Website Traffic Archives

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Top 10 Tips to Improve Your Website Traffic

August 9, 2022 No Comments

By Erik Emanuelli

Are you looking for ways to increase your website traffic? If so, you’re in the right place!

In this post, we will discuss tips that will help drive more visitors to your site.

Traffic is essential for any business – without it, your website won’t be able to generate sales or leads.

1. Have a Business Blog

A business blog is one of the best ways to generate traffic to your website.

By creating quality content relevant to your target audience, you will be able to attract readers interested in what you have to say.

Not only will this help you increase traffic, but it will also help you build relationships with potential customers.

Here are a few tips for creating a successful business blog:

Write quality content that is interesting and informative
Use keyword-rich titles that will help your posts rank in search engines
Promote your blog articles through social media and email marketing
Engage with your readers by responding to comments and questions

2. Create Engaging Visuals

People are visual creatures and are more likely to remember something if an image accompanies it.

When you create blog posts, include images, infographics, or videos to help your readers understand and remember your content.

In addition to using visuals in your blog posts, you can also use them in your email marketing and social media campaigns.

By creating engaging visuals, you will be able to increase traffic to your website as well as improve your conversion rate.

Here are a few tips for creating engaging visuals:

Use high-quality images that are relevant to your content
Make sure your visuals are attention-grabbing and easy to understand
Include a call-to-action with each visual
Test different visuals to see what works best for your audience
Use a mixture of visuals in your marketing campaigns

3. Leverage the Power of Video

Video is one of the most powerful tools you can use to generate traffic to your website.

People love watching videos and are likelier to watch a video than read a blog post or article.

In addition, videos are more likely to be shared on social media than other types of content.

If you want to increase traffic to your website, start creating videos that are relevant to your target audience.

Here are a few tips for creating successful videos:

Create videos that are informative and entertaining
Keep your videos short and to the point
Optimize your videos for search engines
Promote your videos through social media and email marketing
Post them on platforms like YouTube and Vimeo
Engage with your viewers by responding to comments and questions

4. Target Long-Tail Keywords

If you want to generate traffic from search engines, you need to target the right keywords.

Most businesses make the mistake of targeting short-tail keywords that are highly competitive.

While there is nothing wrong with targeting these keywords, you will have a much easier time ranking for long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific, making them less competitive.

For example, if you sell shoes, a short-tail keyword would be “shoes.”

A long-tail keyword would be “women’s size 11 black dress shoes.”

Here are a few tips for targeting long-tail keywords:

Use keyword research tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner and Moz Keyword Explorer
Identify what your target audience is searching for
Create content that is relevant to your target keywords
Include your target keywords in your title, meta tags, and header
Use keyword-rich titles that will help your posts rank in search engines

5. Build Backlinks

Backlinks are links from other websites to your website.

They are an essential ranking factor in search engines and can also help you generate traffic.

The more backlinks you have, the higher your website will rank in search results.

In addition, backlinks can help you build relationships with other webmasters and influencers.

Start building backlinks if you want to generate traffic and improve your search engine ranking.

Here are a few tips for building backlinks:

Identify websites that are relevant to your niche
Reach out to webmasters and ask for links
Create informative and engaging content that other webmasters will want to link to
Submit your website to directories and web listings
Participate in forums and discussion groups

6. Use Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on using influencers to promote your brand.

An influencer is someone with a large following on social media or another online platform.

They can help you generate traffic, leads, and sales.

To use influencer marketing, start by identifying relevant influencers in your industry.

Then reach out to them and ask if they would be interested in promoting your brand.

Here are a few tips for using influencer marketing:

Identify relevant influencers in your industry
Reach out to them and ask if they would be interested in promoting your brand
Create content that is shareable and relevant to their audience
Offer them something in return for promoting your brand
Monitor your results and adjust your strategy as needed

7. Build an Email List

Email marketing is a great way to generate traffic and leads.

Email marketing lets you stay in touch with your target audience and promote your brand.

In addition, email marketing can help you build relationships with your customers and prospects.

If you want to use email marketing to generate traffic, start by building an email list.

To build an email list, you must collect your target audience’s email addresses.

There are a few ways to do this:

Use sign-up forms on your website and blog
Include a call-to-action in your emails
Offer something of value in exchange for email addresses
Be sure to include a call-to-action in your emails so that your recipients know what you want them to do.
Make sure your emails are informative and engaging.

8. Use Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is great for generating website traffic, building relationships, and improving your search engine ranking.

When you guest blog, you write an article for another website in your industry.

This gives you exposure to their audience and can help you build relationships with other webmasters.

In addition, guest blogging can help you generate traffic and improve your search engine ranking.

Here are a few tips for using guest blogging:

Identify websites that accept guest blogs
Reach out to them and pitch your ideas
Write informative and engaging articles
Include a call-to-action in your bio

9. Use Social Media

Social media is great for generating traffic, building relationships, and improving your search engine ranking.

When you use social media, you can connect with your target audience and promote your brand.

In addition, social media can help you build relationships with other webmasters and influencers.

Here are a few tips for using social media:

Identify the social media platforms that are relevant to your niche
Create informative and engaging content
Engage with other users on the platform
Include links to your website in your profile
Monitor your results and adjust your strategy as needed
Use hashtags to reach a wider audience
Participate in groups and forums
Use social media ads

10. Track, Analyse, and Repeat

The most essential part of any traffic-building strategy is to track your results.

You need to know what is working and what is not.

Without tracking, you will not be able to improve your results.

There are a few things you should track:

website traffic
leads
sales
conversions

To track your results, you need to use web analytics tools.

Many web analytics tools are available, but Google Analytics is the most popular.

Once you have set up tracking, you need to analyse your results.

Look at your web traffic and see where it is coming from.

Then look at your leads and sales.

Finally, look at your conversion rate.

Once you have analysed your results, you need to adjust your strategy.

Make changes to your website, content, and marketing campaigns.

Then track your results again and repeat the process.

Final Words

Website traffic is essential if you want to succeed online.

There are many ways to get more visitors, but not all of them are effective.

To build traffic that converts, you need to focus on creating shareable content, building relationships, and tracking your results.

Following these tips can generate the traffic you need to succeed.

What are your favourite traffic-building strategies? Let us know in the comments below.

