How do you get web traffic?

For the general site owner, there are two ways of getting traffic.

You can pay to run digital marketing campaigns (like pay-per-click / AdWords, or social media campaigns), or you can work on setting up your website to be found naturally via search engines (SEO).

Basically, “paid” versus “organic”.

With marketing campaigns, you’ll gain instant traffic. But you still need those users to engage and convert (complete an action) – get users to sign up for your service, read your content, buy your product, sign up for your services, etc. How well that goes, depends on your website.

Depending on your budget though, you may not want to keep spending money on advertising or PPC campaigns to attract more customers.

With natural or organic traffic, there are a lot of factors at play that will increase your site’s authority, and boost your site’s search engine rankings.

So, it doesn’t matter if you pick paid and / or organic – your website needs to be set up correctly. Whether you’re still planning a new site, or looking to improve your current one, this guide can help you gain valuable website traffic.

1) Preparing your website

The first step is to help create the best platform for your content.

As mentioned earlier, there are over 140,000 sites being launched daily. WordPress alone is used to create tens of thousands of sites each day.

With all this competition, it’s important that your site checks each box on the “SEO-friendly” list.

Google Search Console / Analytics

To get a general idea of your site health, create a Google account for your site to set up a few key tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) is a simple way to see how your site performs, and if there might be issues in how Google “sees” your site.

After creating your account, add your website address in the blank field, and click the “Add a Property” button.

You will be asked to download a small HTML file, which should be uploaded to the main folder of your website (via ftp or through your host account).

After uploading, click on the provided link to double-check to see if that was correctly done. A simple page with one line of text containing the text in your html file, will appear.

Tick the “I’m not a robot” box to show you are a real user, and click the “Verify” button to finish up. If successful, this proves that you are the site owner, or at the minimum you are allowed access to the site files.

Now give Google 2 to 3 days to scan through your site, and report its finding back to you. Especially important will be the “Crawl errors” section, which will show you if there any pages / sections that Google can’t access.

Conclusion

By using these tools, you can use their information to check that all the basic elements are in place and correctly used. Keep scanning and analyzing your site to identify any potential issues, because user experience is very important to Google.

2) Keywords

Search engines like Google or Bing, are used to find answers to specific queries.

The basics of search engine optimization (SEO) is to place keywords or phrases in strategic places on your site, so that it highlights to Google what can be found on your site. This should align with what users are searching for.

The catch is that each word or phrase has a certain level of competitiveness. The more popular or competitive the term is, the more difficult it is to make your website rank for it in search engines.

Meaning, just because you pick the best possible keyword, does not mean your site will get found for it.

But you can decide to use less popular / competitive terms, which are more precise (and gets a user closer to what they are looking for) – and use these to gain traffic. These phrases consist of 4-5 words, and we call these “long-tail keywords”.

Conclusion

By using these tools, you can use their information to check that all the basic elements are in place and correctly used. Keep scanning and analyzing your site to identify any potential issues, because user experience is very important to Google.

2) Keywords

Search engines like Google or Bing, are used to find answers to specific queries.

The basics of search engine optimisation (SEO) is to place keywords or phrases in strategic places on your site, so that it highlights to Google what can be found on your site. This should align with what users are searching for.

The catch is that each word or phrase has a certain level of competitiveness. The more popular or competitive the term is, the more difficult it is to make your website rank for it in search engines.

Meaning, just because you pick the best possible keyword, does not mean your site will get found for it.

But you can decide to use less popular / competitive terms, which are more precise (and gets a user closer to what they are looking for) – and use these to gain traffic. These phrases consist of 4-5 words, and we call these “long-tail keywords”