Imagine that you’ve been struggling to get the attention your website deserves. You are on a tight budget and cannot spend hundreds of dollars every month or to hire a freelancer.
So you have to do the heavy lifting yourself. Ugh! But no worries, since there are plenty of ways on how to drive traffic to your website or domain.
Don’t worry, there is always an easy way!
This is a complete step-by-step guide to show you how to grow your website traffic!
In recent months, I’ve tried to reach an audience for my company, Times International, and it didn’t work in the beginning.
I basically had 20 to 40-page visitors per day. That is until I began optimizing my content to my audience’s needs. And the results might not be astounding. But from 40-page visitors, my website made it to 400 to 600-page visits per day on Google alone.
Here are 5 Easy-to-Follow Steps to get you fishing for visitors.
There are several key factors you must take into consideration. Since this is a complete tutorial, you can also download my FREE Ebook on “How to Building traffic to your website.”
So let’s get into it!
How to start driving traffic to your new website?
First, you need to know and understand what SEO is.
SEO is basically what search engines like Google use in order to determine valuable content. Here is the thing: over 4.4 million blog posts (blogs, articles, reviews etc.) flood the web every day.
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the simple activity of ensuring a website can be found in search engines for words and phrases relevant to what the site is offering.
In many respects, it’s simply quality control for websites. SEO ranks all those millions of blog posts based on content and website quality.
Every day, millions of people from across the world come to Search Engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo with questions or to spend time searching for something.
They type certain words into Google and immediately, they get thousands or millions of articles or videos ready.
When you write an article Google’s algorithm looks for certain keywords in your topic to see how beneficial they are for the reader. The ones that are the highest quality from the most reliable websites get ranked number one.
That is why when you enter certain keywords into Google like the news, you get big newspapers or media companies first. Getting on the first page of Google is the key to drive traffic.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is pretty straightforward. More listings in the search engines = more visibility for your business = build traffic to your website = you sell more stuff or book more appointments. SEO is like free publicity for your business. If Google lists you in their search results
So why engage in SEO?
Because you want to optimize your article to be on the first page of Google. Why?
Because of this way, your article can be seen by thousands of people. And this gives you a better chance to get more readers or even buyers if you are running an online store or service.
Thousands of people from across the world run online businesses making millions of dollars from sales, advertising, marketing, or consultancy by being on the first page. Their SEO ranking and articles are super good. And this helps them be on top.
But you can always take their place or squeeze your content in between search results.
Let’s take an example:
Let’s assume that you are doing a random Google search because you are 18 and you’re about to finish high school. You got excellent grades in school and want to know which are the best medical universities in your area. So you type into Google “best universities for medicine.”
And BOOM, you get the results in a matter of seconds.
Now imagine you write an article about the top 100 best universities for your website or any website to help millions of high school students in this decision. You can get a lot of page views.
Sounds exciting! You can get popular with your name under your article, where people will share and like your content on social media.
However, I have to be the bearer of sad news. Writing a great and detailed article is not enough to get to the first page of Google and drive traffic! ?
But there are plenty of tips up our sleeve to help you get there. ?
But how do I optimize my article to appear on the first page of Google?
At the heart of SEO is quality content.
To be successful at SEO and get all the attention your website deserves, you have to produce valuable and useful content that Google can latch onto and list in their search results. That’s it! No complications needed to drive traffic.
Here I have created THREE main parts to advise startups, freelancers, young digital nomads, and small companies about SEO.
The Technical Part of Website Growth
When it comes to Google, its purpose is to organize the world’s information. All those billions of articles have to sort out and provide the best possible answers to every search query people want to know. So if you can provide Google with the content they need to achieve their objective, they reward you with a spot in their search listings.
If you have your own website here are some basic tips to boost SEO in 20 minutes!
Everyone hates slow websites! They just suck.
Source: https://clevelandseoguy.com/
But the worst part about it all is that it can cost you your visitors as well as damage your SEO. Google has announced that website speed is indeed a factor for ranking. So websites that last more than 4 seconds to load are losing views. ?
Pagespeed is crucial. If you run a test on Google’s Pagespeed Insight or Gmetrix, you can get a clear idea about this.
Google wants a clean and simple user experience. So in order to drive traffic to your website, you must look at your page speed score.
If your score is low or red, here are some easy tips to help you out in a matter of minutes:
Download the following plugins to avoid losing views because of a slow page!
If you are using WordPress I’d recommend you to clean up all garbage and unused code from Javascript, CSS, and HTML after writing several articles with a ton of images or videos. You need to run a clear Cache function to get rid of all unused data that doesn’t need to be loaded.
I would recommend you download these plugins!
Clearify – You need to run a clear Cache function to get rid of all unused data that doesn’t need to be loaded.
Really Simple SSL – Move from Http to Https. Why? HTTPS is an encryption method that secures the connection between the users’ browser and your server. This makes it harder for hackers to eavesdrop on the connection. Google has announced that if you don’T do this, it will mark your site as “not secure.”
Disable any theme or plugin you are not using. This slows down your website, which damages SEO.
Health Check & Troubleshooting – Automatically detect common configuration errors, debugs issues, and helps you have a clean WordPress session to run smoothly.
Reduce image size
WP Smush is a plugin for compressing images to take less time to load. After a while, if you have several images, each about 1MB, it becomes harder for your website to load. SO you need to minimize them without damaging the image quality.
