The new year always seems rich with opportunity, especially in the world of marketing. Of the many marketing goals you may have set for 2017, few are more important than your ability to get more website traffic.
While it stands to reason that driving web traffic will generally result in more conversions and sales for your brand, it’s also worth noting that an increase in your site’s visitors can even provide a boost to your SEO—which in turn will make it easier for new customers to discover you in the future.
So what can you do to drive more traffic to your website, improve your SEO rankings, and snag new customers? Here are four key tips to help you get going.
Blogging and SEO
Saying that blogging and search engine optimization are popular digital marketing topics may seem like a bit of an understatement, but there’s good reason that these two topics consistently come up in article after article.
Quite simply, they’re your foundation for success. Without quality blogging, your site’s overall quality (and SEO rankings) will likely flounder, and you won’t be nearly as effective in utilizing other methods of driving traffic to your website. When you write high-quality, actionable blog content on your site, you build a platform that can humanize your brand, build authority, increase conversions and leads, and even improve your rankings for various search queries.
Blogging also gives you a solid base for other methods that drive traffic to your business. With consistently curated blog content, you have everything you need to utilize other key audience-building platforms.
Facebook Groups
The steady decline in marketers’ abilities to organically reach customers through Facebook pages has been well-documented over the past few years, and this trend seems unlikely to reverse anytime soon. Thankfully, savvy marketers still have another tool in their Facebook arsenal that doesn’t limit audience reach or engagement: Facebook Groups.
Many brands have found success by participating in Facebook groups that are relevant to their unique niche. There are Facebook groups available for pretty much every niche imaginable—whether that be running or social media marketing.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should spam Facebook groups with links to your website and blog content—especially in private groups. Rather, your better option is to build a solid reputation within the group by participating in conversations, asking questions, and sharing experiences.
By building rapport with your group members, you gain access to an audience that is highly interested in your niche—and as such, when you are able to share a link to your relevant blog posts, you’ve tapped into a highly engaged group that is far more likely to click through. Everyone in the group will see what you post (not just a select few determined by Facebook’s news feed algorithms). This makes it much more likely that your content will reach individuals who will turn into leads and conversions.
Guest Posting
As an offshoot of blogging, guest posting has seen its popularity rise and fall over the years. However, it continues to be a valuable method for generating backlinks to your website and driving web traffic—as long as you do it right.
While there are several websites that provide guest blogging opportunities, these opportunities aren’t all created equal. Some sites have low domain authority and a small audience. Others may limit your ability to link back to your own blog posts. Because of this, it is essential that you thoroughly research a site and its editorial standards before submitting original content for a guest post.
Start by looking at the site’s authority. The Moz Domain Authority algorithm is a great way to determine whether backlinks from a particular site will actually boost your SEO or not. These rankings are also a good method of determining audience size—so the higher the domain authority, the more potential traffic you can access.
It’s also essential that a guest posting opportunity allows you to link back to your site in the first place. Whether you’re allowed to link to your blog content within your article or can merely include a link to your company in your byline, any do-follow link is valuable—especially if your guest post is shared by industry influencers. By tapping into solid guest blogging platforms, you can increase your authority and reach new audiences.
Quora
Similar to Facebook groups, Quora is a unique social media platform that allows you to share your knowledge and build authority in your niche. Quora is essentially a question-and-answer platform where users can receive more nuanced, personal answers to their questions than they’d get from Google.
On Quora, your best bet for building authority and driving traffic to your website is simple: answer questions! And not just any questions—but the questions that have large numbers of followers and are relevant to your niche.
Similar to Facebook groups, you shouldn’t simply post a link to your website. Make sure that you only share blog posts and other links in your responses when they are actually relevant to your answer and provide real value to users who might be reading your reply—otherwise, you could find yourself banned from Quora altogether.
When you share meaningful, relevant content from your blog in your Quora answers, you’ll be much more likely to reach new audiences and drive engaged traffic to your website.
Are you already on Quora? If so, let’s connect!
Conclusion
The classic saying “Content is king” is especially relevant to these methods of driving new website traffic. But as you emphasize the creation of useful, insightful blog posts, you’ll be able to tap into these marketing methods to reach new audiences, improve your brand authority, and ultimately convert more visitors on your site.
