking data for your property as soon as you add it to GSC Ubersuggest: Ubersuggest allows you to get insight into the strategies that are working for others in your market so you can adopt them, improve them, and gain an edge. It’s very straightforward to use and the interface is built for beginners. If you’ve never done keyword research or traffic analysis before, then this tool makes it incredibly simple. Pros Great for keyword research & blogging It very easy to use and understand which is great for new users, the dashboard is very easy to navigate between pages on Ubersuggest. The cost is probably the best benefit. It’s a great tool that gives you 95% of all the SEO tools you need at a great price. It uses location-based data which is very easy for SEO to search accordingly. You have an option to select whatever language you’d prefer to search in. Cons Ubersuggest doesn’t have as much advanced SEO tools in comparison to its competitors. It is not as robust in terms of features and functionality when compared to other SEO analysis tools. It can be difficult to find results related for specific niche markets. You will not find any mobile app in Ubersuggest. The mobile layout on the website is a little bit lacking. On the main pages of Ubersuggest, it can take a 5-10 seconds to load when making a search. Ahrefs: Ahrefs is one of the best competitor research and SEO tool you can get right now. It has the biggest backlink index than any other tool. It gives organisations and individuals a dependable and strong backlink checker that offers information-rich backlink profiles for any URL or site. Pros It has one of the largest backlink database. You can get a clear profile of any site or URL in one click. Ahrefs uncovers all you need, from anchors and links to backlinks’ strength. Information is frequently updated and its easy to identify what content generates better income. Parent topic lets you conduct topic research in addition to single keyword research. Ahrefs also lets you see your competitor’s search traffic through Positions Explorer tool. You can see what keywords they use to rank in search engines and discover what keywords are spent on their marketing and advertising campaigns. Cons Low limits and restrictions on the $99 plan make that plan not worth it. Keyword suggestions do not have a relevancy score. You have to sort on things like volume which surfaces many irrelevant results. Ahrefs still has too few ready to use integrations with other services such as Google Analytics or Search Console What is a Good Website Traffic A good website should be able to see between 50-500 visits per day. It’s not as important how many visitors a website gets, but more importantly how the visitor interacts with your content and/or stays on your page. Ideally you want your website not only bringing you a lot of traffic but have it bringing you traffic that turn into leads that convert. This is all dependent on the quality of your website traffic. How to know if your Websites Traffic Quality is Low Your bounce rate is higher than the industry average: A bounce is a single-page session and the bounce rate is a single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server. The bounce rate is defined as the ratio of a single page web session to the total number of web sessions. The average industry number depends on the type of business that your website relates to. This means that if for instance, the industry average bounce rate for your sector is 80% (say a food ordering industry), then your site’s bounce rate needs to be higher than that, else its traffic generation is poor. Your average website session duration is less than 2-3minutes: As per some of the latest statistics, about 45% of the total number of websites are able to acquire an average web session of more than 3 minutes. You need to retain an average viewer for some duration for them to be able to consider buying. Your percentage of returning visitors is less than 30%: This is a relatively straight forward numeric. Let’s say on a given day, your site acquires 100 fresh new visitors, but only about 20 of them go on to visit your website in the future, then it must be said that your platform is generating lesser traffic than what it should. 5 Ways to Drive More Traffic to your Website Perform on Page SEO: SEO is one of the best ways to achieve consistent, long-term results. For as long as you rank highly in Google, you’ll be able to generate passive organic traffic to your site. This includes performing keyword research on topics that your audience is searching for in order to produce high quality and useful content for your target audience, writing concise meta descriptions for your pages and knowing what a page is about and what will result in a click by users. However on page SEO tactics are free and effective it does take time and patience. Send Email Newsletters: When you post a new blog or content offer, you can promote it to your followers/subscribers for a quick traffic boost. Sending out regular newsletters and promoting offers through email is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and can also help to get traffic to your website. Just make sure that you don’t continually bombard your readers with emails or your customers will either disengage, delete, or unsubscribe from your emails. You can leverage email newsletters in driving more traffic by: Including enticing information from the content in the subject line and in the body of the email. Inserting a link or button that subscribers can click to read more of the content. Making sure emails are mobile-friendly. Links should be easy to see, since 46% of all email opens are done on mobile devices. Employing