It doesn’t matter how monthly visits your website receives; you could always do with a few more. But after your initial growth, it can sometimes be challenging to find ways to draw in more people; everything seems to plateau. However, there are things you can do that’ll nudge your visitor numbers in the right direction. Below, we take a look at eight tried and tested methods that’ll get you on the right track.
Provide Excellent Content
First thing’s first: you need to give people a reason to visit your website. There’s a ridiculous number of websites out there, and people are only going to spend time on the ones that are worthwhile. There are no pity cases when it comes to the digital world: no-one’s going to spend time on your site as a favor. So before you bemoan the fact that you’re not getting as much visitors as you’d like, you’ll want to check your site to ensure you have excellent content. If it wasn’t your website, would you visit it? If not, then it’s time for a revamp. Spend some time developing your content, and then look at relaunching.
Get Found
However, it’s possible that you could have great content and still have trouble drawing in visitors. There are two things that are imperative to running a successful site. The first is that you have good content; the second is that people can find you. If you’re not performing well on the search engines, and especially Google, then you’ll find it difficult to get visitors. Because this is a complicated aspect of running a website, it’s best that you’re working with SEO experts. They’ll have the experience and know-how that can help your website to be found more easily when people are searching for terms related to your website.
Social Media Traffic
If you want to get people to come to your party, then first you need to integrate yourself with them — and that means hanging out where they hang out. In the digital world, that means social media websites, which, as you probably know, are incredibly popular. So your website should be a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. One mistake that many websites make, however, is that they throw all of their best content onto social media websites, and they save nothing for their own site. Don’t give all your best stuff to Facebook! Instead, use it as a platform to direct people to your website. It’s much better to post a teaser and then include a link to your website, rather than simply post your best stuff. That’s not going to help you.
Other Websites
One way to build an audience when you first start out is to piggyback on other, more established websites. For example, you can write a guest post for a website that ranks higher than yours. When it’s published there, it’ll be seen by everyone who visits that site — and, since you’ll have included a link to your website, then you might just find that people are checking your site out. Of course, you’ll want to show that you know what you’re talking about, so make sure you’re presenting your best work.
Avoid Annoying Aspects
We talk about getting more website visitors, but it’s important to think about the type of audience that you’re building. You could get 50,000 visitors in one month, but if they’re only staying for a few seconds and then never returning, then that’s not going to lead to an effective long-term strategy. It would be much better to have 10,000 visitors who visited regularly. You’ll get that by posting excellent content, but also by, well, not annoying them. There are some things that many website owners integrate into their site that annoy visitors! Don’t do it. Things like autoplay videos, invasive and numerous pop-ups, and dark pattern strategies might be effective in the short-term, but you’ll lose your audience in the long-term. It can take a little bit of self-control not to add these things to your website, but it is worth it.
Reliability
If a person is going to spend time on your website, either for the first time or not, then they need to be able to access the site. You need to have reliability, which means being online, always. You can get this by working with a reliable network provider, or, if you’re a business, outsourcing the task to another company. In addition to being online all the time, you’ll want to look at your page loading times. People have limited patience, they always have, and if something’s taking too long, then they’ll be quick to hit the ‘X’ button.
What’s Hot?
It’s your website, and you’re free to do what you please with it. Indeed, that’s part of the fun — it’s your corner of the digital world! However, it’s always recommended to keep an eye on what’s hot, and what people like on the internet. You’re still able to put your own spin on whatever it is; it’s about the presentation and medium, rather than controlling your content. For example, let’s think about video, which is hugely popular at the moment (and is projected to be even more popular in the future). If this is what people like, then you should look at putting your content into a video. You don’t want to be one of those websites that have failed to move on.
Easily Shareable
Finally, remember that people are more likely to follow the recommendations of their friends than anything or anyone else. So you should make it easier for people to share your content with their friends and family. To do this, make sure you include share buttons on your website. This will allow your visitors to share your pages on their Facebook and Twitter pages, among others.
Don’t sit back and let potential visitors go to other websites. Take action by taking the steps above, and you’ll be on your way to boosting your website visitor numbers.