By Erik Emanuelli

Erik Emanuelli is an online marketer who has been blogging since 2010. Be sure to check his website for free SEO resources.

Sourced from readwrite

In News

5 Ways to Monetize a Website

March 10, 2021 No Comments

By Jacob Maslow

COVID-19 has made 2020 a tough year. Millions of people have lost their businesses, jobs or had to accept a reduced income. Due to the pandemic, it is now common to find people searching the internet for ways they can make money online during these challenging times.

You may be among those looking for a way to earn online not only now but hope to find a money-making venture that makes you more prepared should a new pandemic happen in the future.

This is why website monetization has once again become a widely searched topic.

Although it has been tried, tested, and proven to be a great way to earn money online, many people have feared trying it out. This is mainly because creating a website that will generate an income for you requires patience, which many people lack.

Many individuals have started websites but given up along the way because of the challenges in sustaining and consistently creating content.

But if you want to start a website or want to revive your site, now is a perfect time. With lockdowns happening all over the world due to COVID-19, more people are spending their time online.

So if you’re able to create a good website, offer an excellent product or service, and successfully market your site, you should have loads of web traffic. It is this website traffic you can use to earn from your website. Here are the top ways you can monetize your site.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate means to connect. When you do affiliate marketing, you connect with other businesses and earn a commission from selling their products or service to your website visitors.

Amazon has one of the most popular affiliate programs you can join. When you sign-up for their program, you will be given a link to include in the content you write to recommend various Amazon products on your website.

When people click on the link and purchase the product, you earn a percentage from the sale.

There are many affiliate programs out there. So do your research and look for the ones that suit your website’s niche.

Be sure to disclose to your audience that you’re using affiliate links for transparency.

2. Sell a Product or Service

Here you may need to rack your brain a little. With so many products and services available nowadays, it can be a bit difficult to stand out. But it is possible.

Look at what you’re passionate about and then find a problem within it. The simpler the problem, the better.

Once you found it, create a solution by way of a product or a service.

The good thing about selling your product or service is that you get 100% of the sale amount, unlike affiliate marketing, where you only get a commission.

3. Resell Your Website Traffic

Once you get thousands of visitors on your website, you can join platforms like Google Ads, Ezoic, or Mediavine to place advertisements on your website. When your website traffic sees or clicks on these ads, you get paid for it.

Alternatively, you can reach out to advertisers yourself and charge them to advertise on your website.

If your website numbers are still low, you can pay for a traffic service like ultimatewebtraffic. This web traffic seller can provide your website with 100% human and highly targeted website traffic.

4. Charge for Membership

This is a sure way to get paid with your website. For example, you could create exclusive content, then ask your website traffic to pay you a fee to access this content.

The content you provide has to be of the highest quality and not readily available to make your visitors see the need to pay for it.

Content on a membership website can include research, webinars, or podcasts.

5. Sponsored Posts

With a big website audience, you can reach out to companies within your niches that would be interested in your website traffic.

When you reach out, you can offer to publish an authoritative blog or video about their product or service and link to them. Include them in your regular newsletter, or place their ads on your site.

This can be done regularly. Only, be cautious of some brands because if you seem to be a bit biased toward their competitor, you may be seen as a threat to them.

Just make sure you know what you are doing and let them know your goal with your review or sponsorship deal.

Conclusion

While staying at home due to Covid-19 is not exciting, you could make the best of it and start a website that could earn you a regular income long after being done with this pandemic.

Monetizing a website is not a walk in the park, though, so here’s a quick checklist to see if you have what it takes to take on the task.

Attitude

As the age-old saying goes: your attitude determines your altitude. There is much truth behind that kernel of wisdom.

Monetizing a website is a long-term investment and may need time before you see dividends. You should have the right amount of patience, perseverance, and motivation to push through.

Goals

Your goals should be S.M.A.R.T., which stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timely.

Skills

Creating a good website will need some set of skills. You will need to plan, write, design, and even code a little.

Don’t worry if this seems like plenty of tasks to do. If you have good team management skills, you can hire people to reduce your workload.

You should also have a thorough understanding of how to buy website traffic. If you don’t, the best way to get immediate traffic is to work with a traffic service like web traffic experts. This web traffic provider can drive thousands of visitors to your websites within hours of paying for their service.

I wish you all the best in your website monetization efforts!

By Jacob Maslow

Sourced from INFLUENCIVE

In News

Want More Traffic for Your Website? Try These Proven Content Marketing Strategies

November 9, 2020 No Comments

By Rooney Reeves.

In the highly-digitized world, we are living in, we often hear about content marketing. But what exactly is content marketing? Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach, focused on building and distributing relevant, consistent, and valuable content to draw and retain a clearly defined audience, and the ultimate goal is to drive profitable customer action.

Content is king, and website development today entails building websites and web apps with high-quality content. The most experienced successful brands and marketers already are vouching for that by developing powerful and unique content marketing campaigns. Unlike traditional marketing, content marketing costs 62 percent less and provides as many results when it comes to leads and traffic.

Business organizations seeking services of web developers, such for instance a PHP web development company that builds web solutions using PHP are doing so to boost their marketing strategies and to stay on the competitive edge. Unquestionably, content promotion strategies are popular and insanely effective in today’s marketplace. Whatever business vertical you are in, you could leverage content to develop a robust brand reputation, boost brand awareness, and boost ROI.

There are content marketing strategies that help drive more traffic to your website. What are these? Let’s find out.

Proven Content Marketing Strategies to Drive More Traffic

Build Astounding Content for a Very Distinct Audience

A content marketing campaign to be successful demands a lot of things. The most critical, however, is you have to take into account the concerns of your target audience. Put simply, you should recognize and understand the characteristics, behavior, needs, mindset, desires, issues, and habits of your audience.

If you’re to deliver value, then you must certainly know that your content would bring something new, something that your audience could hardly find somewhere else. The most essential element of SEO is keyword research. Look for the keyword and phrases that your audience uses in search engine queries.

Build content around these phrases and words to boost your rankings. When researching a keyword, look for long-tail phrases and keywords to bring in more relevant traffic. It would also be helpful to include keywords that are semantically related.