personalisation tactics by including the name of the subscribers. Conducting A/B testing to see which versions of emails receive more opens and clicks. Write Guest Posts: Guest posting for other websites is an effective way to generate backlinks, boost referral traffic, and increase search engine results page rankings. It is a tactic where you write for other blogs. In return, the editor/site owner will usually allow you to link back to your site. First, identify complementary businesses in your area whose audience is relevant to your business look at the website’s content and make sure your content is relevant and useful to their audience, check its domain authority and study their guest posting guidelines. Also, ask the publication if they’ll promote the post on social media and if they’ll tag you. Keep Active on Social Media: Social media is one of the most popular free marketing tools around and plays a role in driving traffic to your website. It’s also important to have a diverse social media strategy and use the right social media platforms. You can easily leverage social media in increasing website traffic by: Posting content across your social media platforms. Interacting with followers by replying to them, reposting their content and tagging them. Use relevant hashtags in posts that promote your website pages and blog posts. Updating the link in your bio to promote new content when it comes out. Tag influencers who may be interested in the content. Including enticing and well detailed information from the content to encourage people to click the link to it. Replying to other people looking for answers with links to your content. Use Advertising: Advertising through paid search, social media and display ads can be an efficient way to increase website traffic. While with search advertising, you’re paying to show up in the top spot for relevant searches, with social media advertising you are paying to show up in relevant feeds. With search engines, you can run pay-per-click or retargeting ads. With social media you can run display ads or sponsored posts. For instance, when doing pay per click ads, it’s critical to start with one campaign and a few different ad groups containing the keywords you want to target most. Once campaigns begin, see how audiences behave with various keywords. Maybe one keyword only resulted in impressions, which didn’t increase website traffic, while another resulted in clicks and conversions.
5 Google Analytics Strategies To Measure SEO Success
The top page of Google is essentially the promised land for all online pages. What’s more, why shouldn’t it be? Sure, getting there requires effort and time. However, once you’re there, traffic takes care of itself. To stay there, you just need a fraction of the effort you put in previously. Climbing the SERP ladder is, unfortunately, easier said than done. Only 5.7 percent of internet pages will appear on the first page of a specific search keyword. Even worse, only 0.78 percent of Google searchers click through to the second page of results. To put it another way, if you want to stay competitive, you need to step up your SEO efforts. Fortunately, the solutions could be closer than you realize. Google Analytics can provide you with all of the information you need to improve your search visibility. Here are five ways to use Google Analytics to help you with your SEO efforts. In Google Analytics, Create SEO-Specific Goals. If you want to use Google Analytics for SEO, keeping track of referral traffic and keywords isn’t enough. There could be a lot going on underneath the hood that reveals fresh information. One of the most significant things that iNET VENTURES focuses on is this. They recognize the need of mining relevant data with care to ensure that their customers’ SEO strategies are correctly implemented. When working on a new website, one of the first things SEO specialists will do is either implement or analyze Google Analytics goals. Basically, SEO should be tied to a specific lead generation or conversion statistic. The metric itself will be determined by the objectives of your website. While Analytics has a lot of goals, only a few of them provide genuine insight into how engaged your organic traffic is. There are five Different Sorts of Goals Available in Google Analytics. — The page they ended up on, such as the thank you page. Duration: The amount of time they spent on a page, for example, 2 minutes on a landing page. Pages per Session: The number of pages they looked at in a single session. Whether they initiated an event, such as watching a movie or downloading a file. Smart Goals: Track the most enthusiastic visitors and turn their enthusiasm into objectives. While significant, both events and pages per session are passive goals that do not directly evaluate intent. As a result, for SEO, it’s preferable to utilize Destinations or Events goals. You could, for example, create a form on your landing page that leads to a thank-you page. The quantity of submissions can then be used to determine if you’re getting targeted traffic or just casual browsers. Uncover Hidden Patterns with Journey Analysis The paths that customers follow while on your website can help you figure out which pages perform better. They can also reveal where certain pages in your buyer’s journey map should be placed. The Audience tab in Google Analytics has a User Flow analysis that reveals how users act on your website. Advanced analytics solutions, such as Woopra or Mixpanel, can provide a more in-depth look at user behavior and the customer journey. The purpose of journey analysis is to help you achieve your SEO objectives. For starters, it can show you which pages are driving