Building a successful website can be a challenging task. After all, there are over a billion websites on the internet today, so what makes your website more useful than your competitor’s? Sometimes it’s not always about your content. There are websites out there that are extremely useful for certain niche subjects, but they likely wouldn’t be used by the general public. In other words, your website’s content is just one contributing factor, but there are other ways to increase internet traffic.
- Search engine optimisation
One of the proven ways to increase traffic is to make your website more visible. The best way to do this is to utilise search engine optimisation, or SEO for short. A team of SEO professionals can be relatively cost-effective depending on what you need them to do. For instance, optimising a website won’t be very costly, but writing original content in your style might cost a bit extra.
Search engines work by ranking websites depending on their relevancy and popularity. The more popular your website, the more views you’ll get. The more relevant your website, the higher it will be on search terms. For instance, if your website is about mobile phones, then having a lot of mobile phone reviews and previews will give you a lot of views.
A great way to optimise your website is to specialise the subject material. If you talk a lot about phones, then it doesn’t make sense to start talking about cooking appliances unless you are a tech website. Diversity can work, but it does mean you need a lot of content that covers everything.
- Engage with users
Engaging with your users is another great way to promote retention. Comment sections should be enabled for your articles, and you should have an associated social media account. This way, you’ll be able to chat with viewers, share opinions, and respond to criticism.
You can’t engage with users unless you are open to speaking with them on public platforms. Get used to responding to comment sections and you’ll see repeat visitors. Users love to discuss various subjects, so if you’re lucky, your website might even be featured on another website such as Reddit or Disqus.
It’s important to practice a bit of patience when interacting with users. Some users might be trolls who actively spam your comments with needless comments or attempt to frustrate you in one way or another. Try and identify these obnoxious people and ban them from your website, or simply ignore their comments and only respond to constructive comments.
- Diversify your content
If you’re focusing on one form of content, then try and expand your portfolio. If you mainly write articles, then consider setting up a weekly podcast to cover current affairs or recent articles. Not only do you have more content for users to consume, you also open your website to different viewers. Some people might not have the time to read your articles, so they choose to listen to your podcast to recap.
Some people might prefer videos. You can use YouTube as another platform to share your content and link back to your website, thus increasing your internet traffic for a relatively low cost.