These are words and phrases that conceptually relate to one another. Some free keywords to help you include:

Keyword Tool Dominator
Google Search Console
Keywords Everywhere
Rank Tracker
Google Ads Keyword Planner

There are also other on-page and off-page factors, which impact your SEO aside from your content, such as:

backlinks
inbound links
site architecture

Networking and Guest Posting

Aside from engaging in a web development company, one of the most reliable ways of boosting awareness of your brand and blog traffic is guest posting. Guest posting first off enables connecting with niche authorities who possess an established database of customers and followers already. Effective guest posting secondly generates direct traffic.

You nonetheless have to target the right blogs, which target a similar audience, you should share content that amazes your audience, and you also have to link back to your website properly so that readers would feel enticed to click on your CTAs or call-to-action buttons. Guest posting provides an opportunity for you to connect with other same-minded people. All kinds of fruitful relationships could arise since you could share links, knowledge, and opportunities with your network group.

Segment the Audience and Build Various Landing Pages

Intelligent content marketing isn’t done randomly. Effective marketers segment their audiences following their various needs, including product needs, solution needs, and more. Segmentation is necessary simply because some of the visitors to your site are not customers, but some of them are.

Your content thus couldn’t be relevant to all your visitors since they have various needs and are at different stages of the sales process. Thus, as an example, the content you develop to boost brand awareness is wasted basically on people who have purchased one of your products already. The easiest way of segmenting the audience is through developing particular buyer personas.

Q&A Marketing and Forum Marketing

Q&A platforms and industry forums, such as Quora are goldmine content marketing channels. These sources, if properly leveraged, could drive plenty of traffic back to your website. Depending on your industry and the target audience, you have to identify the most relevant boards, which people use in discussing different topics.

There are different discussion forums, depending on the products and services you are selling. Study these forums and make certain that your ideal customers spend time there. The next thing to do is to build a branded profile that features the name and logo of your brand.

Forum marketing is all about interacting and providing effective solutions to people’s problems. Provide relevant advice, engage in relevant discussions, and use your signature in sharing important links back to your landing pages. The more helpful you are, the more leads and traffic you will generate over time.

Master One Social Network yet be Present on all the Others

Billions of people on earth today are active social media users. If you think about it, nearly half the population is using social media for different reasons. This tells you that social media isn’t a should anymore, but has become a must for every kind of business, enterprise, or blog.

Social media and content marketing are interconnected. One completes the other and vice versa. The perfect place for you to develop brand exposure, build meaningful relationships, and gather relevant leads is social media.

Whether you’re promoting content on social channels, you need to identify the most preferred social network by your target audience. Determine what communications channels they use, where they hang out, and how do they spend their time on social media. Quality over quantity is always the best, thus decide on the social channel you should focus more on.

Repurpose, Update, and Link to Old Content

Do not forget old content, especially if it’s evergreen and qualitative. Rather, you should update it, repurpose it and remind it throughout your newest blog posts. Simply, updating your content means adding new visual content, information, and new twists to make it more extensive.

Content update often could boost your search engine rankings, since crawlers revisit the pages and detect changes, which have been modified. Linking back to your past blogs is another effective way of boosting traffic and reputation to your brand. By adding internal links, which resolve various problems and needs, your target audience gets to spend more time on your blog, become familiar with your value proposition, style, and products.

Content repurposing involves modification to its media type. You could turn text into slides, audio, videos, infographics, and the other way around. As soon as you have numerous versions of the same value and information, share it via the various content channels.

For Better Results, Leverage Professionals

Content marketing is demanding. If you want to stay ahead of the competition and overshadow your competition, then the quality of your content should be great all the time. Keep in mind that a great entrepreneur, webmaster, or marketer is not a good writer or editor all the time.

In these instances, considering partnering with professionals. Aside from saving time and money, the quality of your article would be consistently written and preserved. There are several platforms where you can find talented freelancers.

Before contacting them, however, make certain that you build the profile of an ideal writer. Mention knowledge, experience, and skills requirements, and allow these services to find the perfect match.

Conclusion

Although technology and the internet continue to evolve, the main principle remains the same. Develop a content marketing strategy based on reliable data for a satisfactory and seamless customer journey.

By Rooney Reeves.

In News

A Guide to Driving Traffic to Your Website

April 9, 2020 No Comments

By Jamie Johnson.

Many businesses struggle to drive more traffic to their website. If you’re not getting as much traffic as you’d like, these five strategies will help.

You worked hard to create a website for your business in hopes that it would bring in new customers. But as the weeks and months go by, your traffic never seems to improve. Here are five ways you can begin driving more traffic to your site.

Do a full website audit

If you’re not getting as much traffic as you’d like, you’ll probably want to do a website audit. An audit helps you identify any issues that are preventing your site from getting more visitors and conversions.

You can do this by accessing a website auditing tool. These tools will check for technical problems, identify any broken links and point out duplicate content. It will also determine whether or not your mobile and desktop loading speeds need improvement.

Take advantage of SEO strategies

One of the best ways to bring more traffic to your site is by taking advantage of SEO. This involves strategically using keywords in your page descriptions, meta descriptions, image alt-text, blog posts and more.

A good SEO strategy can help you rank higher in Google, so people who are searching for what you have to offer can find you. Keep in mind, though, that SEO is a long-term strategy and will not result in overnight success.

If you’re not sure where to start, there are a variety of free and paid SEO tools available. These tools can help you identify relevant keywords, perform competitor research and more.

A good SEO strategy can help you rank higher in Google.

Guest post on other websites

One of the best ways to boost your SEO strategy is by guest posting on credible websites. When you guest post on a high-authority website, you’ll gain a backlink to your site. This improves your website’s credibility and can help your ranking on Google.

Guest posting can also drive referral traffic back to your site. Guest posting regularly can be a great way to bring in an additional source of traffic to your website.

Utilize social media

Hopefully, you’re already using social media for your business. But if you aren’t or if you haven’t been as consistent as you would like, now is a great time to start. Utilizing social media is a great way to engage customers and boost traffic to your site.

Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube can all drive a lot of traffic to your website. By assigning someone to be in charge of engaging with your community and responding to comments, your social media strategy will be more effective, and it will help you get ahead of potential problems or customer complaints.

