It may go without saying that the most immediate way of generating and maintaining interest in a web project is by creating a service, product, or online content of value to the audience. But assuming that the core of the project is finalized, there are various additional techniques that can be used to drive traffic and generate leads.
When it comes to driving traffic to your site, businesses should be encouraged to try different approaches and monitor for success. Here are some of the best ways that this can be achieved:
Digital Flipbooks
Making digital flipbooks helps you engage your audience and generate new quality leads. Such documents don’t just drive traffic and improve your search results—they bring you more visitors that convert into clients. You can send your online flipbooks via email, embed them into your website, or post to social media. This way, you reach a wider audience and use all the marketing and sales channels you have to drive traffic to your website.
For instance, check out this engaging flipbook, made with FlippingBook.
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Backlinks
Any link from another website to your website is known as a backlink. These can potentially drive extra traffic to your website, and backlinks that come from influencers or other businesses in the field will bring qualified traffic, and not just any internet users. With more trusted sites linking to yours, search engines will notice and increase trust in your business, which will in turn lead to higher rankings and more traffic. The next challenge is to build partnerships and collaborations with influential websites that will host your links, possibly through a link exchange.
Social Media
One of the best free ways to promote a web project is to post to one of the many social media platforms. By creating content such as blog posts, articles, interactive flipbooks, and videos, marketers can draw interest through topics that are relevant to your business. Content that is useful or entertaining will help to grow a social media audience. When you include links and calls to action (CTAs) this new audience can become website visitors.
By making your posts shareable you can also access the wider networks of your audience members. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are popular platforms that allow content to be posted, so industry experts have a way of instantly connecting with their audience and providing valued content. If you want to draw attention to your posts, you can try sharing your content in a flipbook format. Such flipbooks have a nice and fresh preview and will make people stop scrolling and click the link to learn what it’s all about.
On-Page SEO
This includes a range of tactics for optimizing content, tags, and URLs for users and search engines. Search engines are more intelligent than they were in the past, but they still crawl sites for keywords. Titles and text that are keyword rich are more likely to rank higher. Content can be optimized by such things as providing contact information, writing meta descriptions, image alt text, and creating internal links. Google’s Core algorithm is also rumored to consider user experience for website rankings. Optimize your website from the backend and make sure your web hosting provider is giving you fast load times to get good results here. Many SEO practices can be carried out free of charge, they just take some time and attention. This can help to increase your organic traffic.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is proven to have the highest return on investment (ROI) of all marketing channels, and this trend continues. It enables brands to stay connected with customers and drive traffic to websites. Marketers need to be sensitive about how they use this approach, providing useful and relevant information, the right balance needs to be found so customers are not overwhelmed by emails and subsequently do not lose interest. Attention also needs to be paid to the email subject, which may affect whether emails are opened or not.
Create engaging newsletters if you want your audience to share them with others. You can enrich your usual newsletters with interactive flipbooks and link to them from the images or GIFs in your newsletter. Since each flipbook is trackable, you’ll have additional stats on how your content performs—to complement the ones your emailing service already provides. Here’s how we made a GIF + flipbook combo work in our email newsletter:
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Advertising
Google Search advertising will help websites to rank high for certain keywords, and costs are only incurred when people click on the ads. Search advertising on Google Maps may also be an appropriate option for businesses to show their location.
Display advertising allows you to have banner ads on relevant websites in a particular field, while social media advertising allows ads for businesses in relevant feeds. This leverages more psychographic data which can give more specific targeting. Retargeting ads can appear in various places and they are a way of targeting the audience that has already visited your website and can be considered likely to return.
Google My Business
Google claims that businesses listed on Google My Business are 70 percent more likely to get visits from customers than businesses not listed. Becoming listed is free and it allows your business to show up in relevant searches. Businesses can provide all of the relevant information and increase their visibility. This is a great way of driving traffic to a website, although with the details provided some customers may even bypass the website and contact the business directly. Customers also have the chance to leave reviews, which can help to promote your web presence.
Alternative Directories
In addition to the major search engine player, there are many web directories with considerable influence that allow businesses to be listed for free. Here you can list a link to your website and create a profile that needs to be frequently updated. It is necessary to build positive reviews and build trust to generate traffic to your website. You should also consider whether the directory has the right reputation and is popular with your target audience. Some directories also have authority with Google, so it is possible to rank for certain searches.
Online Activity
Creating content is a great way of building interest in a brand, but it is also good to engage potential customers online to generate traffic to your site. This can be done by responding to questions relating to products, services, or content that people are asking, or comments they are making. Engaging with a community will lead to increased exposure and profile visits. With a link to the website in your profile, users are more likely to visit your website. But be careful to make your engagement genuine and personal, as the target audience may lose interest if your behavior is pushy or insincere.
Long-Tail Keywords
High-intent or popular short-tail keywords are more frequently targeted in SEO, but long-tail keywords should not be overlooked. Long-tail keywords account for 70 percent of all search traffic, which means focussing solely on the top few hundred keywords could mean missing a trick. Taking a long-tail strategy can mean ranking higher for queries that are directly related to your business, which will lead to more traffic. To make sure you're beating the competition and driving stable traffic to your content, you need to track search engine rankings for the keywords you're targeting and adjust your strategy if needed. Long-tail keywords are also more relevant to voice and advanced search technologies, which are becoming more specific.
Guest Blogging
Asking a well-known industry influencer to write content for you can be an excellent way of driving traffic to your website. Such an arrangement can be mutually beneficial, as the influencer can bring their following to your site, while your audience will come to theirs. You also have the option of turning an interview into a blog post or even writing an engaging article for their site in order to drive traffic back to your own. It is important to ensure that the content is interesting and useful and not created solely for the purposes of a guest blogging exchange.
Different Content Formats
There are various methods of creating quality content that will drive traffic to a site, so don’t let yourself neglect the many options. Blog posts and articles can be long or short form, they can be news based or editorial, and they can incorporate video or infographics. Podcasts and webinars are also popular ways to deliver content directly to an audience. It is a good idea to vary the approaches you take to content to keep it interesting and monitor the response from your audience.
Analytics
There are many analytics tools, such as Bitly, SEMRush, or Google Analytics, which provide useful insights into website traffic and visitor behavior. While some of these charge for the premium service, others offer free plans. This kind of analytical data is incredibly useful for informing marketing strategies and campaigns, so every business should make the most of these tools. Gathering data can show you how customers are responding to content, which approaches are the most successful and which need to be dropped. You can also understand where visitors to your site are located, the devices they are using, the links they click on, and how they arrived at your site.
As a higher proportion of commerce takes place in a virtual space, it is not surprising that there is a growing emphasis for businesses to generate traffic. This can be achieved by following the changes in marketing or search engines, or it can be more focussed on increasing exposure or improving the quality of content. There are many possible means of driving more traffic so the best place to start is a coherent marketing strategy.
Author's bio
Robert O’Sullivan is a freelance writer who writes about marketing, business, and technology.
