After designing and building your lovely new WordPress website, the next step is to get some traffic visiting it!
Website traffic is one of the most basic ways of growing an audience (and sales!) for your business. But, it doesn’t necessarily come by default, right away. There are some key things you’ll want to do to be sure you’re making your website visible and accessible to your business’ target audience.
Why your website traffic matters
Website traffic is an important part of your site’s success (and your overall business success too!).
Simply put: your website is only as useful to your business as the quality (and quantity) of website traffic it’s attracting for you.
Website traffic is your barometer of how well you’re growing your business’ online reach.
How to measure your website traffic
There are a few different ways to measure website traffic:
- Unique visitors: how many people have visited your site during the timeframe reported
- Visits: how many browsing sessions occurred on your site during this time (in Squarespace Analytics, browsing sessions are measured in a 30-minute window)
- Page views: how many total pages have been viewed on your site during this time
How much website traffic do you need?
One of the questions I get asked most often by my web design clients is:
How much website traffic do I need?
Of course, there’s no straight way to answer this. The amount of traffic you get matters, yes. But so does the quality of that traffic.
In general, having more eyes on your website is helpful to your business, as it increases the number of people who know you exist—which certainly is the first step in those people knowing about the benefit you can offer them, and ultimately choosing to purchase from you, sign up for your email list, etc.
But, the number of eyes seeing your website isn’t as influential in business success as how interested those people are in what you have to offer.
You could have 50,000 monthly visitors and make zero sales. You could have 500 monthly visitors and make 50 sales. (Most business owners would probably prefer the latter option!)
So, we’ll get into how to grow your website traffic in just a moment, but before we do, just note that numbers alone don’t equate to website or business success—those numbers must be meaningful sources of traffic that are relevant to your business offerings.
THE BEST WAYS TO GROW TRAFFIC FOR YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE
What I recommend for business owners looking to grow your website traffic (and thereby your business audience and sales) is to focus first and foremost on attracting the right type of website visitors—and then, after you’ve got that down, it’s a lot easier to increase the number of them too.
Then, here’s what I suggest for growing your website traffic among your target audience:
1. Perfect your SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is not just a buzzword—it’s how you build and grow organic search traffic for your website.
What is organic search traffic? It’s the search results Google (or other search engines) list in their response to search queries.
Google processes 3.5 billion search queries every day!
People from all over the world are looking for answers to their questions (and problems) by searching the internet for them. Search engines do their best job at connecting those people with the specific information they’re looking for.
It’s your job as a business owner to help search engines see and understand your particular website content, so they can rank it better in their search results for queries that your webpages would be a good fit for.
Search engine algorithms are wildly complicated (and also secret), but we have a good enough understanding of them to know what helps your website perform well in search result rankings—so you can use those tips to optimize your website for search engines (aka, boost your website’s SEO).
One thing to note about SEO is that it grows over time. It’s not a quick-fix scheme, but is super essential for long-term and sustainable website traffic.
And, it’s my first tip here because setting up your website properly to perform well with search engines is a helpful precursor to the other traffic-generating tips below.
2. Blog, blog, blog!
So, I’ve mentioned the importance of optimizing your website for search engines…
And one of the very best ways you can do that is to publish regular blog posts!
Blog posts (if done “right”) boost SEO by helping to add relevant keywords to your website, and providing more in-depth opportunities to answer your target audience’s burning questions they’re actually Googling. Aka, blog posts give you a better chance of showing up in your target audience’s search queries.
There’s lots more to know about how exactly to format your blog posts to be SEO-friendly, which we won’t get fully into here—But, the important point here is that regular blogging is one of the key ingredients of growing traffic for your website (and especially so if your website happens to be new!).
3. Internal linking
In both your blog posts and website copywriting overall, it’s important to add internal links to other pages and content on your site.
This is an internal link to a blog post about how to use internal links to improve SEO on your wordpress website.
Though internal links aren’t weighted as highly by search engines as inbound links (other websites, especially prominent ones, linking to your website), they’re still important for a couple reasons:
- Any links help to show search engines that your content (any given page or blog post on your site) is part of a larger web of information.
- Internal links help to connect your readers with additional relevant information that may be of interest to them, thereby keeping readers on your site longer, which ultimately helps your SEO.
So, internal linking doesn’t boost website traffic in and of itself, but it does influence your website’s overall SEO, which is a key factor in how your website traffic will grow over time.
4. Good web design
Aesthetics aren’t really spoken about so much with regard to website traffic and SEO, but are actually quite important—good web design (both aesthetics and functionality) does impact your website traffic by influencing your site’s overall SEO.
Here’s how your web design influences SEO and website traffic:
Mobile-friendly web design
As a greater number of global search queries are performed on mobile devices, search engines are more heavily weighting mobile responsive design in their algorithms—which means, less mobile-friendly sites will be de-prioritized in search results. So, how mobile-friendly your website is will influence your SEO.
Page loading speed
Slow loading websites are shown to hurt SEO, both naturally as users bounce from them quickly (influential in SEO), as well as because search engines de-prioritize slower loading sites that may have problems with user experience or retention. So, in looking to grow your website traffic, it’s important to ensure your website is well-crafted on the back-end so it loads reasonably quickly.
User experience & navigation
Websites that aren’t designed to flow well and easily connect visitors with the information they’re looking for will typically have higher bounce rates than websites that have fantastic user experience. As I’ve alluded to before, higher bounce rates (visitors leaving your site before clicking through to another page) = reduced SEO.
Website branding & aesthetics
People enjoy aesthetically nice things. This is more qualitative than quantitative, but in general, website visitors are more likely to spend more time on a site that’s attractive and appealing to them than a site that is not.
(Now, what’s considered “attractive” varies between people, so it’s important to know and understand your target demographic so you can be sure to develop branding and design your website with their aesthetic preferences in mind!)
5. Pinterest content marketing
And, finally, once you’ve set up your website as best as possible to grow its own traffic behind the scenes, there’s another key tip for increasing your website traffic: content marketing via Pinterest.
If you’re interested in increasing your website traffic, particularly for a new website that doesn’t yet have much organic SEO working for it, Pinterest is one of the absolute best ways of doing that.
Though it may come as a surprise, the reason Pinterest is so great at helping grow your website traffic is that it’s not actually “social media” (like many people think it is)—rather, it’s a visual search engine that helps people find specific content they’re looking for.
And, compared to other “social media” (like Facebook and Instagram, for example), Pinterest is much better at connecting users with content from accounts they don’t follow (aka, grows your reach among new audiences), and sending that traffic through to your website (aka, grows your website traffic!).
On top of all this, Pinterest also allows for users to “pin” (save/share) your content, which further grows your content’s visibility among new audiences—free marketing!
Here’s more about growing your website traffic with Pinterest, including my top tips for setting up your Pinterest account and creating branded pins that perform well in Pinterest’s own search results algorithm.