Invest in paid advertising

Social media is a great way to engage with your customers and get in front of new potential customers. But it’s not as easy as it used to be to show up in your customers’ newsfeeds. Thanks to algorithm changes, many of your social media posts may go largely unnoticed.

This is why paid advertising can be so helpful. Using Facebook ads is a great way to get in front of potential customers on Facebook and Instagram. And you can use paid advertising on Google to drive more traffic to your site and increase your conversions.

Just make sure you think carefully about what your goals are before investing in advertising. Of course, you should also keep your customers top of mind and think about the type of advertising strategy that will resonate most with them.

CO— aims to bring you inspiration from leading respected experts. However, before making any business decision, you should consult a professional who can advise you based on your individual situation.

Feature Image Credit: From implementing a solid SEO strategy to engaging on social media, there are several effective ways to increase traffic to your website. — Getty Images/golibo

By Jamie Johnson

Sourced from U.S. Chamber of Commerce

In News

2 tips to increase traffic to your website (without spending money)

December 9, 2019 No Comments

Sourced from Alison Wolf.

Getting organic traffic to your website firstly takes time and patience to do. You will NOT get any overnight success with this!

By being consistent and having a long term strategy, you can start to see you ranking on the search engines and have more traffic to your website.

Top two strategies to driving traffic to your website are:

1. Social Media Marketing

2. Content Marketing

Here I will dive into how both tips can work for you and what steps you should be taking.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is a popular way of targeting specific groups of people. But it is also a way of truly engaging with them and turn them into high-quality leads.

92% of small businesses use social media as they consider it an important part.

When it comes to using social media, unless you are a large business with large teams of staff, only stick to 1 or 2 platforms and dominate them.

Every platform is targeted to different segments of society, so you need to be strategic in choosing which platform is best for you.

– Facebook Targeted towards B2C and generation Y and older (so people born no later than the mid-1990s)

– Twitter Used by a whole variety of different segments of society. Though some businesses will find Twitter more useful than others. To find out if Twitter is a good path for you to take, look at your direct competitors and your target market.

– Instagram A mainly visual platform that is mainly used by Millennials. As a business, you can take advantage of this by using ‘influencers‘ to market your product.

– Pinterest Another mainly visual platform, where you can post a picture that gets redirected to your website. Pinterest is also great for SEO, as Google images show Pinterest images.

– LinkedIn The ultimate B2B platform, where businesses are networking with businesses. If you are in the B2B industry then LinkedIn is the only platform you should be taking advantage of.

Don’t know where to start?

My business partner Josh Turner has done for you LinkedIn campaign management services. You will get a pipeline of clients consistently full of 10-15 appointments every month with high-end clients.

Content Marketing

Content is all about creating content for your target market that they will love and want to use you as their go-to resource, then eventually buying from you. The biggest trick to content marketing is to stay consistent, give value and be useful!

Here is a little guide to how you CAN do content marketing in your business.

– Keyword Research

Keyword research is a must done starting point for any content creator. To do keyword research effectively look at Facebook groups and forums with your target market in and look at what the hot topic of discussion is.

– Blog or Vlog Regularly

Blogging or vlogging (video blog) regularly then you will start to attract regular visitors to your website. Make sure you optimize your blog or vlog with specific keywords (in the vlog description).

– Optimize Your Meta Description

Meta descriptions are the small piece of text under the site title on Google search results. Adding the keyword in the meta description so that you rank higher for the keyword. Using a tool such as Yoast SEO (a WordPress Plugin) will help you to do this effortlessly.

– Linking (internal and external) To Create A Structure

What Google loves the most is when websites have a structure. Google wants to see you linking to other pages or posts within your website. Also, Google wants to see you linking out to other websites. Using external websites to back up what you are saying in your post or an affiliate link is the normal method to do external links.

Those are my top 2 tips for driving more traffic to your website. If you have enjoyed this post then please share it on social media or comment below.

Looking for a blog writer in the B2B niche, then send me a message by clicking here

Sourced from Alison Wolf

In News

Is Your Business’ Website Traffic Declining? Here Are 14 Tips To Diagnose The Drop

June 19, 2019 No Comments

Sourced from Forbes

Website traffic is an important marketing metric for most companies. The more visitors who see your Web content, the more chances you have to make an impact, develop relationships and boost sales. That’s why a sudden and sharp decline in traffic can be such an unpleasant jolt—it represents lost opportunities to convert viewers to customers.

Identifying the issue is one thing; diagnosing it can be much more tricky. There are many potential causes of a decline in website traffic, ranging from a Google algorithm update to technical issues. We asked members of Forbes Agency Council to offer tips on where a business should start investigating a significant loss in website traffic. Here’s what they had to say.

1. Check For Recent Google Updates

For a dip in organic traffic, the first place to look is with Google to see if they’ve recently released an algorithm update that negatively affected your rankings and visibility. The most recent example of this happened in August 2018, when Google released its “Medic” update. – Steve Cross, iSynergy

2. Improve Your SEO

The best place to start is checking to make sure you are up on Google algorithms and that your content matches the parameters of how Google performs searches. It is ever-changing, which means you can’t just throw some keywords in and expect results. Lower traffic means fewer people are seeing you—improving your SEO strategy is how to fix that. – Jason Hall, FiveChannels Marketing

3. Check Your Traffic Sources

What’s great about analytics is that you can “see” why there is a decline in website traffic. Check your traffic sources before and after the decline so you can find which source was mostly affected. If it’s organic (search engines), look at your rankings; if it’s social, track down what you were posting before and after; and if it’s referrals, then make sure these sites are still linking to you! – Rafael Romis, Weberous Web Design

4. Determine If It’s A Technology Issue

In the markets we serve, a sudden drop in traffic is virtually always a technology issue. If you build great content that ideal prospects cannot resist and you market it appropriately and with respect, there is almost never a steep decline unless the technology breaks. There are all kinds of tech issues that can cause declines. This is why our clients rely on us to have really sharp tech skills. – Randy Shattuck, The Shattuck Group

5. Look At The Stories You’re Telling

Have you experienced a lull in new content? Have you made a shift to different types of stories? If you’re doing A/B testing to see what types of content your consumers prefer, then congratulations—you just figured it out. If not, then maybe it’s time to take a hard look at your strategy and find ways to tell new stories that will be more engaging for your readers and keep them coming back for more. – Lisa Arledge Powell, MediaSource

