Ready to rocket your website traffic in 2021? This week MD Sarah is bringing you her top tips to increase your website traffic FAST.
Sarah explains… “As a business owner, I know it is important to have continuous website traffic to grow the business in the right direction. However, a lot of business owners out there either ignore the importance of driving traffic to their website on a daily basis, or don’t know where to start! I hope these top tips will change that.”
Video transcript
“Are you looking for ways to boost traffic to your ecommerce store without having to pay for advertising?
In this video, I’m going to cover unusual but highly effective ways to grow your traffic to your ecommerce store without paid ads, so keep watching.
Now for the best advice on how to grow your brand online quickly and profitably, subscribe to our videos, hit the bell so you’re notified every time we post a new video.
I’m Sarah, founder of The Fastnet Agency, and we help ambitious ecommerce businesses to scale their brand online. Follow me for more great videos on how to grow your ecommerce brand.
So first up… Why would you want to be looking at growing your website traffic? Well, the first most obvious thing is that you will inevitably convert some of that traffic into more sales, and that in turn will help you to grow your store.
But secondly, to that, by increasing the amount of traffic going through your website, you’re also helping to push your brand in front of more people, and it helps to grow your authority.
So even if some of the ways in which we’re looking to boost brand here does not necessarily directly lead to a sale, it’s still building your brand’s authority and it’s also meaning that you can retarget those people that have visited your website through email marketing, or through retargeted or remarketed advertising.
So every time somebody visits your site you’ve got the opportunity to put your brand in front of them again.
So the more traffic you can get through your website, the more valuable that is, the more you’re gonna be able to grow your sales.
Many brands spend lots of time focusing on what the website looks like and not enough time focusing on SEO. SEO is essential if you’re gonna start ranking in search engines. It’s all those indicators that Google and other search engines look out for in order to promote websites and push them to the front page of Google.
So you’re going to want to make sure that you have a clear understanding of how you can improve your site’s SEO.
Now, if you don’t know where to start, if you go to Ubersuggest you can get a free SEO audit… You just pop in your URL, press enter, and that will bring up a free SEO audit, and actually, I really recommend Neil Patel, who owns Ubersuggest, subscribe to his blog,. he’s got some brilliant advice on how to grow your website traffic, so check that out, that’s my number one tip.
If you want to try and tackle SEO yourself, then it’s really good to have a plugin on your website that will help you with that.
So a couple that we recommend are Rank Math, they’re a relatively new plugin but they’re super simple, really easy to understand. We like the Rank Math plugin, so check that out, and also Yoast SEO.
Yoast are the sort of the longstanding industry leaders; follow their directions in order to improve your SEO score.
The other thing you should do is connect your website to Google Search Console. Google Search Console will automatically scan your site,and will let you know of any major issues that is affecting it.
So it’s a really useful, completely free of charge, tool that Google provides, so check that out as well.
Now the other thing you really need to spend a lot of time doing is making sure that you understand the keywords that people are searching for, because obviously you don’t want to spend a load of time optimising your site for keywords that just aren’t very popular.
So there’s various different keyword research tools online. Google has its own keyword research tool. You can also look at Google trends to see if there’s anything in particular that’s trending at the moment that you can tap into in terms of keywords.
Also, Ubersuggest, as I mentioned earlier, that does the SEO audit, that will also allow you to do some keyword research, so you might find that there are several different ways that you could refer to your product or service.
But certain terms are a lot more popular than others. So it’s really important that you’re clear about how many people are searching for what term and what you want to be found for as a brand.
Okay, so the second way to drive more traffic to your store is to set up for a referral programme. Now this is really valuable because the referral is always going to be a way of building authority before they’ve even come onto your site.
So what you want to do this is to set up some sort of system that allows existing customers to recommend you to their friends or their family in order for them to get some sort of kick back for that.
So a lot of the time referral services are ‘recommend a friend’ & when they check out they’ll get a 5% or 10% discount, as you will as well next time you shop.
So those ideas of making sure that that referral has made the purchase, and when they make the purchase, they benefit, and your original customer benefits as well.
Now, having a really good referral service is a brilliant way to grow your brand, & a lot of up & coming brands at the moment have spent a lot of time and thought into their referral services in order to grow quickly and profitably.
The next way to grow your traffic quickly is to make sure that you understand the sort of questions that your target audience, your target customers, are asking and then produce the targeted content on your website purely based on answering those questions.
So you can use a tool like Answer The Public to help you with researching what those questions are. Answer The Public – great resource, just pop in your keyword and it will come up with all the various questions that people are searching for in order to, in order to cover that keyword.
Another tool you can use in conjunction with that is a plugin for your Google Chrome called Keywords Everywhere that will actually take the answers that you get from Answer The Public & will add the amount of searches that people were doing for those times, so you can see what questions are most popular.
Now a really good example of how you can then take a question and produce brilliant content in order to answer that question, we take a look here at evo.com – now they sell skis and you can see here that the page they’ve set up for how to fit my skis is just brilliant, it answers every possible question you could have about the topic.
Now, people are inevitably searching for this, it pops up as an answer, you’ve got all the information you could possibly have here, but it also sets you up as an authority in this sector, so people are inevitably going to check them out. Now, another way that you could grow your website traffic is to create an online tool.
So if people are having to work something out for themselves, and you can create a tool to do that for them, then that will inevitably drive traffic to your website. Now there are various different tools that I’ve seen recently.