your traffic and what their objectives are. You can use this data to build gated content to attract people to subscribe. It can also assist you in answering urgent questions. Is it true that consumers behave the way you expect them to? Or are they deviating in unforeseen directions? Are there any pages that are causing bottlenecks? This data can then be used to develop more relevant content for your users. To Come Up With Content Ideas, Use Google Analytics. Creating material is typically regarded as a creative endeavor. That is correct. After all, writing is a form of expression. However, because content is the backbone of SEO, it must be data-driven. This implies that your material should have defined objectives. You should also have metrics that show whether or not your content is meeting those objectives. Google Analytics may assist you in a number of ways. To begin, use the All Pages option to see which pages receive the most clicks. This may be found in the Behavior > Site Content > All Pages section. Page Titles should be the primary dimension. This will show you which of your website’s titles receive the most clicks. Are there any similarities amongst the top-performing titles? Any of the patterns in this section can be transformed into a strategy. If listicles are performing well for you, for example, publish more of them. Work with names that contain questions if they perform better than titles that contain declarative statements. Site Search can also assist you in coming up with article ideas. All search phrases entered into your site’s search field are recorded by Google Analytics. To view what keywords visitors are using in your site’s internal search engine, go to Site Search > Search Terms. Individual search words can generate wonderful content ideas, but it’s better to look for patterns. Assume you run a website that sells dog food. If you see a lot of searches for “canned or home-cooked dog food,” that’s a smart place to start. Identify Your Referrals So far, we’ve talked about how to harness data created by on-site activities to aid your SEO efforts. But that’s only one part of the story. Referrals, or your traffic sources, are also quite important. Google’s two most essential ranking variables are content and backlinks, followed by RankBrain. Websites that send you visitors are known as referrals. A referral source brought any site visitor who didn’t enter your site directly into the browser. Your referral traffic is obviously significant because it tells you which sites you need to improve your relationship with. Go to Traffic Source > Sources > Referrals to see your referral traffic. You’ll see a list of websites sending you traffic, sorted by traffic volume. By clicking on each site, you can see which pages brought you traffic. This data is beneficial in a number of ways. To begin with, your top referral sites are your most ardent brand supporters. Consider making them a top priority in your link-building activities. You have a better chance of collecting additional links here because you already have a relationship with your top referrers. You may also look at the pages that are sending you traffic more closely. You can contact the authors for extra content if there are brand mentions or backlinks in the articles. Combine Google Analytics and Google Ads to Get The Best Results. In and of itself, Google Ads provides incredible analytics capabilities. It may provide you with extremely specific reports on your ad budget and results. However, once your ad traffic arrives on the site, it won’t tell you much. The benefit of combining Google Analytics and Ads is self-evident. The integration might reveal information about your target audience and what they’re looking for. Following the landing page, you can see which links users are clicking on. Bounce rate, visit duration, and time spent on a page are all characteristics that can be utilized to improve Ads performance. It’s simple to connect them. For this to function, you’ll need Administrator permission in your Google Ads and Analytics accounts. Go to your Google Analytics account and log in. To link Google Ads, go to Admin > Property > Google Ads Linking. Combine Google Analytics and Google Ads to get the best results. In and of itself, Google Ads provides incredible analytics capabilities. It may provide you with extremely specific reports on your ad budget and results. However, once your ad traffic arrives on the site, it won’t tell you much. The benefit of combining Google Analytics and Ads is self-evident. The integration might reveal information about your target audience and what they’re looking for. Following the landing page, you can see which links users are clicking on. Bounce rate, visit duration, and time spent on a page are all characteristics that can be utilized to improve Ads performance. It’s simple to connect them. For this to function, you’ll need Administrator permission in your Google Ads and Analytics accounts. Go to your Google Analytics account and log in. To link Google Ads, go to Admin > Property > Google Ads Linking. Conclusively, It’s tempting to believe that SEO, like every other project, has a deadline. Regrettably, as the name implies, it necessitates constant optimization. Because SEO is a constantly changing field, some objectives may become obsolete over time. Others who were previously unknown or unimportant could take their place. Through extensive insights into user behavior, Google Analytics may help you improve your SEO performance. Nonetheless, it’s unlikely that a single strategy will help you achieve your goals. You’ll need to monitor your progress and make modifications to your strategy as needed, sticking to what works.