6. Check For Outdated Terminology

First, review your site’s text for the latest terminology. An example is “marketing” versus “sales enablement.” Second, review how prospective customers find or don’t find your site. Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is one approach. An example is a Web search for “marketing agency” versus “sales enablement agency.” As industry buzzwords change, so will your page rank. – Jim Caruso, MediaFirst PR – Atlanta

7. Check Web Hosting Infrastructure

I would recommend checking the server/Web hosting infrastructure to ensure everything is technically performing and optimal. Then I would look to SEO, including the page rank and any recent on-site changes that may have impacted index scoring. – Jordan Edelson, Appetizer Mobile LLC

8. Look At Your Bounce Rate

The first place to look is bounce rate to determine if traffic arrived but dropped off or if traffic never arrived in the first place. If the former, it’s time to look at design and navigation as well as website performance to figure out where the problem is. If the latter, then it’s time to review SEO and see if there was a change in the search algorithm that you can adjust for. – Stefan Pollack, The Pollack PR Marketing Group

9. Check Google Analytics

If you see an unexpected dip in traffic in Google Analytics (GA), you simply have to dig further to see what the cause is. Check the Acquisition Overview in Google Analytics to determine which channel had the biggest dip—organic, direct, referral, paid search or social. This typically will point you in the right direction to determine where you need to investigate further. – T. Maxwell, eMaximize

10. Do Analytics Integration And Messaging Audits

If the spike is sudden, it’s likely an issue with your analytics integration. If the decline is gradual, the situation is likely more serious. It might mean your messaging no longer resonates, the content you have on your website is stale or you’re not getting media coverage that can push additional readers to your site. Conduct a website audit or find out if a search engine algorithm changed. – Kathleen Lucente, Red Fan Communications

11. Make Sure The Drop Is Real

Start by making sure it’s an actual loss of traffic and not an issue with your analytics measurement tool (e.g., pages dropped GA code). Once you’ve ruled that out, investigate the source(s). In other words, what channel(s) dropped? Was it organic search? Paid media? Email? Direct? All of the above? Knowing which channels/sources/mediums were impacted will help you understand the cause. – Gyi Tsakalakis, AttorneySync

12. Analyze Trends By Source And Channel

When traffic is on the decline, it’s important to understand where the loss is coming from. This means a deep dive into the source (the origination of the traffic—e.g., Google) and the channel (the type of traffic—e.g., social media) to determine where the attrition is occurring. Once that’s uncovered, look at what has changed. Once you identify these factors, you can create a strategy to improve. – Bryan Shetsky, Lamark Media

13. Check Backlinks To Your Site

First check backlinks to your site on different directories, industry association pages and even paid listings that may be powering traffic to your website from a credible source. Changes to those sites that impact your links could be devastating. Quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant sites also help in getting better search engine rankings. – Jim Heininger, The Rebranding Experts

14. Catch It Early With A Daily Scorecard

With tools like Google Data Studio, it’s easy to create a custom scorecard for your analytics and have it emailed each day. The trick is setting up segmentations for monitoring changes in traffic against a monthly or yearly cadence. Next, breaking down site traffic by channel (SEO/paid/email/social) helps to quickly identify what’s happening by channel and fix small issues before they become big. – Jacob Cook, Tadpull

Sourced from Forbes

In News

How Google Analytics Help Small Business Owners to Make Better Business Decisions

April 15, 2019 No Comments

By Jyotirmay Samanta

The goal of Google Analytics is to help you as a business owner to deliver a high-quality website to your customers and provide you with all the necessary information regarding the website statistics

Google analytics might seem scary at the first site. But you are an accomplished owner of a dynamic and customer-focused small business and your website represents your business! So, being inquisitive about the traffic data is your religion. As a fact, you want to know much more than just traffic data.

To give you a broader overview of what Google Analytics does, it helps businesses gain insights on their website’s traffic, where the visitors are coming from (channels, mediums, source, referrals, paid channels), which keywords draw the most traffic, what pages are visited most etc!

The data can then be drilled down to see the page views, sessions, bounce rate, new vs returning users, and session duration. Further, drill down the data to see what time of the day the users visit, what browser they visit from or what device they access your website from, the behaviour flow etc.

Google Analytics not only provides you with a lot of data, but it also pushes you in the right direction when it comes to your website optimization. You can actually get insights on whether you need to optimize the on-site SEO of your site or make your site more mobile friendly or whether to improve the website’s speed etc.

We will take a detailed look into all these in a moment and analyse how Google analytics helps business owners take important business decisions based on a huge amount of real data points. If you are a novice when it comes to Google analytics, this is the post that will push you in the right direction.

[1] Google Analytics Reports – The holy grail for understanding your website traffic

Audience Overview report :
Audience overview reports provide information on your website’s traffic at a glance. Along with that, it also provides insight into the characteristics of your users. It gives you details of your audience’s cohort, demography, age, the technology they use, behaviours and interests of your website visitors.

Image Credits – Moz

How does Audience overview report in Google Analytics help your business?

[i] As a business owner, it is paramount that you can comprehend what kind of audience your website is drawing and whether that is the customer persona you are targeting. Audience overview report pushes you in the right direction by providing clear and consistent frames of reference backed by a whole lot of data.

[ii] Once you gain insights on your customer behaviour, you can leverage it to formulate marketing strategies to increase engagement with them. It will help you target your niche audience.

[iii] Also, this helps you keep a check on how your business is doing compared to your competitors. All these extremely useful data can be used to optimize your site’s performance in order to make it more target-customer centric.

Customer Acquisition Report

This report in Google Analytics tells you from what channels and sources your website visitors landed on your website, such as search engines, social networks or referrals and what campaigns are drawing how much traffic. Acquisition report basically helps determine which marketing tactics are working and which are not.

How does Customer Acquisition report in Google Analytics help your business?

This report is an overview of your marketing tactics. This report lets you know what kind of content your audiences are enjoying and which digital marketing channels are the most successful for your business. Leverage this data to develop and optimize marketing strategies that result in higher conversions.

It can help enhance the SEO and the UI/UX of your website. If you see some pages having a high bounce rate, then divert your attention to analyze why users are abandoning those pages.

