Any website is seeking to increase its traffic, but what is traffic on a website, how to do so, and what affects it, that’s what we will find out in this article.
There’re many factors that affect website traffic including:
- Â Â Â Search engine ranking.
- Â Â Â Website speed.
- Â Â Â Website layout.
- Â Â Â High-quality content.
- Â Â Â Links.
- Â Â Â Mobile optimization.
- Â Â Â The design of the website.
Putting all these factors in mind will help you get better traffic. Now let’s talk about each one of them in detail.
what is traffic on a website?
Among the factors that affect website traffic are:
Search Engine Ranking.
For people to reach your site it must be among the top 10 pages in search engine results like Google and Bing. The higher you rank the more traffic you get. Most people click on the first link they get and scroll through it. If they find the information, they need they will not search more.
To rank in search engines, you should optimize your content to meet the requirements. Make on and off-page optimization. This happens by using relevant keywords, adding high authority links to make your site trustworthy, using better headlines and Meta descriptions, and so on.
Speed of the website.
If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load people will get bored and leave, especially the ones who use their mobile phones. Which in turn affects website traffic negatively. To increase the traffic, make your site load faster. To ensure that your site is good to go visit it and see how much it takes to load if it’s fast then no need to worry.
Website Layout and design.
People want a website that they can navigate through easily to find what they’re searching for. Providing a layout that makes it easy to access the content increases website traffic. If your site contains many ads and pop-ups people will leave immediately.
That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t include advertisements on the website. Just don’t overuse it and put them on the sides. Not in the middle of the content or customers will get distracted. And ensure that they don’t make your site slower or they will drive the traffic away. Bad design and slow pages highly affect website traffic.
Content
What affects website traffic significantly is its content. We just said that Google cares about providing customers with what they truly search for.
If you write low-quality content your site will not rank. Therefore, you should write content that provides customers with valuable information that meets their needs. And that is not just to please Google. When you find a helpful post on Facebook for example want you to share it with your friends to read it? The same things happen to websites. When someone finds good content, he most likely will share it with his friends.
Increasing the site traffic is what you should aim for and you can do so by writing high-quality content that is up-to-date.
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What causes a drop in website traffic?
There are many factors that may cause a sudden drop in website traffic, here are some of them:
1. Â Â Google Algorithm Updates.
Google makes some changes regularly to its algorithms. And to rank, you must meet all the requirements. Google stated that they make updates daily to improve the search engine experience. What google cares about is providing the users with what they truly need.
Optimizing for search engines while keeping what users need in mind is your key to increasing website traffic. To figure out the new updates and to keep up with the changes search for press releases and confirmed changes released by Google. Also, some SEO tools like SEMrush and Moz will give you updates based on Google updates and changes made in its algorithms.
2. Â Â Low-Quality Content leads to low traffic.
What affects website traffic significantly is its content. We just said that Google cares about providing customers with what they truly search for.
If you write low-quality content your site will not rank. Therefore, you should write content that provides customers with valuable information that meets their needs. And that is not just to please Google. When you find a helpful post on Facebook for example want you to share it with your friends to read it? The same things happen to websites. When someone finds good content he most likely will share it with his friends.
Increasing the site traffic is what you should aim for and you can do so by writing high-quality content that is up-to-date.
3. Â Â Over-Optimization.
Using keywords and optimizing your website will surely affect website traffic. However, using too many keywords will give you a negative effect. If Google finds too many Keywords it will see your site as a site that cares about marketing and not providing good content for users.
4. Â Â Slow Website.
The speed of a website is crucial, it’s one of the main things that can increase traffic or reduce it. If the website takes more than 3 seconds no one will wait until it loads. People nowadays don’t like waiting and they will leave your site right away.
One of the things that search engines take into account is the speed of the website because it is part of the user experience journey.Â
What factors might affect a site’s search ranking?
Here are the main factors that affect the search ranking of any website:
High-Quality Content.
