5 Useful Tools to Help Grow Your Website’s Traffic
Why is your business looking to advertise? Ultimately, it’s to generate traffic either to your physical location or digital website, right? Having a healthy amount of visitors to your site means you’re generating leads and converting these leads into potential customers, which is good for sales.
You may think that just by putting up a website you will be able to generate traffic, but creating a great website is only the first step. There must be a reason why people come to your website: whether it be for information, products, or services.
Understanding Types of Traffic
Before we dive into how to grow traffic, we need to first understand the two types of traffic: paid and organic.
Paid Traffic
Paid traffic is straightforward: you place an ad in places where your ideal customers are visiting, whether it be a television show, website, or social platform, and this ad helps to generate traffic to your website.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is unpaid traffic that is directed to your site or location by search, inbound links from another website, or by content that you create on social platforms. The tools we will talk about today will focus on bringing organic, unpaid traffic to your website.
SEO Tools
In order to drive a healthy amount of organic content, you need to publish great content. Great content gets shared and provides value for the reader. The best way to determine what kind of content to create is to plan out your content strategy.
Content strategy begins with in-depth keyword research to understand what your ideal customers are searching for and what types of information, products, or services they need. Another important factor that many people overlook is volume: you don’t want to focus on topics, products, or services that a small handful of people are looking for – you want to prioritize high search volume keywords and phrases when planning out your content strategy.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a powerful digital marketing tool that helps you plan and research keywords and build backlinks to your website. There are many features that Ahrefs offers and here are just a few:
- Site explorer: allows you to see how many backlinks your site has earned compared to your competitors, and how your competitors rank for certain keywords
- Content explorer: helps to improve your content strategy by identifying topics that your competitors are writing about that you can also rank for
- Keyword explorer: find relevant keywords for your marketing campaign based on volume and competitiveness
- Rank tracker: monitors your site’s Google ranking on desktop and mobile so you can see how your site improves
- Site audit: identifies common SEO problems and issues on your site and recommendations on how to fix them
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a more budget-friendly option if paying for a tool like Ahrefs isn’t in your marketing plan. With Ubersuggest, you can also research keywords and conduct site audits. The main difference is that Ahrefs offers more features such as rank tracker and deeper competitive analysis than Ubersuggest. Also, if you want to conduct keyword research on other platforms such as Amazon, YouTube, or Yahoo!, you won’t be able to do it with Ubersuggest.
WordPress Yoast SEO Plug-in
If your site runs on WordPress, the Yoast SEO plug-in is a must-have. It analyzes your content and checks it for optimizations you need for SEO purposes such as:
- Keyword density
- Outbound/internal links
- Meta description
The readability function of this plug-in is also very useful. Readability is another important factor in Google’s search ranking algorithm because poor content formatting leads to poor visitor experience.
Yoast will grade your content’s SEO and readability on a red, yellow, or green status. Green means your content is optimized to its full potential while yellow and red indicate there is room for improvement, which the tool will also suggest.
Content Structuring Tools
Related to readability, here are some tools that can help you format your content just for great site experience, but improve its click-through rate as well.
Google rich snippets appear in search results and results that have rich snippets tend to get more clicks than results that do not. Example of rich snippets include ratings, FAQ’s, table of contents, and recipes. By enabling your site’s content for rich snippets, it can help your search results stand out from the rest.
Table of Contents WordPress Plug-in
As we’ve mentioned above, one of the features of the Yoast SEO tool is that it grades your posts on readability. The easier your posts are to read, the more likely your visitors will stay and read the whole thing.
This benefits two important factors: your session duration (how long visitors stay reading your content) and your bounce rate (the rate at which visitors leave your site without visiting another page).
The Table of Contents plugin helps organize your post with headers. Headers help Google understand the flow of your content, and more importantly helps to guide the reader when they’re digesting the information.
By having a Table of Contents at the beginning of your post, you allow the reader to see what your article will cover and jump to the most relevant section if they wish.
Optimizing visitors’ site experience and creating great, share-worthy content help to build trust and a relationship with the reader. This increases the likelihood of them re-visiting your site, following you on your social media channels, or making a purchase.
Social Sharing Tools
Another great way to get organic traffic is by posting frequently and consistently on social media platforms. You can also leverage your customers, followers, and fans to drive more eyeballs and traffic to your website by allowing them to share your content – whether it be a product, blog post, video, or image.
Grow by Mediavine
Grow by Mediavine allows you to add social sharing buttons to your products and blog posts to encourage visitors to share your content with their Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or LinkedIn networks.
The best practice is to add the social sharing buttons at the end of your blog post, and making the buttons “sticky” on mobile if possible. Limit the number of social media platforms you allow, because you do not want to overwhelm your visitor with too many choices: choose the social media platforms that generate the most traffic for your website.
Conclusion
It’s important to understand that organic traffic takes time to grow: it takes Google time to crawl your site and recognize what your site is about. Building your website’s domain authority will also take time. Creating valuable, share-worthy content that services the need of your target audience on a consistent basis is the first step. Marketing your website, product, and services to the right people on the right platforms is the second step. You can use the tools above to ensure that the content you create is optimized for organic traffic and use this guide to understand how to leverage the right social media networks to amplify your brand and messaging. If you need help, contact CC:S today to see how we can help you develop a marketing strategy to grow your traffic.