The two main ways people draw traffic to their websites are via either paid advertising or by free advertising or ‘organic’ traffic. Paid advertising is a simple way set up a ‘stream’ of relevant visitors directly to your website. When you stop paying for traffic however, the traffic stops instantly. With ‘organic’ traffic which comes from the internet search engines like Yahoo, Bing, Ask and of course Google, you can ‘rank’ your content and continue getting traffic for potentially years to come, for free.
Is there a ‘but’?
There’s a big ‘but’ (not butt!) with this method of traffic. It takes time for Google, and other search engines to crawl your content and list it in the search results. Once there, other content can out rank it and new content is appearing all the time. An article which ranked on Google in first place won’t necessarily be there a year later. It may still rank on the the first page if the content is good enough, and there isn’t much competition.
How to draw traffic to your website
However, it’s not all bad. By targeting your article correctly for long tail keywords, with little or no competition, you can rank them on the first page of the search engines for potentially years to come. Using the keyword planner, you can type in your main business niche keywords and be given a list of related keyword chains which are already being searched for on Google. By targeting the long tail keyword chains of four or more words, and those which are less competitive in the searches, you will stand a greater change of ranking each article in the search results.
Don’t make this mistake
The mistake many people make when creating content for their blogs is to target the most competitive keywords in their niche. However due to the competition on Google you are much less likely to rank on the first page of Google for these keywords, despite the keywords having a huge monthly search volume. Instead, aim for the ‘low hanging fruit’. ‘Low hanging fruit’ are the keyword chains of 4 or more words, which have a lower volume of traffic, but which are also much less competitive in the search results.Â
Low Hanging Fruit
You can aim for the shorter keywords which have huge competition and be on page 5 of Google – where no-one will find you, or target the long tail keyword chains and be on the first page of Google. Even if your keywords only get 10 searches a month, and you get 1 of those a month, for free, this is much better than targeting keywords which get 500 searches a month and being on page 5 of Google where you will get no traffic. By creating many articles for your blog in this way you will have a number of traffic sources which ‘trickle’ into your website on an ongoing basis.
Quick competition test
Once you have your long tail keyword chain, for use in your articles title, you should do a quick test on Google just to see how competitive this keyword chain is. Using the example in the video of “how to choose the right keywords for your website”, take your chain of keywords in quotes and put it into Google as shown in the picture below. You will get a number just below the search bar which show the competing page results for this “phrase”. Less than 10,000 is a good sign you could rank for the keywords – given a good article. The lower this number the better. Less that 1000 is ideal, but unlikely. The higher this number is, the less chance of ranking your article. This isn’t a definitive guarantee that you will rank but just an overview. For a more detailed account of competition you could get some software such as Market Samurai.
Creating Content
Your content needs to be better than your competition. For an idea of what Google thinks is the best content simply use your keywords to do a normal search on Google (without quotes). Your first organic result (not the paid for ones which have “Ad” in them on the left), is the website which Google likes the most for this particular set of keywords. Have a good look at the article and create a bigger, better and more useful one.
SEO – Search Engine OptimisationÂ
I use a SEO plug-in for my article which helps target specific keywords called WordPress SEO by Yoast. Your article should have the main keyword in its title and somewhere in the text also. You can also use other related keywords throughout your article which you can find by putting your title into the keyword planner.
Share Your Content Via Social Media
Use social media to share your content and put a social media share buttons on your posts so other people can also share it easily. I use a plugin called TF Social Share (TF = Twitter Facebook + Other social sharing sites).
Other Ways To Draw Traffic To Your Website
Back links – Back links help Google determine how your site stands in the community of your particular niche. Ideally you should develop a plan to connect to other authoritative blogs in your area and have them link to your site – bringing in traffic. There are various ways to do this and one of them is to offer to write guest posts for another websites and ask for a link in exchange. You can also create content in other ways such as an info-graphic which other blogs similar to your own might want to ‘showcase’ on their sites.
Paid Traffic – I have already mentioned paid traffic and how it can give you an instant source of targeted visitors to your website. If you have the right products and services on your website for the audience you are targeting, this can be an effective way to market them. However, once you stop paying for traffic, it stops instantly. Building an ‘organic’ stream of traffic alongside some paid for traffic is a good way to build in visitor sources which don’t completely rely on handing over cash for every visitor.
Social Media – Regularly sharing your content on the variety of social media sites will help you to get a wider audience and also get people sharing your content.
Forum and Blog Commenting – Interacting with other blogs via their comments section is another good way to link back to your site and build some more traffic streams. Providing you are simply spamming the comments section and that you are offering some value and genuine interest in someone else’s blog, you should get some traffic back to your website via either an allowed link or from your profile page if using a forum.
YouTube – YouTube is a great platform to comment and interact with other users in your niche and also to create useful, interesting and informative content. You can place a link in your videos description which brings visitors back to your website. Regularly commenting on videos with high traffic volume will also help bring traffic to your website. make sure you set up your YouTube profile with a link to your website and provide genuine useful comments. Read the terms and conditions of users and don’t just ‘spam’ videos with your back-links.
Allow comments on your own blog – If you can build a community through your blog and attract people and get them discussing some topic which you have written about, it is a great way to build some authority and get people sharing. Google loves sites which have an active discussion on their articles. It shows an accountability if you let yourself open for criticism and builds a community around your site.
Post Regular Articles – If you post regular quality articles Google will reward you by improving your site’s authority with them. This means your blogs will rank higher in the search results and over time your traffic will increase exponentially. Google like fresh, quality content.
The Right Traffic
Drawing traffic to your website is one thing. However you also need to draw the right kind of traffic to your website. Bringing in the wrong kind of traffic won’t get you any sales or sign-ups! Make sure your content is right for your target audience and has their interests in mind. See why is target market important.
If you have any further insights about how to draw traffic to your website please share in the comments below.
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