Acquisition report helps you track which sites are responsible for most referred traffic to your site and focus on developing strategies to gain more referrals from them.

Real-time Behaviour Report

With the help of real-time reports on Google Analytics, you can monitor website activity as and when it happens, i.e. in real time. You can get an overview of the no. of people that are on your site right now, which pages or events they’re interacting with, and which goal conversions have occurred. You can also continuously monitor the effects that new campaigns and site changes have on your traffic.

How Real-time reports in Google Analytics help businesses?

[i] Time-specific content marketing – With real-time data, you will get insights on when there is more number of visitors on your site; so, you can push content to your blog around that time. This will give your content a boost and increase exposure.

[ii] Also, it will give you an idea of how engaging your content is. If people are bouncing off the content too soon, you might start thinking of something else.

[3] You can also view the behaviour of your visitors with real-time analytics. This will help you get details about what is working and what’s not. Say your visitors land on your “Contact us” page but bounce before filling the form. Here you know that you will need some alterations to keep visitors engaged.

Point to remember: In order to take better decisions, make sure you avoid inflating your own website traffic. This can be done by filtering out your own IP Address.

Moving to a little more advanced Google Analytics level :

[2] Segmentation with Google Analytics :

Segmentation is a way for businesses to understand the behaviour of various groups of users (segments) on your website. It shows data based on certain criteria and tells you how different group of people (segments) interact with your website, such as all data for visitors from the United States. It also compares the performance of that segment to the performance of the whole site.

How Segmentation in Google Analytics helps Small businesses?

[i] As data is found in abundance in Google when businesses start out, they might have trouble coming to a conclusion with all that data. Segmentation converts quantitative data to qualitative data with respect to your specific business requirements, making it easier for small businesses to interpret and analyse the data.

[ii] Small business owners can segment traffic by date and time, traffic channel, geographical region etc.. You can also create custom segments to measure various sales funnel benchmarks like reaching CTA button, adding products to cart, reading your blog etc.

[iii] Segmenting website visitors in groups and targeting campaigns w.r.t each group and comparing one segment to another – really helps to derive various insights in the interest of your business. Analyse them and use them to drive campaign success as well as conversion.

[3] Setting up Goals in Google Analytics

Goals are basically created so that Google Analytics can let you know when something important has happened on your website. Goals in Google Analytics allow you to track specific user interactions on your site.

How Goals in Google Analytics Helps Your Business

[i] Businesses can set goals to keep track of specific URLs. Whenever that particular URL is visited, the goal will be triggered. Say thank you pages or order confirmation pages. This will help you know the number of completions within a specific period of time.

[ii] Businesses can set goals to track the no of users that spent a certain amount of time on your site. Also, track the no. of users that don’t spend that time on your site. This way you can track both customer engagement and also how fast your customer service provides support.
[iii] Set up goals to see the number of pages each visitor sees before they quit the website. This is also used to measure engagement. This is of help for eCommerce businesses who might want to analyse the actual users who are looking to buy.

[iv] Google Analytics also lets you set up goals when users take some specific action on your website like plays a video, shares some piece of content etc. For businesses that have a unique content strategy like video, marketing can totally use this method for their advantage.

[4] Customized Reports and Google Analytics

Google analytics has too much data, but only a portion of it is used to draw meaningful conclusions and help you optimize and make better business decisions. The reports that Google Analytics provides are okay for surface level data and offer a glimpse of what’s actually going on. Also, sorting through all that data manually is time-consuming. What custom reports do is, it collect all the data and presents them in a format that is easier to analyse.

How Does the Custom Report in Google Analytics Help Businesses?

[i] All businesses have unique strategies and thus they need specific data and more importantly, customizable analytics. With custom reports, businesses can drill down into fine details and discover correlations you wouldn’t see otherwise.

[ii] Custom reporting dashboard provides a consolidated all in one view that can be digested easily and is simpler to share and export. Also, there is provision for the dashboard to be emailed to you as a pdf either daily or weekly.

[5] Setting Custom Alerts in Google Analytics

It so happens that sometimes there is a huge dip in the web traffic or a huge drop in conversions. Manually attempting to track these fluctuations would mean keeping your eyes glued on Google Analytics 24/7. Well, you have better things to do. But again, keeping a tab of the critical fluctuations is important. Lucky for both you and me, Google Analytics came up with custom alerts to help track these variations for your website. Create custom alerts for data that are most significant and meaningful for your business and Google Analytics sends a custom notification if a change triggers one of your custom alerts. Also, you can create annotations about an alert so that you can come back as and when required to see why that alert occurred.

How Does Custom Alert in Google Analytics Help Businesses?

Stay on top of your website performance and react accordingly and make necessary changes when notified. Traffic spikes after a new campaign can indicate that the campaign is performing as expected.

[6] PPC Campaign and Which Channel Converts the Most Customers

Anyone using PPC advertisements knows that it is a key revenue driver for their businesses but also know how expensive it can get! Integrate your AdWords account with your Google Analytics and carry out a PPC audit in Google Analytics to ensure all clicks are reported accurately in Google Analytics. This will help make informed decisions.

How Tracking PPC Campaigns in Google Analytics Help Small Businesses?

[i] Adwords already show you which keywords and ads initiate the maximum conversion. Google analytics, in addition to that, will show you the customer journey, so, you’ll get an idea of what factors on your website influence the conversion rate.

[ii] With Google Analytics, you also get additional data like bounce rate, Pages Per Visit, repeat customers etc to optimize your AdWords Campaigns and make more informed business decisions.

-:: Parting words::-

The goal of Google Analytics is to help you as a business owner to deliver a high-quality website to your customers and provide you with all the necessary information regarding the website statistics. So, they let you know who’s visiting your site, who are converting and who’s not interested. Along with these which location they hail from and what social or referral channels bought them here. It also lets you set up goals and segregate your traffic. Then it helps to present all these data in an all-in-one view dashboard so that analysing all that data and taking suitable actions becomes easier for you. So, Google Analytics basically helps you market to the right people, in the right way and at the right time.

Feature Image credit: Shutterstock

By Jyotirmay Samanta

CEO of Binaryfolks Pvt. Ltd.

