These 10 Expert Tips Will Drive Traffic to Your Business’s Website

June 20th, 2016 by Search Influence Alumni

It doesn’t take a web expert to know that more traffic to your website means more business. However, researching ways to improve your online traffic isn’t always easy. We asked our in-house experts for their thoughts and came up with these ten ways to drive traffic to your website.

1: Implement Schema Markup and Rich Snippets on Your Site

Schema Markup is structured data that labels existing elements on your website so search engines can better understand the content. Essentially, when Schema.org markup is implemented into your website’s HTML source (the only place where it should be visible), it clearly defines specific parts of your content, such as your business address and telephone number.

Rich Snippets are a structured data markup only recognized by search engine algorithms. When used on appropriate content, Rich Snippets can show exact content from a website on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. These snippets are the few lines of text under every search result. For example, if you run a medical practice that wants to advertise its high rate of patient satisfaction, you can markup content from patient testimonials so that your glowing reviews show up when people search for doctors in your area.

2: Improve Your Site Speed

Site speed is the amount of time a page needs to completely load. This matters for both users and search engines, as users are less likely to stay on a website that takes a long time to load and search engines will penalize your website for being too slow. Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool is a great way to analyze your site for ways to improve your site speed and will provide you with detailed information on how to fix each issue.

3: Use Google Search Console

Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) allows you to indicate to Google the various details of your site. A very important part of this process is submitting your sitemap so that search engines can better crawl and categorize your site—if you haven’t done this yet, you should! Search Console will give you a report on the average ranking of your website on SERPs for specific search queries. These reports will let you know what you should be improving on your site to gain a high position and click rate.

4: Publish Press Releases

Press Releases are great when you have an announcement to make or a story to tell. They’re also highly useful for helping you own your business name in SERPs. Sites like PRWeb and Cision will distribute your press releases for you and get them published on news sites and blogs. For a little extra money, they’ll also send your release to journalists and bloggers, in hopes that they’ll publish it on their sites as well.

5: Perform On-Site Link Building

Internal Linking is a link from one page to another on your website. This process fosters a great user experience, as anyone visiting your site will find themselves easily hopping from one page to another without having to really search for the information they’re looking for. Search engines like Google are very focused on user experience. Good internal link building helps googlebot understand the relationship between pages, among a set of content.

6: Perform Off-Site Link Earning

By submitting your website to online forums, specifically those that pertain to your business’ physical and professional communities, you’re naturally increasing the chances that someone will visit your website. Engaging on social platforms like StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, and Delicious can be more valuable than you think.

7: Perform Off-Site Citation Building

Similarly to off-site link earning, submitting business listings to niche directories (industry & categorical), data feeds, major directories like Google, Yelp, Bing, Foursquare, YP.com, and secondary directories like Merchant Circle, HotFrog is a great way to drive traffic to your website.

8: Syndicate Your Videos

It’s no secret that having a YouTube channel filled with optimized videos drives up web traffic. However, you should also syndicate your videos across other sustainable video channels, such as Vimeo and DailyMotion. Videos will earn links and citations on social sites because they’re highly shareable. These increase link source diversity.

9: Post and Promote on Social Media

This may seem like a no-brainer, but you would be surprised by how many businesses don’t actually do this. Paying for promoted posts on Facebook offers a relatively inexpensive way to get your business in front of target consumers. Facebook also offers radius-based targeting for ads, which lets you target people who are/were:

• Living in your area
• Located in your area
• Recently visiting your area
• Traveling to/in your area

Posting and promoting isn’t limited to Facebook, though! LinkedIn and Pinterest are other examples of great social media sites that are perfect for driving traffic to your website.

10: Be a Resource in Your Industry Through Sharable Content

It’s one thing to be ahead of your competition, but it’s another thing entirely to be an industry thought leader. You can do this by creating shareable content. For example, you MUST have a blog. Your blog should be on site, not offsite. If your website is hosted on a CMS like WordPress, then you can easily integrate a blog within your existing site! Not only does blogging build authority for your brand and show off the human side of your company, but according to Hubspot, businesses who prioritize blogging experience 13 times increase in ROI.

You should also start to create infographics. They combine easily digestible—but valuable—information with a visually appealing information, making them highly shareable across all social media websites. For example, this infographic, created for a medical directory, was shared more than 900 times, got more than 300 Facebook shares, and was pinned more than 150 times.

Want more information? Watch our recent webinar for more information and tips.