How to increase traffic to your new website

Author
Zorana Milovanovic

Date
Jan 9, 2023

Read time
10 minutes

When you have a brand-new website, it can seem difficult to drive traffic, especially on a limited budget. Getting your first customer versus your one thousandth is pretty much the same process. But, to ensure that the traffic converts, here are some essentials you should consider:

Content marketing

You’ve probably heard a hundred times that ‘content is king’, and there’s a good reason why content marketing is not losing its relevance in 2022. Whether through ebooks, podcasts, or videos – there are endless opportunities for creating engaging content to drive traffic to your website organically.

The most popular content marketing tactics include:

1. Blog posts

Companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites. So, your business needs a blog where you can regularly publish interesting long-form content on your website. This way, you will tremendously increase website visits and multiply the chance of generating positive ROI.

The best blog posts solve potential problems but are also search engine friendly – meaning they contain relevant industry keywords, are long enough, readable, and are written in such a way that they are likely to rank well on search engines.

When writing blog posts, first determine who your readers are and write content that can educate them or solve problems. Then, be purposeful about your content – put yourself in the customer’s shoes, build buyer personas, and create posts your ideal audience would like to read.

It would help if you also considered guest posting on other websites. When growing your audience, guest posting allows you to get in front of someone else’s audience. Link back to your site where you can, even if it’s only in the author bio. Guest blogging might be time-consuming, but it is worth it – this way, you can generate backlinks (which helps with SEO) and make your brand more visible.

Blog posts tend to have a life far beyond the initial post. By converting one of your blog posts into another format (like an ebook, video, infographic, or podcast), you can drive even more traffic to your site.

2. Podcasts

Podcasts can generate significant ROI when done right. They target niche audiences, creating value through informative, educational, and fun content. Almost 60% of US Consumers Listen to podcasts. While podcasts aren’t typically optimised for traffic acquisition, at least not directly, they can still be a clever tactic to support other traffic acquisition channels. If you are not ready to start a podcast, there’s a solution that might be even better: go to other people’s podcasts as a guest. This tactic almost guarantees you will boost your website traffic in no time!

3. Video

Video has become an integral part of our everyday life. With 74% of adult users, YouTube is the most popular online platform in the US. Hosting videos on YouTube can help you drive traffic and achieve truly impressive results. Here’s a quick overview of what video content types your business can use:

  • Educational: teach new skills to build trust or solve your audience’s problems with your product. Use educational webinars to highlight your product benefits.
  • Storytelling: inspire your audience and add credibility to your brand by telling stories – use your brand history, case studies, and brand image.
  • Entertainment: use fun videos to capture attention.

‍Book a call with our experienced content marketing team to bring your brand to life with world-renowned video, animation, illustration, and copywriting.

SEO

When people search for your products and services or are looking for a way to solve a particular problem your business can address, you want your online store to appear high in search results. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies are crucial in generating qualified leads to your website. SEO is complex and takes time and effort to learn and implement, but there are some key aspects you should consider applying to improve your website discoverability:

  • Keywords: Keywords are phrases by which your potential customers find your website in search engines. A good keywords strategy speaks the same language as your potential customer, so always include keywords that your customer is actually searching for online. Being a master of natural language processing is useful when you’re researching keywords.
  • Content formatting: With the right formatting, your content can appear in Google Featured Snippets – also known as answer boxes. Answer boxes are pieces of content displayed at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) without the user having to click and visit the website. Formatting isn’t only important for snippets. Search engines love well-formatted blog posts and pages, so you should also use headings and subheadings, break your text into paragraphs, and use list formats where appropriate.
  • Metadata: Metadata is a series of micro-communications between your site and search engines. The metadata we want to focus on in SEO includes meta tags, descriptions, keywords, robots, title tags, and schema markup. All these elements represent micro-communication between your website and search engines, so adding them will help search engines better understand your website and improve rankings.
  • Backlinks: backlinks, or external links that lead to your site, are a critical ranking factor. Links from reputable sources can increase your site’s authority and improve your SEO over time. You can acquire those backlinks through a process called link building.
  • Page speed: page load time affects your SEO and user experience. If a page loads too slowly, users are unlikely to stick around, increasing your bounce rate. Optimise and remove anything that loads slowly to improve your ranking on Google.

Graphic optimisation: optimised images improve page loading time, so it’s worth putting a little effort into optimizing them. Pick the right format, compress images, name images properly, use alt tags, and add images structured data.

Paid campaigns 

Paid campaigns can quickly skyrocket traffic to your website if you have the budget.