To rank and increase your website traffic, you should write helpful content. Write content that answers what customers want. This is also one of the search engine ranking factors.
Also, you should make content consistently to show search engines that your website is active. But how will Google know that your content is useful? By measuring the time people spend on your website. If you are offering useful and relevant content the reader will keep reading which means that they will spend more time on your website.
Remember useful and relevant content is the key, it is still important to target keywords but in an effective way and in their context. Don’t just throw random keywords and wait for your website to shine because it won’t.Â
Here’s how to make content that attracts the reader and answers his needs:
- Â Â Create long content.
There was a study to see the average word count on the ranking webpages and it found that the average is 1890 words. Seems a lot right?
You are right; in order to write useful content that answers people’s needs and concerns, it must be long. This will also be beneficial to you; as you can target many keywords in your article.
- Â Â Try different types of content.
Another great way that will help you is to make different types of content, see what people are searching for, and write about it. This will affect website traffic greatly.
You could also make videos because people prefer to watch a video than read, it is also shareable which will increase the traffic to your website.
- Â Â Repurpose old content.
It is essential to keep your content up to date. For example, you could add more advice or new information that wasn’t there at the time. That is how your SEO-friendly content will rank.
Make your website User friendly:
To make people love your website you need to put in mind what they care about and what they don’t. User experience cares about how the website looks and appeals to the user and how they interact with it. Therefore you should fix anything that could cause disturbance to the user and affect the website traffic.
A good user experience design makes it easy for the user to engage and interact with the website, and to easily find what they are looking for. Which in turn affects how Google and search engines see your website. The higher number of people navigating your website the higher ranking you get.
Search engines use user engagement metrics to rank websites, so enhancing the UX of your website will surely enhance your ranking. Because search engines focus on providing people with what is relevant and helpful to them. Making customers happy makes google happy.
What affects website speed?
What people care about is having the information they want fast and easy. So here is what you should do:
- Â Â Increase the speed of your website:
When you open a site, you want it to load fast, not to wait for a long time until you see what the site offers. Or you will simply leave, why would I stay on a slow website if I have other dozens of web pages offering the same thing? So having a fast website is one of the SEO keys to ranking.
How do you make your website fast? Use images of small size, because large images take a lot of time to load.
- Â Â Keep your website easy to deal with:
Don’t make a complicated site that when people open get confused and don’t understand what to do. They need a simple website that offers them the information they need without having to look all over the place for it.
- Â Â Limit ads.
Let’s face it ads are annoying, when you open a website and you find many ads that pop up in your face you will get angry and leave. Ads shouldn’t take more than 30 percent of the vertical spaces on your website.
When you open from the mobile ads will be really difficult to close them so they need to be limited or else you will lose your rank on search engines.
Mobile SEO optimization:
This is a very important factor, as Google announced the following:
“The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.”
Most people use their mobiles nowadays no one searches from desktops anymore. And Google announced that over the past years, most of the searches were from mobiles. Optimizing for Mobiles will affect website traffic positively.
So how to have a mobile-friendly SEO? Take Google’s mobile-friendly test. Just take a copy of your website URL and paste it, then wait for a second and you will have your result. If your website didn’t succeed Google will tell you the problem.
Links:
To rank, your page must have links, and by saying that we don’t mean that you go and add as many links as you can. That will harm your website, what we mean is that you add relevant links to the content of your website. Or add some links at the bottom of your page that shows the customers where to go next, or what is the next step that will give answers to their questions.
Link is a major factor that will make your website Rank and affects website traffic so pay attention to them. There was a study made to understand the importance of links in a website and they found that fewer links or no links at all means low ranking on search engines.
But what is the importance of links? Having a link from high-authority sites is like having someone that guarantees that your website is trustworthy. Increasing the number of website links will show search engines that your website is reliable and not a fake website.
