If You Boost It, They Will Come: How to Supercharge Traffic to Your Site

Everyone doing business online in 2018 has to contend with big ongoing changes. These include how end users research goods and services, refine their preferences, engage with vendors, conduct their transactions, and rate and share their experiences on the web.

The customer’s journey is more independent than ever and rival brands are scrambling in a search engine optimization (SEO) race to the top.
High-quality traffic to your site and positive visibility on social media platforms are great for your brand. Here we will cover some tips and tools that can help you achieve both and remain competitive in today’s evolving landscape.

Get Social

The most powerful tool in your arsenal is reaching out to your target market on social channels like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. These platforms have become the search engines of choice for end users. Putting yourself in the thick of the conversation helps you drive the narrative and win the hearts and minds of potential customers by fostering trust in your brand.
Once you climb aboard a social media platform, wade into the discussion forum and engage with your audience in the comments. Share industry news and promote your content to catalyze discussions. Ask and candidly answer questions. Crowdsource feedback with polls and share the results to invite more dialogue. Harness hashtags that draw browsers into your orbit and actively seek new potential customers by exploring recommended content via the platform’s internal search features.
Social outreach is a great investment of time and energy given that the audience you rely on spends more of its time – and does more of its buying – than ever on social media. Get active, stay engaged, and watch your brand blast off.

Soup Up Your Site

Not all of what you can do to give your web presence a signal boost should be done out in the wilds of social media. Much can be done from within your website to summon organic traffic to it. The key is the power of SEO, for which there are many tools available.
Search engine optimization is all about using keywords to pull web traffic in your direction. Populate your website’s metadata, titles, and text with them and rocket to the top of the search engine results. Places to stash them include your title tags, the names of your image files, the first 100 or so words of your posts, and your URL.
A less-than-obvious SEO hack is to opt for long-tail keywords. It turns out keywords consisting of more than one- or two-word phrases more easily find their way to the top of search engine results. Another trick is to balance outbound traffic with sustained on-site activity via internal links routing readers from one area of your site to others.
The final step is to encourage return visits from your online guests. Use snappy blogs and bulletins with industry news to encourage prospective customers to make a habit of visiting your site.

Arm Yourself with Automation

Finally, when all else fails—deploy the robots! Take email marketing. Much of it can be automated. For starters, you need to know your target market. Use a client database to organize the information about clients that you need to keep track of your transactions and secure repeat buys.
Next, augment your social media legwork with social media management tools such as those detailed here on TrustRadius. These instruments enhance your reach and visibility on social channels by making it easier to schedule and manage your content, track performance metrics, and curate communication with end users.
By venturing into social channels, tricking out your website, and automating what’s left, it’s possible to build a strategy of outreach and engagement that will put 2018’s web trends to work for you.