When people visit websites, they do so to learn more about a company, its products/services and sign up to receive emails. Visitors may use the site to contact the owner for a services/product quote. On the other hand, website owners rely on the traffic to their site to raise brand awareness and attract more visitors.
If you’re a business owner with a website (and what business doesn’t have one), you need to know where your traffic is coming from and how to optimize them to ensure your success.
6 Key Website Traffic Sources To Improve Your Chances Of Success
Your website’s success hinges on the proper optimization of six main traffic sources:
• Direct
• Email
• Organic
• Paid
• Referral
• Social Media
What are these sources? How do they differ from each other? How can you use them to your benefit?
Direct Traffic
When visitors type in your website’s URL into a browser, they are known as direct traffic. Any traffic to a website that wasn’t from social media, search engines, or referring sites is also considered direct traffic.
How can you increase your direct traffic? Put attention on efforts to increase brand awareness, using tangible sources such as local ads, business cards, printed brochures, etc., ensuring your website address is listed on them.
Email Traffic
People who visit a website from an email link are seen as email traffic.
A website can improve its email traffic by ensuring its email marketing campaign and content marketing strategy complement each other. Create content and develop automated email campaigns that will regularly send your material to your prospects. Make sure it’s personalized to each person to meet their needs and encourage them to buy from you.
It could be prudent for your business to develop industry-specific content and email newsletters to increase your website traffic and brand awareness.
Organic Search Traffic
A visitor is considered with organic search traffic when they have clicked a link of a search engine result. Organic search, when used with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), increases your website’s ranking in search engine results.
A way to improve the number of people who visit your website as an organic search is to make improvements to blog posts or pages that get a high amount of traffic. This improvement comes in the form of better or more content, more or better multimedia or adding or improving keywords.
Have targeted keyword phrases in your well-thought-out content. These are words or phrases your target audience is using to find you (or your material), enticing them to click on your link. Many people assume that shorter content is better in luring visitors, but that’s not the case. The more detailed content is with properly used keywords, the better your chances of seeing organic traffic. Make sure to add your location to pertinent areas to the website, such as meta description, headings, footer and title tags.
Paid Traffic
A paid traffic visitor is someone who clicks on a paid digital ad.
When you want to bring more paid traffic to your site, you need to do some trial and error to learn when your ad will get the most views and generate interest back to your website. There are all kinds of paid advertising options on various networks such as Bing, Google, etc.
Before setting up a paid ad, do some research on relevant keywords that relate to your business. This will help improve traffic quality, helping turn those visitors into conversions (paid customers/clients). If these visitors are looking for your particular service/product, using relevant keywords will increase the chances of making sales.
Referral Traffic
This kind of traffic results from people who have clicked your website link on another website and were redirected.
More and more business owners are using digital media to conduct their online sourcing activity. Increasing referral traffic means using sites such as MyGoogle Business, LinkedIn and similar sites. Referral traffic compared to search engine traffic leads to better rates for bounce-back, sale conversions, etc.
- 40% less bounce-back rate
- 65% more time on the website
- 210% sales conversion
Social Traffic
A visitor is considered social traffic if they visit the website after clicking on a social media post of yours.
Businesses can benefit significantly from social ads and social media posts, as it allows them to produce visually pleasing posts for their target audience. Make sure you set up a schedule for your articles, blogs, e-books and others to post. You can also use videos (short ones) to capture the audience’s attention. According to various studies, 89% of people who see a video tend to buy the product after watching a video about it.
Be aware that social media traffic can be erratic so that you may see high or low amounts of traffic at any given time. Still, if you regularly update your social media page, you can increase the traffic and add more visitors. A marketing automation site such as HubSpot can help you track the activity and manage posts.
No matter what business you have, no matter what kind of website you run, web traffic is a must if you want to be successful. Every one of these traffic sources is essential to businesses and personal websites, but focusing on all of them isn’t easy. Therefore, the key is to concentrate on incorporating relevant keywords and optimize your website, so visitors arrive at your site, regardless of how they got there.