With paid ads, you can create targeted campaigns that show tailor-made ads to the customers who are most likely to click through and purchase your products. These ads should run continuously and regularly updated with new sub-persona funnels, new copy, and even new products.

Here are some paid ads platforms you should consider:

1. Google Ads

Google Ads can do wonders for new and established e-commerce sites. Google Ads is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform where you pay per click or per impression on an ad – in other words, you only pay for the results. Search ads drive traffic to your business by appearing when customers search for products or services similar to the ones your business offers.

Your ad campaigns can target a specific marketing goal. The goal should reflect the main result you want to achieve – website traffic, revenue, new customers, or page views. Each campaign lets you set the location, devices, and language to refine your target audience further. Finally, you’ll set a budget and a bid strategy. Google Ads determines which ads will appear on the search engine results page (SERP) with an ad auction, which takes place every time a potential customer searches on Google or visits a partner site that shows ads. Winning an auction depends on your bid and the quality of your ads.

Google offers a variety of different campaign types that you can use:

  • Search campaigns
  • Display campaigns
  • Shopping campaigns
  • Video campaigns
  • App campaigns

2. Meta Ads

Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Meta Ads cover both Facebook and Instagram, so if your target audience is on Instagram or Facebook, it’s worth learning a little about how they work.

Both Instagram and Facebook ads are managed through Meta’s Ads Manager. This single location for ad management makes it easy for marketers to select multiple audiences and placements. On Facebook, you have the option to create the following ads:

  • Carousel: two more scrollable images or videos
  • Single media: image, video, or slideshow of images
  • Existing posts: includes links that you might have shared

For Instagram, you technically have the same options as above, but you’ll need to use the CTA buttons to add a URL.

You have more opportunities to reach your customers by advertising across both platforms.

3. TikTok

With 1 billion active users globally, TikTok has become a titan in e-commerce. Around 71% of users worldwide shop for items after first seeing them on TikTok, making it a large player in PPC.

Although many brands can benefit from utilising TikTok campaigns, TikTok ads will achieve the best results for brands marketing to customers 35 and under and brands targeting women, especially those aged 18 – 25.

TikTok offers different ad formats, such as In-feed ads, top-view ads, brand takeover ads, and branded hashtag challenges. These formats encourage huge engagement among users. For example, with in-feed ads, users can like, comment, share, follow and make videos within the same TikTok audio. From a technical standpoint, TikTok advertising works similarly to Facebook, so if you or your partner agency knows how to run Meta Ads properly, chances are you can also run impactful TikTok ads as well.

Email marketing

Email marketing offers an incredible ROI (typically a phenomenal $36 on every dollar spent), making it a great tool for improving website traffic.

Personalisation is the key. Even a minor personalisation tactic – such as using your recipient’s first name – can increase the open rate by 26%!
Your email campaigns should be sent to people who are genuinely interested in your content. These types of visitors are likely to spend a longer time on your website, which will signal to Google that your site is an authoritative resource and will increase your ranking.

Take advantage of list segmentation: divide your audience into smaller groups based on the desired criteria to get more clicks. To bring the email subscribers to your website and keep them engaged, you should aim to have a relevant landing page that conveys more information about the offer from the email. It goes without saying that your emails should be mobile-friendly – it’s good to know that more than 68% of email campaigns are opened on mobile devices!

Next, work on email template design – you can choose simple options like pre-designing some of your templates using the email service you chose, or you can custom-code live HTML email templates that will render perfectly across all browsers and devices. Standardising email template design to a certain extent will help you appear consistent and in accordance with your brand identity.

Email marketing is one of the most sustainable and cost-efficient marketing channels; the good news is that it will stay for a long time.  Having said that, it’s definitely worth exploring its potential and refining your campaigns to stay relevant.

QR Codes

Last but not least, QR codes can be a brilliant way to drive website traffic, no matter if you use them for general ads and information or targeted promotions and offers. QR codes provide a simple and efficient way for readers to visit web pages with long URLs without typing the address into their browser’s address bar.

You might consider QR codes yesterday’s news, but their popularity shot up in recent years as they allow physical locations like restaurants to show customers online menus.

Dynamic QR codes are particularly exciting because the URL isn’t encoded on the QR code itself, meaning you can reuse and reassign the code as you need.

What next?

Driving traffic is a never-ending process, but it also brings results long after you have started. There are many paths your potential customers can take to reach your website, and if you’re not sure where to start, contact us to discuss what would work best for your business to get more qualified leads and maximise ROI.