Web Design Costs: Everything You Need To Know
Editorial Note: We earn a commission from partner links on Forbes Advisor. Commissions do not affect our editors’ opinions or evaluations. When you’re building an online presence, web design costs can add up quickly. While you can limp along with just a free social media account, you should also have a website to establish your brand. Featured Partners Starting price $2.90 per month E-commerce (low-priced plan) No Starting price $1.95 per month E-commerce (low-priced plan) Yes Depending on the scope of your company (larger e-commerce sites will be more expensive) and what automation requirements are needed (think online tax calculators), costs will vary considerably. It’s also worth mentioning that you can either build it yourself or hire a team of professionals to help you hit the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) out of the park. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves—let’s first investigate what you’ll need to start. Web Design Essentials There are a number of basic requirements that need to be met when setting up a website. These include registering a domain name, finding a website hosting company, locating a professional designer to build the website, or doing it yourself with a website building platform. You may also need to obtain an SSL certificate if it’s not included with one of these services, in addition to other add-ons you might require, such as an e-commerce portal. When building a website, you can DIY with websites providing free templates. That being said, there is a learning curve that can be steep. In the modern world, investing time in a skill that you won’t be able to utilize at a later stage can be a costly exercise. Domain Name Securing the right domain name is vital, especially if you’re looking for a .com URL or prized Top-Level Domain (TLD). Registering usually entails an annual subscription from a domain registrar, ranging from anywhere between $12 to $60 a year. If you’re utilizing a website builder service, they sometimes include this as a free bonus for the first year. With services such as WordPress, it’s an extra fee. Hosting With drag-and-drop website building sites, this is usually included in their annual subscription fee. But if you’re building the pages yourself or using WordPress, you will be required to subscribe to a website hosting service provider. Once again, these subscription fees vary from around $100 to $500 per year. If you have a lot of web traffic to your website, it’s better to invest in a more robust web hosting plan to ensure that your site doesn’t crash. A high volume of traffic is considered to be more than 100,000 visitors a month. At a later stage, you could invest in your own servers and ensure that all the information is kept in-house. Generally, most smaller companies don’t need to go this route. DIY Website Builder or Professional Designer We’ve mentioned website builders and their inclusive packages. If you are on a tight budget, using these packages to design a site yourself can save you a wad of cash. But to access premium features such as unique themes, you will need to pay higher subscription fees. Costs vary depending on the platform you subscribe to and the plan you choose, and can run anywhere between $100 and $500 a year. As a rule of thumb, customization for website builder sites is limited compared to WordPress or building your site from scratch. If you want to tap into that unique design aesthetic, you will need a graphic designer familiar with HTML coding. Designers can charge per hour or a flat rate for the allotted project. But you’ll want someone who has a strong portfolio, as there will be fewer design reverts and you’re more likely to get what you envisioned for your website. Costs can vary widely depending on experience and the needs of the project, but it’s not uncommon to get quotes between $30 and $100+ an hour. SSL Many small businesses don’t realize how important it is to sign up for a secure sockets layer (SSL) service provider. SSL certification means that your visitors are protected from unwanted cyberattacks. Some browsers will divert users away from websites without SSL certification with the message, “This site may not be secure.” For most visitors, this is enough to deter them from clicking through to the site. SSL also helps with SEO and the flow of data to and from the site. Fees for SSL vary from free to around $249 a year. Some website builders include this certificate at no additional cost, so consider that a valuable perk if you see it offered. Additional Costs To Consider As with everything in life, there are always extras to consider