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Launching a business can be daunting and stressful but what could be more stressful is finding ways to increase the amount of traffic that comes to your business. This post is about how to increase traffic to your business online and it provides 16 actionable tactics that have been tested by a number of businesses.
Now, let’s start getting you some traffic.
- Get a blog and write
Nothing fancy, but a blog that is simple in design and optimized for mobile and search engine. Blogs are a great way to drive traffic to your site via content.Why do you need a blog for your business?
People locate the information they need by asking questions on Google – how would they find you if you don’t have any content that can show up on Google search results. Also keep in mind that businesses that blog receive 97% more links to their websites than those who don’t – Hubspot - Be very active on Social Media
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages are part of the most important pages for a business that wants to be visible online. Your customers are online and some of them spend an average of 106.5minutes per day on these platforms. Be active; post interesting and useful updates, engage them, use images, text and videos. Don’t be afraid of curating content also. You can’t produce them all. - Classifieds
Make use of classifieds in your niche/market to get more traffic to your business. Classifieds like Olx, ng are places where businesses can get found. Users navigate to these sites to buy fashion and mobile phones while some go there to look for services. Vconnect is another platform that can give you lots of traffic if you are ranked for specific keywords that your customers are searching for. In other to do this, you need to understand how to carry out keyword research. - Google+Create a Google+ page and build a connection there. Once you have content that you want to push out especially articles – you should share it there also. Google favors Google+ content over content from other social media platforms according.
- Instagram HashtagsOne great way of getting constant eyeballs to your Instagram page is by using relevant hashtags on your posts. This does preclude you having content that your audience is looking for. E.g. – if I sell men’s shoes, I should have a male theme in my business page from well taken product images to quotes of famous men to themes that men are used to or known for like power, strength, class etc. In other to make the buyers who fit these personas, we would need to accompany our posts with relevant hashtags. To find appropriate hashtags or popular hashtags that are being used in your industry, try out Keyhole for real time data and analytics.
- Press ReleasesPublish a press release about a new feature or the unique selling point for your service/product. Write about a new recruit and how their experience and influence in the company would help your company dominate, write about your funding (no matter how small). If you have no news to share with the press, do a research and publish industry reports. They will write about it – show data, use infographics and send it out. When I was Head of PR at Carmudi (a Rocket Internet Company) – we wrote about the company’s rebranding, how we grew our business, CEO Weekends We were constantly sharing a bit of our business with the press and this got us more traffic and helped build backlinks at the early stages of the company.
- Get InterviewedSo you couldn’t get any of the big blogs to publish your press release due to one reason or another – don’t fret, you can get them to interview you. Lots of reporters look for entrepreneurs to interview especially entrepreneurs who are successful.
Pitch to the press as a success story. Tell them about your growth rate, how you were the first in your industry to reach a particular milestone, how your store was now delivering to remote villages or how your product is solving global hunger – one family at a time. Share your story.Why you should get the press to interview you?
) To build a relationship and this would be beneficial to you for years to come.
2.) Get more views when you interview with them as against when you don’t.
3.) You provide them with valuable content which they can link back to you (eternal traffic) - Pay attention to On-Page SEO
SEO is still an integral part of any online business and on-page SEO could make or mar your business. Are you making the most of image alt text? (Helps search engines understand what an image is about), friendly permalink urls, strategic placement of outbound links to related pages etc. Linking out is very important because it helps Google figure out your page topic and also shows that your site contains quality information
- Target Long-Tail Keywords in your SEO strategyLong Tail Keywords account for the bulk of web searches and neglecting them means you are losing out on a huge chunk of the internet’s web traffic.
What are long tail keywords? Here are some examples
– What is the capital of Nigeria?
– How do I get Visa to Dubai?
– Places to make your hair in Abuja?
– The major webhosting services in the Alabama? - Post Articles on LinkedInThis article you are reading is hosted on Pulse. I get a couple of InMails as a result. It has a good reach on LinkedIn and I also get traffic from Google search due to my Google+ profile. Some LinkedIn users see my post weeks after I posted them on the platform Most of them are not even my connections. They usually find it via Pulse or on their newsfeed when a connection likes or comments. Posting content on LinkedIn can increase traffic to your site as well as establish you as an authority in your industry.
- Email Marketing
There is a guy who sells locally made phone cases (he uses Ankara) online. I purchased one from him once and he started sending me all kinds of creative emails. I was hesitant at first but I had to open the email due to the title.His title: Get the African Design Case For Your Phone with 60% Discount & Free ShippingThe beauty of his emails is that he sends them once a week and he sends them as early as 7am. I read his emails every time, even though I don’t intend to purchase another phone case anytime soon but his strategy keeps him at the top of my mind and sooner rather than later, his brand will be the only one I remember when I think of phone cases. So is email marketing dead? It’s not – you just need better content.
- Make your Site ResponsiveI shop online via my mobile phone. I read news via my mobile phone. I watch movie trailers and new episodes of my favorite series on my mobile phone and lastly, I download music using my mobile phone. There are some few things that are inappropriate for a mobile but they are few. Most of the important ones can be done from a mobile. If your customers are spending more time on their phones than their PCs, then your site needs to be responsive so they don’t get turned off when they visit your site from a mobile phone. Plus Google launched an update that favors sites that are mobile responsive over those that are not
- Make your Site Fast
No one waits for slow sites anymore, if your site takes more than 15seconds to load, your bounce rate will be high. A slow site could be caused by having heavy image files, inappropriate page structure and too much plugins (in the case of a WordPress site).
Check how fast your site is and ways to make it faster - Incorporate Video into your StrategyVideos show up first before text based content on Google. In other words, if you rank page 1 for the keyword – how to be President in Ghana for an article you created. My video content with the same keyword will be placed above yours in the search page.
Quite interesting right?
If you can’t afford a video production budget, you could create a slide which would be saved in avi and then upload it to YouTube. - Research your competitorsAre you in a business but you don’t know how to go about launching your PPC campaigns? Then research your competitors. Want to know what keywords cars.com ranks for? Research the keywords online. There is practically nothing any business is doing online that you can’t research and get data for. You can see the ads your competitors are using, check out the keywords they rank for and are using for search intent ads, you could also get their hashtags and results. Why is it important for you to research your competitors? Two reasons:
– If it’s working for them, then it could work for you.
– You get actionable data you can work with immediately rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.This doesn’t mean your company shouldn’t look for other ways to get positive returns on your PPC campaigns or anything but what it means is that you can leverage on what others are doing that works and this would give you a head start over other new businesses in your Industry.
Here is a tool that is very valuable for researching competitor’s keywords. - Host WebinarsPeople love to learn and Webinars are great ways to impart knowledge and wisdom. If you add this with an effective social promotion, they are a great way to increase traffic to your site. Don’t know how to get started on a webinar?
Webinars allow you to share your content LIVE to your audience and they also get to ask questions. It’s a very effective way to establish your brand as an authority, to pass knowledge to your customers (especially if you are into B2B)
Learn how to set up your first Webinar here
There you have it!
16 smart ways to increase traffic to your business online. Feel free to add other ideas that you might have used or are currently using that are effective for your business.
Thanks for reading.
Jimi Akinleye is a Digital Marketing and Social Media Professional who writes from Lagos. He is the Owner of Social Media Experts in Nigeria. A private group for top social media professionals in Nigeria. He enjoys creating social media content, consulting for E-commerce startups and playing monopoly online.
