Are you struggling to drive traffic to your website? Do you feel like your website is not reaching its full potential? If so, you’re not alone.
Many website owners face the challenge of attracting visitors to their sites.
This can be a big problem, as when your website is performing well, it can be your most profitable sales channel.
We’re a marketing agency, and we help our clients improve their digital channels. When we audit websites, we often see the same issues limiting their success.
We’re going to let you in on what those issues are, and by the end of this article, you’ll know what to look out for on your own website and how to update your site so that it becomes the sales-generating, profit machine you had pictured!
Why your website might not be getting a lot of traffic?
Before we can dive into how to improve your website, you first need to understand why it might be struggling.
You may find that it’s something easily fixed, but more likely, there are probably a few changes you’ll need to make. The thing about websites is that they aren’t easy, and it can take a while to start seeing success, but they’re also totally worth the hard work.
1. People can’t find it
If your website is not optimised for search engines, it may not be ranking high enough in search engine results pages (SERPs) for people to see when they type in a query related to your website.
If you’re not appearing, how are they supposed to find you?
You can check how well you are performing on search engines by looking at your organic traffic on Google Analytics. If it’s quite low, it’s probably because your site isn’t ranking very well.
You can use tools like SEMrush and Google Search Console to dig into the issues further and get a better picture of how the site is performing.
2. Lack of content
If your website doesn’t have enough high-quality and engaging content, visitors may not find it interesting enough to stay. If they can’t quickly find what they’re looking for, they’re likely to leave and unlikely to return.
3. Slow loading times
If your website is difficult to navigate or doesn’t provide a good user experience, visitors may leave your website and not return. Slow loading times are one of the easiest ways to lose your visitors’ attention.
4. Lack of promotion
How are you letting people know about your site? If you’re not actively promoting your website through social media, email marketing, and other channels, it may be difficult for people to find it.
Want to talk to us about increasing awareness of your medical device?
How to drive more traffic to your website
So, what can be done?
Before we dive into this, it’s worth noting a few important things you probably need to know.
Firstly, getting traffic to your website is a good goal to have, but how does it ultimately help you to achieve your business goals? More than likely, it doesn’t. You probably want people to come to your site so they can buy something or book a meeting with your team – this is what is known as converting your traffic.
We’ve covered how to improve your website’s conversion before, so feel free to take a look at that article. It’s important to consider before you start traffic-driving activities, so that when you do get the traffic to your website, it’s well set up to convert that traffic.
Next, you need to think about who you want to visit your website. Yes, getting lots of website traffic looks impressive, but if 90% of that traffic isn’t part of your target audience, what is it helping you to achieve?
So, when you’re planning how to increase traffic to your website, make sure you think about how you can do this in a way that brings your particular audience to your site.
1. Content creation
Creating high-quality and engaging content that adds value to your target audience gives users something to look at when they visit your website. This can include blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts, and more.
If you’re unsure what sort of content your audience will find most engaging, you can read our article on generating content ideas.
2. Optimise for search engines
Search engine marketing (SEM) is all about making your website more findable on search engines. This is either done through search engine optimisation (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) ads.
The purpose of SEO is to get websites to rank higher for specific keywords or phrases. The higher you rank, the more clicks you’re likely to earn – which means more traffic to your website.
SEO involves a combination of technical and creative techniques aimed at improving the quality and relevance of your website and its content so that search engines like Google or Bing can better understand and rank your website. You can learn a lot more in our SEO guide.
PPC ads, on the other hand, are not organic, meaning you pay to appear at the top of search engines for keywords or phrases. You may be thinking, “That sounds way easier, why wouldn’t I just do that?!”
A study by Moz has shown that organic search results get about 20 times more clicks than paid ads on desktop and nearly 14 times more clicks on mobile devices. That being said, it can take 7 months to start seeing the results from your SEO efforts, so PPC could be good for those looking for a quick traffic boost.
3. Social media
Your social media channels can be a powerful driver of traffic to your website when you use your posts to link back to your website.
Sharing valuable articles and any other content from your website can be a great way to do this. Ideally, the majority of your posts should funnel viewers to your website.
Social media is also a fantastic channel for building brand awareness and growing your audience. In turn, this means more potential traffic for your website.
4. Emails
Your email marketing campaigns can be your strongest tool in getting previous visitors to return to your website. You can do this by encouraging your website users to join your mailing list when they first visit your website. This might be through calls-to-action throughout your website or maybe a pop-up banner that appears before users leave.
You can then recapture their attention later on down the line by sending out newsletters linking back to the exciting content on your website.
You may be thinking, what is the point of getting visitors to come back to your website? Surely, if they didn’t convert the first time, they’re unlikely to come back? Well, actually, returning website visitors are generally more likely to convert than first-time visitors, as they may have already researched or considered your offerings.
5. Links, links, links!
Whenever you are creating any kind of marketing or sales material, you can usually find that there is some way to link back to your website.
Even in-person marketing and sales can be linked back to your website. For instance, at exhibitions, all of your materials, like stands and business cards, can contain QR codes directing towards your website.