Minimize Redirects
It took me a while to understand what the hell this means. Basically, if you have a website called https//www.swimsuits.com and you upgrade to https//www.swimsuits.com or www.swimsuits.com, you need to redirect your official web address, which is https//www.swimsuits.com.
There is a plugin called, Redirection to help you out with this issue to lead all users to take you to your updated https//www.swimsuits.com/
There are many more factors I will cover later.
Content Marketing
Write to your audience as if you are telling a story to an 8th grader with the attention span of a goldfish!
This is my number one rule to market your writing. There is just SO MUCH info on the internet. 90% of internet users just skim through all the details. Their eyes (including mine) look at headlines, images, gifs, headers, colors… People are captivated by good visuals.
Use Canva if you have to make some small-motion images.
Use Lumen5 to make simple videos put together.
If you just want to write that is also fine. But how you do it matters the most!
If you wish to write a novel, that is up to you. But to avoid squeezing too much text together!
Leave some space after every 3rd or 4th sentence the way I do it here. And highlight some important words or phrases that are important for the reader.
I would say, nearly 90% of page visitors will not read the entire text you or I write down. (Sad piano music) ?
Instead, they focus on headings or words that stand out. So write headlines that basically explain the entire text. This way, if a headline captures a reader’s attention, they might read on. And if your content is good and on point, that 90% of readers will eventually spend more time on your pages
Ideas and Creativity
This is where many-many SEO experts fall short. They are excellent at covering topics on marketing and tech. But our brains are not computerized and they don’t work through complex algorithms.
And this is why part “Ideas” are the most important.
There are countless ideas that are just relatable. Psychological factors are at play. If I write a nice and well-researched article on “the struggles of single moms” because I can speak from the heart and I know my audience, there is a good chance I will find one.
Content is usually in the form of written text. But don’t forget about videos and images as content. Do a Google search for “how to fix a leaky faucet” and you’ll see a blend of text, video and images in the search results — any one of which can lead you back to the website of the person producing that content.
When it comes to SEO, it is important to remember that Google runs on a computer algorithm. For that reason, keywords are super important since they trigger Google searches.
You definitely should be writing for your visitors and customers, but write smart.
You can easily write for your audience while still keeping SEO best practices in mind.
Whenever you write a blog post or publish a page on your WordPress site, you should always have a focus keyword in mind. Don’t just craft a post for the sake of pushing out more content. We’ll talk more about keyword research further below.
Using the Yoast SEO plugin, you can easily set the focus keyword that you want to write about. For example, for this post, we are using the focus keyword “WordPress SEO.” You can see that Yoast SEO analyzes the keyword density, and is reporting that it is a little low for this post:
Everyone wants their words to appear on the first page of search engines like Google, Bing Yahoo! With Billions of daily users, your words can appear to thousands or even millions of people. SEO includes the methods and/or strategies used to help web content rank higher in search engines Better positions on SERPs result in more organic traffic.
There are three sides to Search Engine Optimization.
Number one is the technical part.
This involves playing to search engines’ ranking algorithms.
The second is marketing. This involves more of a natural branding strategy for online businesses to stand out from the crowd.
And third is writing. Delivering valuable and attention-grabbing content is perhaps the most important of all these three parts for successful SEO.
How to Get Started with my first Article?
The real question to ask yourself: how do you come up with content ideas that let me stand out?
You know, content that everyone wants to share, link to, read, and make you popular in your industry.
So here is what you must do! Step number one!
Think of an idea! Got it? Great, now we can move to step 2. (Wow, that’s fast) 😛
Step 2 is basically finding out whether there is a market for your idea. Let’s say you are blogging for an audience of young adults in university or high school. The topic you want to talk about is “college life.” You want to express in a few points your experiences, your tips, the pros and cons of what happened to you, while in college.
Sounds good? Let’s find out!
This is what you need to do.
Go to Ubersuggest, Mozbar, Semrush or download Linkassist.
In my case, we will use Ubersuggest because it’s super fast and easy to understand.
The point is to track down your competition on the topic of “college life” and see how many people look for this topic. If the competition is high, you will not rank on the first page of google.
You need to find out if people type into Google Search for a specific topic you write about. At the same time, you need to see the competition revolving around this topic in a specific region. I chose the United States.
So once you clicked search this is what you get!
What does this all mean?
If you are a beginner in content writing, the most important data I have circled for you. You can see the monthly search volume for the keywords “college life.” This is an estimation of the number of people who search for ‘college life” keywords. That’s a pretty good number.
Secondly, SEO Difficulty shows from a scale of 1 to 100 how difficult or competitive your keywords are. 1 means it is super is, 100 means it is super hard to rank well on Google and be visible to as many people as possible.
Depending on the number of backlinks, you should aim for anything below 20 if your website is very new.
If your keywords have a high SEO difficulty score, try different keywords like “college life challenges or “life in college” or “most challenging colleges.” You need to play around with your keywords until you find something with low SEO difficulty and a high enough search volume. Otherwise, it will not be worth writing. Your audience will not find you on Google.
But why? Well simple…
As you can see above, people rarely go beyond the first page of Google. All search intent is based on the first and very rarely on the second page. This is why it is SO important to rank on the first page. You are visible to literally hundreds or even thousands of people.
Having this visibility will drive traffic to your website.