One that I tend to use all the time is a VAT calculator online, for example, there’s various mortgage calculators, so service-based industries tend to offer this a lot, but you can be quite inventive with it.
If there’s something that you work out all of the time, you can potentially make life easier for somebody else by providing a tool for them, then do that.
Say, for example, a sail maker might be able to produce an online tool to work out your sail area. So that’s a good example of just a little online tool that would help people out.
Now, if you’re inventive about this, most people can think of something that they could pop on their website that would be searchable and useful for their customers.
So, rack your brain and see what sort of tool you could come up with that you could place on your website.
Now have you tried to grow your online traffic? How have you found it? Have you been successful? Are you coming up against problems?
I’d love to hear your experiences so yeah, pop a comment in the box below and let’s get the conversation moving. Number five for how to grow your traffic is to make sure you’re capturing an email address when people visit your site for the first time.
If you can produce some sort of incentive, or really good call to action for people to leave their email address and subscribe to your newsletter, that’s a really good way of being able to retarget them with content straight to their inbox, which drives them back to your website.
If you can gather those emails, that means that your initial visitors are much more likely to return to your website and that in turn will increase your website traffic. The next way to grow your traffic quickly – leverage other brands.
If you’re selling a certain type of product and that is complemented by other products from other brands, then try to get together with them to collaborate.
Do joint blog posts or social posts, do a social media takeover, do joint competitions… By leveraging the audience of other brands it’s a brilliant way to grow your website traffic, and it can be mutually beneficial because that brand gets access to your audience, some of whom they might not already have been in front of previously, and you get access to their audience.
So it’s a really good way of both businesses being able to scale by leveraging each other’s audiences. So, yeah, definitely have a little look at other brands that are complimentary to your own, where you’d have a similar audience, a similar demographic of people that are wanting to access your products, and seriously, look at approaching those brands to leverage some sort of joint effort.
Now, a really simple way of doing this initially if you’re a bit nervous about approaching them, is to produce some really good content for them.
So, for example, if you sold walking boots, you might want to approach a holiday provider for walking holidays and produce a really good piece of content, a blog post all about, you know, the various different things that you need, the various equipment that you need, in order to have a really good, successful walking holiday…
You know, what to pack, what to take with you…etc… and, you know, being in the sector, you’d be able to offer a really good article on that, which, of course, we also reference walking boots because you need walking boots in order to go on a walking holiday.
And you could potentially approach a walking holiday provider and say, ‘look, I’ve got this really good blog post, it fits into your audience, it will be really valuable for you’,
And chances are they will take it if you can build a good relationship with them, and of course that article will link, in a subtle way, not in an overtly sales-y way, to your website, where you can then sell your walking boots.
So it’s a really good way of being able to leverage bigger brands that you think you might be a little bit out of your reach, and leverage their audience in order to direct their traffic towards your website.
Now, running competitions is a brilliant way to build the traffic to your website. First look at where you want to promote your competition. Are you going to do this on social media? Are you going to do some PR around it? Are you going to collaborate with other brands in your sector?
So have a little bit of a think about how you’re going to promote your competition, to get as many people to enter as possible.
And ideally, if the aim of your competition is to increase your site traffic, then make sure that in order to enter the competition they’re going to a specific landing page and filling in some sort of form with contact information because that will obviously then allow you to have that valuable email address which we’ve already discussed is so important.
But it will also allow you to retarget them with adverts based on the information that your site pixel has picked up. So you can then run retargeted or remarketed adverts on Facebook and Instagram and Google for those people that have already visited your site to enter.
So it means you’ve got that valuable contact information. Make sure your website is mobile friendly. Probably the number one thing that you can do these days to ensure that you’ve got good site traffic coming through to your website.
Now, again, two reasons for this. The first is that Google will penalise you if your website isn’t mobile-friendly. And the second is all about user experience. So many people are accessing websites from a mobile now, it’s over 50%, so when they come onto your site, you want to make sure that they’re getting the best possible experience from your mobile website.
Now you can really easily check your site’s performance on mobile by going to Google’s Mobile Test website and I’ll pop the URL for that in the comments box below, Now, number nine – check out your site’s speed, one of the things that could be really affecting your website traffic and your bounce rate is your site speed.
If your website is slow, then first of all, Google is more likely to penalise it because one of the criteria that Google looks at when it comes to prioritising your site on search engines is your site speed.
So if your site is slow, Google could well degrade you in terms of where you sit in your search rankings. And the other thing is that when people actually reach your website, if your site is slow, it’s not loading up quickly enough, then people are much more likely to bounce off your side and not look at your content.
You can use a tool like Pingdom to check out your site speed. Make sure that you, when you type in your URL and you select the server, that you select the one most local to your audience, to your website traffic.
So if you’re based in the UK, make sure you select the London server, because that will affect site speeds. If you’re selecting a server in America and you’re based in London, it will appear slower than if you select a server more local to where your website is hosted.
Now I produce a new video every Thursday, so make sure you subscribe. Hit the bell for notifications every time I post a new video and we’ll see you next week. Now I really hope that you found this helpful.
Now, if you’d like some more ecommerce sales strategies which cover every part of your funnel, then check out this video over here. And if you’re serious about growing your site’s website traffic, then you really should watch this video all about content marketing. So check that out over here.”
