3 Simple Ways To Get The Right Website Traffic
There are probably hundreds of ways to get website traffic but only a handful to get the right type of visitors to a business website. In today’s post I’d like to explore how to target the right kind of traffic using website graphics and on page optimization.
Website Traffic: Quality vs Quantity
When it comes to visitors to your website quality beats quantity hands down. You can have thousands of visitors on your website each month but if they aren’t targeted visitors it’s like having no traffic at all.
It’s far better for conversions to get a handful of visitors that are looking for your product or service than it is to get a lot of non-targeted traffic. So how to you get the right kind of visitors? It all starts with knowing your ideal customer and keyword research.
Market Research
Start by exploring your current customers. Think about your ideal customer and what they are looking for when they visit your place of business. You may even set up a short survey to ask them what terms they would use when looking for your type of business on the internet.
Then after you have some basic search term ideas use the Google Adwords Keyword tool to help find the keywords that the most people are searching for. Remember to add your city + industry to get the most relevant data. Watching this short video on website market research can help if you’re not sure what to do.
Optimizing Your Website Title & Description
There are a dozen or so know on page optimization factors that help rank your web pages but the Title and Meta Description appear to have the most weight. If nothing else they play a key role in whether or not someone will click thru to your website.
Website Title
The website title is displayed in the upper left-hand corner of the web browser and the first line of the search results listing.
The title usually displays around 60 characters and if you go over that amount the title will be cut short using three dots (…) like seen in this example above.
The title needs to stand-out and it will if you make it highly relevant. When someone searches in Google for an “emergency dentist” in Ann Arbor this listing appears on the first page. Notice that the keywords that where searched for “emergency dentist ann arbor” are in bold making this listing display most prominently.
Website Description
The meta description is usually shown right after the title and website url. This is not a description that is shown anywhere on your web page but is used by the major search engines to determine what the web page is all about.
The description can be around 160 characters before it gets cut off. Using your keywords in the description can not only help in rank in the search results but also with the click thru rate.
Try to write a concise and compelling description that is focused in on what the searcher is looking for. The more relevant the description the more likely you are to get to searches to click onto your website.
Having your listing displayed on the top of the search results is definitely an advantage to getting more traffic. However, other factors that can help get your website more clicks are graphical elements.
People are drawn to graphics and videos and will often skip over the first few listing if there are these other elements displayed.
For example, in this screen shot you can see I have two listings on page one of Google for my website design company. Both are near the bottom of the page. The one without my photo gets very few clicks, while the one with the authorship photo receives more than the average 9th place listing.
Implementing these three strategies can help you get more website traffic: targeted keywords, relevant titles and descriptions and graphical elements.
Search results are constantly changing and if you want your website on the first page you need to keep up. Bookmark this website and share it with your colleagues to keep up to date.
Filed under: Website Traffic
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