Sourced from Entrepreneur India

In News

14 Tools And Tactics For Monitoring And Understanding Your Website Traffic

December 7, 2018 No Comments

Sourced from Forbes

With so many companies relying on their websites to make sales and engage customers, it’s critical to understand how many people are visiting your site and what they’re doing once they get there. Monitoring your web traffic and page views can give you an idea of what’s working and what might require more effort. You can identify trends — like when users are most active and which content they engage most with — that help you better understand your consumers’ digital habits.

There are a lot of programs for monitoring, measuring and analyzing website activity, and it’s sometimes hard to know which ones to try. Below, 14 Forbes Technology Council members share their favorite tools and methods for the job.

1. Google Analytics

While there are many tools available to monitor web traffic, Google Analytics is free and comprehensive. However, while simply adding standard Google Analytics tracking code and reviewing basic traffic metrics is a good start, the real power of Google Analytics is unleashed when events are added to every link, button and action on a web page. This allows for a more extensive range of analyses. – Jonathan Babad, DIRECTED

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is our go-to tool for monitoring traffic, domain authority and keywords. We can see which keywords are ranking the best and identify improvement opportunities to drive more traffic to our site. It also lets us see which sites are linking to us to identify potential guest posting partners, increase our backlink profile, and drive additional referral traffic. – Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster

3. Matomo

Matomo (formerly Piwik) is an open source and self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics. Because of these qualities, it gives businesses complete access to raw tracking information so that any custom reporting can be generated. Going with a self-hosted option can avoid some of the privacy concerns of giving Google even more data on your users. – Matthew Kolb, SkilledNursingFacilities.org

4. Leadlander

It depends on volume and target audience, but for us, a tool like Leadlander works well because it lets us see which specifically named companies are visiting which pages. Even though it’s not 100% accurate, it’s good enough to give our account executives valuable ancillary insight into how their outreach efforts are progressing. – Chris Moustakas, DevonWay

5. Clickback.com

Tracking website visitors to your website is very important. You can do this through Google Analytics, which is a free and commonly used tool, but having the ability to turn that data into valuable information — such as finding out what companies are visiting your website so you can potentially track them down — is extremely useful. My favorite platform for such a purpose is clickback.com. – Ruslan Desyatnikov, QA Mentor

6. Heap

Google Analytics is the industry standard; however, there are tools like Heap that can help teams understand behavior much quicker — not to mention, they are sometimes easier for junior teams to start using immediately. You can couple these tools with business intelligence tools like Google Data Studio or Domo. I think there are many ways to get the data you are looking for and move on. – Mike Schmidt, Dovetale

7. W3Counter

There are free and paid versions. The free one lets you track 5,000-page views a day across 10 websites, while the Pro account allows you to track up to 1 million views a month. I like how visual it is, and it shows me exactly what I need to know rather than having to hunt around. – Jon Bradshaw, Calendar.com

8. Your Server Logs

Tools like Google Analytics provide helpful insights, but don’t forget to look at server logs for data that Analytics doesn’t show. Attacks, brute-force attempts, and click fraud aren’t reported in Analytics and can persist for years undetected if left unchecked. Have your IT department use log monitoring software to look for unusual trends and spikes in traffic (both free and paid) just in case. – Jason Gill, The HOTH

9. Your Own Custom Analytics Module

If you’re looking for higher accuracy, you should build an analytics module yourself. Most third-party analytics tools are javascript-based and client-side solutions. This means you might not get data from some of your users. They might have javascript disabled. They might be using some ad-blocking plugins that block analytics tools as well. – Vikram Joshi, pulsd

10. Your Conversational Interfaces

Web analytics previously focused on how users navigated a complex jungle of pages. Today, AI-backed conversational interfaces can transform user journeys into streamlined, on-demand experiences. This increased user freedom to self-serve in one consolidated view means companies can gain actionable analytics insights into which journey designs best lead to product purchases or issue resolution. – Evan Kohn, Pypestream

11. A Combination Of Tools That Tell A Story Together

Monitoring the web traffic and page views of a company website is very important, but getting a Google Analytics report each month will not tell the whole story. Marketing professionals will use several tools (Google Analytics, Ahrefs, Moz Tools, etc.) to track analytics over time, looking for trends that tell a story. This helps us take decisive action on what website changes need to be made. – Marcus Turner, Enola Labs

12. A Heat-Mapping Tool

I like the visual representation of heat maps that show me where people go on websites and how much time they spend there. It tells me so much more about what works and where to make changes. – Chalmers Brown, Due

13. Year-Over-Year Data Reports

YoY calculations are particularly good for businesses with seasonal peaks. For example, air conditioning sales might peak in the summer and a retail business might peak during the holiday season. The YoY growth rate smooths out any monthly volatility and helps easily see long-term trends. You might find out that you’re doing better than last month, but you’re actually down compared to last year. – Abishek Surana Rajendra, Course Hero

14. Any Tool That Serves Your ‘Why’ Of Data Tracking

The “how” is the easy part — the “why” is the important part. From easy and free tools like Google Analytics to very detailed behavior tracking like Lucky Orange to customer journey tracking, the tools are out there. It is most valuable to first decide why to track this and what decisions the data will drive. If you know the “why,” then the “how” will follow. – Timothy McGuire, J.S. Held

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only, fee-based organization comprised of elite CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Find out if you qualify at forbestechcouncil.com. Questions about an article? Email

Feature Image Credit: Getty

Sourced from Forbes

In News

7 Compelling Reasons Your Firm Should Be Blogging

October 25, 2018 No Comments

By Tim Asimos

Today, anyone with valuable, relevant content can attract an audience online. Blogging enables firms to become publishers by creating educational content that attracts and engages their audience while building trust and credibility in the process.

Having an active blog loaded with quality, original, thought leadership-oriented content should be a top priority in your marketing strategy. We’ve previously discussed the role of thought leadership in the B2B buyer’s journey—and blogging is one of the cornerstones of content marketing. Blogs provide an avenue for prospects to recognize your firm as a subject-matter expert, by providing them with information that they are looking for and/or find relevant to their business. Furthermore, blog content is viewed by 77% of B2B buyers during their purchasing process. Still not convinced that blogging is important for your business? Here are 7 compelling reasons why your company should be blogging.