before hitting upload on the back end of your website. Here are some of the most common. Add-Ons and Plugins Whether you’ve subscribed to a website building site, using WordPress or looking to venture into e-commerce, you will likely need add-ons. These plugins can enable features such as on-page testimonials, contact forms and newsletter subscriptions, just to name a few. There are loads of free versions as well as paid plugins. At the end of the day, it’s up to you to decide what features are worth spending money on. Depending on the new function you want, it could be free or an annual subscription fee of $100+ per year. Hiring a Content Manager If you are planning on rolling out a large website, you may need to consider hiring a content manager. This individual will upload and update content on the website, and they can also handle social media channels which will drive traffic to it. It may be an expensive monthly cost, but an outdated website can keep potential customers from conducting business with your company. SEO Your website needs to rank well on Google. Unfortunately, this doesn’t just happen by chance. It takes work. If you’re looking at ranking your website on the first page of SERPs, you may need to hire a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist. This individual will assist in recommending content and what keywords you want to rank for and providing monthly reports of how the strategy is working. If you’re using WordPress to host your content, you’ll get far more flexibility but, also, WordPress sites generally rank better on Google. Another benefit of hiring an SEO specialist is that they should inform you whether any of your site’s pages are experiencing issues like a 404 code (“Page Not Found”). Images and Design Another cost associated with creating a website is the artwork. Whether it’s your company’s corporate image, product shots or lifestyle shots, these assets can add up quickly. While you can tap into royalty-free images, they won’t separate your business from the competition. If you’re able, it is always worth your time to hire a photographer to take images of your offerings, hire a graphic designer or subscribe to an extensive stock library like Shutterstock. As a rule of thumb, make sure that the professionals you hire to assist you with your website know what they are doing. A simple mistake can shut down your website and, in turn, lose you revenue. Bottom Line Depending on the project’s scope, whether you require updates and need unique functionality, the costs of a website can vary widely. If you’re willing to invest the time to learn new skills, it accomplished cheaply and fairly easily with an all-in-one website builder. But if you want professional assistance or lots of extra functionality, the costs can add up quickly. Frequently Asked Questions What’s the difference between web design and development? Web design is focused on how the website will look and feel to browsers. This means they’ll need to be able to produce work that is easy to understand, eye-catching and unique. Web development involves implementing these designs on the website’s backend and managing the site’s structure. If you recruit an experienced designer, these two roles can potentially both be filled by the same candidate. Should my website be responsive? Responsively designed websites are mobile-friendly. This means while you design your site on a desktop or laptop, if it’s found by someone using a mobile device, the site doesn’t cut off elements or have broken functionality. In a world that’s progressively using mobile devices to search the web, it is critical to ensure your site is mobile-friendly. Before any design can occur, it is always best practice to review a wireframe design for your website. A wireframe gives you an idea of how pages will look, how much space elements will take up and what navigation should be in place. It’s a very basic way to show what a final product will look like before in-depth work begins. What are carousel and hero images? When referring to a carousel, web designers are talking about a slide show on the landing page of your website. Carousels help to reduce clutter on the page and allow you to display multiple messages about different offerings. With regard to a hero image, this is a large image placed on the top of the page, which usually extends the width of the page. UX, or user experience, is the process where the designer focuses on providing users with the best experience. If done correctly, users will find navigating the site easy, enjoyable and relevant to them. Ensuring your site’s UX is top-notch will encourage users to explore more of it.
