Wondering how to get more hits on your website? Most new websites will struggle to get traffic. If your website is very new, you’re also likely to find you don’t even appear on a Google search for your own name! That can be because Google will “sandbox” new sites for a period of several months before including them in the search results. Even then, you can struggle to get traffic for a number of reasons:
- You don’t have enough content on your site.
- Your content isn’t optimised for search engines
- You haven’t built enough back links to your content from authority sites in your niche
- You’re competing in a topic which is very competitive, therefore there are many other sites offering more authority, back links and content than your own; which take the top listings
- Search engines aren’t rating your content highly enough
You can of course run paid advertising to your content for super fast traffic. But this is costly and you need to test and measure paid advertising before you can determine profitability. This costs money and most ads won’t work in bringing in profit immediately, so it can take time to determine which ads work and which don’t; all the while you’re burning through cash! So what’s the answer? A compromise is to spend a little on paid marketing, and spend time building and optimising content. You must also promote your content as you publish it for the best effect!
How To get More Hits On Your Website – Paid Marketing
Paid marketing is the fastest way to get more hits on your website. Hits don’t necessarily turn into customers or profit though, so you need to be careful when approaching paid marketing. Google Ads (Adwords) is a good place to start, or Bing (Microsoft Ads) is an alternative.
With paid marketing, you can burn through your daily budget quickly, so it’s worth considering which keywords are the most valuable to you before you start your campaign. Using a generic keyword phrase can bring in thousands of visitors the same day, with a large enough budget. But often these will be browsers not buyers. Determining your customer “avatar” is an important step here. By learning more about your “perfect” customer, you can target ads more appropriately and save yourself heaps of cash. See how to know your target market.
For example, if you target a generic keyword associated with your business, it will bring traffic from anyone who types this keyword with any other keywords attached. This can be costly if they are looking for freebies, or if your business is locally based and you end up paying for global website traffic! You can eliminate these problems by adding the term “free” to a negative keyword list, and targeting your ads only to your local area respectively; if you’re based locally. Getting to know your platform can save you a heap of cash, and bring you the right customers for less.
How To Get More Hits On Your Website – Blogging
Blogging is a great cheap method of generating more website traffic. Blogging is time consuming however, and is a longer term strategy of traffic generation than paid marketing. With paid marketing you can reach a lot of people fast and scale up globally. With blogging, you can get free traffic over a longer time period and your efforts can compound over time. Initially though, results are slower with blogging than from paid advertising.
But over time, if you stick with blogging, it can give you a heap of traffic for free. So profit you generate from your previous blogging efforts is all profit, since you’re not paying for ads.
If you’re going down the blogging path, it’s worth making a daily routine of creating content for your website and uploading it. It’s worth getting a good SEO plugin which will help with optimising your content for the search engines. See also the best free blog plugins for WordPress.
Blogging isn’t just about creating lots of high quality content, although that’s a good place to start. As a blogger you will also want to:
- Learn the best strategies for syndicating your content as far and wide as possible. See Auto post To Social Media From WordPress.
- Use plugins to help your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and help people easily share your content on social media (see best blog plugins for WordPress)
- Learn how to target long tail keywords which offer the least SEO competition. See how to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
How To Get More Hits On Your Website – Quora
Quora.com is a question and answer website which offers the opportunity of sharing your content when answering questions on your topic. So it can be a good resource for traffic to your website.
To use Quora.com to get more traffic, you need to find questions on the site which you’ve already answered with your content. Then, answer the questions on Quora.com and link back to your content.
Quora.com is aware of spamming of course so you need to be careful doing this. You can’t simply spam your links without giving some value first. So make your answers useful and informative. If you do this well, you should be allowed to paste your link to relevant content on your website. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.
Back Links To Your Website
Back links are another important thing you can work on to get more traffic to your website. They are doubly important because they bring people to your site through the links themselves and also they indicate to Google (and other search engines) the authority of your website. With a lot of backlinks, from reputable sources, Google will give your website a higher rating and therefore list your content higher up in the search results than others which are similar.
A natural back link profile should indicate that people are naturally linking to your website content over time. This is a clear indication to Google that your site is a valuable one.
Links are like “votes” indicating recommendations from others in your field of expertise. Older sites which rank well on the search engines often will have tens of thousands of back links to them from other authority websites. This can make the job of moving your website up the search listings very difficult; particularly if your site is new and in a competitive industry/niche.
Get Backlinks By…
To get back links you can:
- Create the best content you can in your topic. The better it is, the more likely people will naturally share it and link to it
- Offer to guest write for other websites within a similar niche to your own (look for guest blogging opportunities)
- Comment on blogs, forums and websites which offer a comment section
- Optimise your content so that more people see it (and can therefore link to it if they choose) – SEO
- Share your content and promote it after publishing; which gives people more opportunity to share and link to your content
- Ask for links directly from other website owners
- Use SEO services to create link building services on your behalf
- Write content on article marketing platform: e.g. Ezinearticle
- Upload videos to YouTube and/or TikTok and link to your content via your uploads
- Link to content via shares on social media
Content Marketing
Building content on your website is the cheapest strategy you can use to get more hits on your site. However, there’s a fair amount of work you’ll need to do to get traction using this method. It’s a long term strategy and it can take months or years to get traction, depending on your topic, and the relative competition in your field of expertise.
Be prepared to work consistently for several months and make a habit out of uploading content daily. Over time, you should see traffic slowly increasing if you put in the work. As your content grows, your traffic can compound from newer articles and the back log of older content you have created. You can also run paid advertising to give your traffic a boost alongside your blogging efforts. See also how long for a new website to get traffic, and is blogging worth it.
Hits On Your Website – Turning Hits Into Cash!
Of course it’s also worth mentioning that not all hits on your website are going to turn into sales or customers. Many of your website visitors will leave, never to return having never bought anything from you or taken any action on your website.
To make the most of your efforts, it’s worth starting out knowing about your perfect customer, or “customer Avatar”. The customer “avatar” is your perfect customer. It’s the person who loves you, what you’re doing and the products you’re promoting. They want everything you have to offer, and are prepared to pay for your services for a lifetime!
If you have existing customers, look at them to see what attributes they share. This will help you understand the demographics which best sum up your perfect customer. They might be of a certain age, live in a certain location, or have particular interests or hobbies.
Once you understand the audience you can best serve, you’re in a better position to help them with your content. Creating content which attract the wrong audience can be time consuming and wasteful. So if you’re starting out on a content generation mission, it’s best to target your content towards paying customers, rather than generic visitors. See also how to know your target market.
By writing content which attracts your perfect customer, you can shave years of a blogging campaign and achieve success more rapidly by targeting your content at the right people who have buyer intent, rather than “browser” intent.
Email Marketing
Another good way to make the most out of your marketing strategy is to use email marketing on your website. With a website, visitors only hang around for a few minutes. Most will leave never to return again! That’s a huge waste of all the work you’ll be doing to get them there! Many website owners therefore offer something of value on their website so they can capture the email addresses of their prospective customers when they come to visit.
For example, I offer a free video series on my website, and several free ebooks. When my visitors access these, I collect their emails and they join my email list. I can then follow up with an email marketing campaign which can last for months and even years!
Once you start using email marketing, it’s much easier to turn website visitors into customers because you can build a relationship with them over the longer term. See also the power of email marketing and free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.