1. Create value for your target audience

Content marketing is all about adding value by sharing relevant information that informs, educates and guides your prospects and clients. So by writing blog posts about topics that are relevant to your audience, you begin to provide value for them, as opposed to just talking about your firm and what you sell.

What are their pain points? What challenges do they face? What gaps in information are they lacking that your blog can fill? What problems can you help solve for them through blogging? If a prospect finds value in your blog posts, they are also likely to find value in your services as well.

2. Become an industry thought leader

Keeping your prospects engaged over a longer sales cycle is important to nurture the relationship. Blogging provides you with the opportunity to show that you’re an expert and thought leader in your industry by leveraging your technical staff as writers. Writing posts on topics relevant to your industry and providing valuable guidance and best practices gives you credibility as a company and positions you as a reliable resource for information. Your blog can become a go-to place to answer your prospects’ questions and concerns that are common in the industry and keep them connected to your brand for an extended period of time. You are helping your prospects learn something, while building thought leadership at the same time.

3. Differentiate yourself from the competition

While many companies engage in “me-too” marketing, focusing on features and benefits of their services, blogging provides an opportunity for you to differentiate your firm by showing instead of just saying. There are a growing number of firms with blogs on their website, but many are filled with the same old self-promotional, news-oriented content that everyone else publishes. But by providing educational and informative content that people find valuable and useful, you can set yourself apart from the rest of the “me-toos” in your industry. Instead of just telling your audience that you’re the expert, blogging allows you to actually demonstrate your expertise and knowledge.

4. Drive website traffic and improve SEO

One of the best ways to boost your website traffic and improve your SEO rankings is through blogging. According to Hubspot, companies that blog receive 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages on average. Blogging gives you something to talk about online and promote on your social media channels, it gives you more indexable pages for Google to serve up to visitors, and it provides you the best forum to create keyword-rich content and lots of it.

Your blog posts should contain keywords and phrases relevant to your industry. It is important to have these keywords in the headlines, image ALT tags and blog post URLs. By doing this, each blog post increases your chances of being found online through search engines, ultimately driving more traffic to your website.

Recommended for YouWebcast, October 17th: How to Solve Your Marketing Data Nightmare

As more people view your blog posts, many begin to link to your pages on their own websites. This creates inbound links that give your company’s website authority with search engines and increases your referral traffic.

5. Keep your website fresh and create shareable content

As you write and share blog posts, you are increasing your firm’s content and keeping your website fresh and updated. Further, many blog posts can be repurposed into other forms of content, and vice versa. Each blog post should have share buttons to make them easily shareable on social media so you can further increase your reach to potential clients. It’s important to cross-promote your blog posts as much as possible in order to maximize its reach and influence and drive traffic to your website.

6. Attract prospects and generate leads

By providing valuable, relevant content, your blog attracts prospects and starts a relationship with them. Every blog should include a simple subscribe form to capture “fans” and they should receive periodic email updates from the blog. Be sure to promote subscribing to your blog using intentionally placed calls-to-action (CTAs).

Premium content for lead generation such as an eBook or whitepaper can be promoted on your blog as well using strategically placed CTAs in posts or on the sidebar. Gate premium content behind a form on a landing page that requires the prospect to enter their name, email and company in exchange for the content. Now you have a prospect to begin a lead nurturing program with and can eventually convert some of these leads into customers.

7. Engage existing clients and create brand advocates

Blogging is certainly effective for attracting new prospects and generating leads, but it’s also useful for nurturing relationships with existing clients as well. Blogging is one component of the content marketing machine that is useful for continually engaging your clients after you’ve closed the deal. You can and should continue to show your knowledge and expertise and keep adding value to the relationship. Ultimately the goal is not only keeping your clients, but creating passionate brand advocates that generate positive word-of-mouth and sell for you.

No pain, no gain

Many firms struggle getting their blog of the ground or keeping it going. Some are reluctant to blog because they don’t know who will write it or they are unsure if they can maintain it. Blogging isn’t easy! In fact, regularly producing valuable, quality blog content can be challenging and difficult, especially if your firm is not committed to it. However, blogging (as these 7 reasons point out) should be an essential component of any online marketing strategy and is a huge opportunity to drive website traffic, build thought leadership and generate leads.

These are just a few of the many reasons why blogging should be a focal point of your digital and content marketing strategies.

Feature Image Credit: Free-Photos / Pixabay

By Tim Asimos

Sourced from B2C Business 2 Commumity

In News

Google ‘Freshness’ Algorithm May Still Cause Dips In Website Traffic

March 20, 2018 No Comments

By Laurie Sullivan

Google challenges marketers all the time by changing its algorithm often. One change that occurred in early 2017 might still be affecting some marketers. iQuanti found the flaw after a large publishing site that averages more than 600,000 monthly visits lost 28% in organic traffic site visits from January to February 2017.

Companies experiencing unnatural dips in traffic might want to look more closely at Google’s Freshness Update, as put by Michael Bertini, an online marketing and search strategies at iQuanti. The algorithm is intended to address the increasing volume of data being made available by ensuring that the most recent data serves up in the response to a search query. And each time the update is made, Bertini says, marketers can experience a significant drop in traffic due to older content being hosted on their site.

“People are still being hit with the algorithm and don’t realize it,” he said, suggesting it could take years. “JCPenney didn’t get hit with their backlink building tactic for four years.”

iQuanti’s markets began to dig for a reason to explain why the site dropped in ranking, and began to break out the traffic for each page that lost significant amounts of traffic. The list came down to a set of 20 URLs. All were articles created prior to 2014.

After iQuanti’s marketers took down the old content and began repurposing it by adding new elements and republishing it, the site saw a lift in search ranking. The exact same content published with a more recent date ranked better for more keyword terms.

Then in May of 2017, the site got hit again with “Google’s freshness update” that caused a drop in traffic once again. This time it was for another set of articles that were published in 2014.

The test conducted on 20 URLs saw a 101% increase in traffic and an 80% increase in share when repurposed and republished.

The results also suggest that the maximum amount of traffic an article produces occurs during the first two months, and after this point it stabilizes. And the average traffic for the content created in 2017 drove 26% less traffic than in 2016.

So if there is a dip in search traffic to a website, marketers may want to dig into the site looking for Google’s Freshness Update.

By Laurie Sullivan

Sourced from MediaPost