You also need backlinks; Backlinks mean to have links to other websites referring to a page or content on your website. Let’s say you mentioned another website on one of your pages, that means that they have a backlink from you, and if another website added your website link to their website, then you have a backlink from them.
Backlinks are also known as inbound links, why? because through backlinks, the traffic of another website is driven to yours. Based on the quality and the number of backlinks you have you will get a higher rank in search engines like Google. But why is that? Having backlinks are like having testimonials that your website is valuable and helps users. And that’s why backlinks are good for SEO.
Okay, now you will say I understand the importance of links, but how do I get them?
Getting kinks is not an easy task, but there are some methods to follow to get backlinks, here they are:
- Â Â Publish an original study or case study: this is an effective way to force people to link to your site.
-   Write testimonials for other companies: make a list of the companies that will be of use to your website and write them a testimonial asking them if they want your website to offer a testimonial for their site. Most probably they will accept and if they don’t send you a link asking them for it in a polite way.
Meta Descriptions and Headlines affect website traffic
Headlines and Meta description is what represents your page in search engine results, it is the first impression that people take about your website. So you need to pay attention to them and write an attractive headline, something that grapes the reader’s interest. Which affects your website traffic positively.
Regarding Meta description, you should hint at what your article provides to the reader.
One important ranking factor is called click-through rate (CTR). What does it mean? It is a comparison between the number of people who clicked the link and how many people saw it in search results.
If the number of people clicking your link is low then your ranking on search engines will drop to the ground.
Headlines and Meta descriptions are the main players here, they are the ones that represent your page and the information it offers.
So make a headline that attracts the reader and at the same time contains your focus keyword and is optimized for SEO.
Here is what you should do:
- Â Â Keep your keyword at the beginning of the headline:
You need to make search engines understand what your content is about and that is how you do so.
- Â Â Make it a headline that will catch the reader’s interest:
However, don’t focus on making a catchy headline and end up making a headline that doesn’t represent your content. Or else people will click it and then leave fast because it doesn’t contain what the heading says it does. When they leave your website fast this will cause your site to fall in ranks.
But the time it takes for your site to load is just one of many metrics that Google analyzes to assess user experience. UX is such an intricate discipline with many aspects that it has its own field of experts.
Keywords and customers’ intent.
In the past people used to stuff keywords that aren’t relevant to their content just to rank higher in search engine results. As more keywords appear in the content more search engines see them as relevant. Because they were the only way of communicating with search engines to show what your content is about. This led to showing irrelevant content to users.
When search engines found out about the misuse of keywords, they updated their algorithms. The new algorithms can see if the content is really relevant to the website content or not. If not then the poor-quality website will not show up on top pages. Â
As you can see, using relevant keywords is highly important for your webpage to rank. Therefore, it’s important to take into account the search intent. Because if your content meets the user’s need it will highly rank in search engines.
How to find the keywords that serve your goals? Through Keywords research. Keyword search is the process of finding keywords that people search for and analyzing them. Then using the data you’ve collected to serve your business goals which are mostly marketing through SEO optimization. keyword search shows you how a specific keyword is popular, its competition, and its ranking difficulty.
Through Keyword research you can find the best keywords to target and provide users with what they need. When you understand the user’s intent you can build a whole strategy to give them what they need and enhance your marketing strategy.
When someone types a keyword in search engines they are searching for an answer or a solution. Providing them with what they need will lead to higher traffic and better ranking.
Some of the benefits of using keywords include:
- Â Â Â Keywords show you what customers need. So that you provide them with the answer or service that meets their needs and expectations. So, think of it as a clue that shows you the right path to take.
- Â Â Â get better chances to Rank higher in search engines. As they tell search engines what your content is about, and how it can help customers.
- Â Â Â shows search engines how your website answers what users need and search for.
- Â Â Â keywords help your content appear to the right people.
- Â Â Â Get higher traffic to your website.
- Â Â Â Increase your conversion rate and revenue.
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How can I increase my website traffic flow?
In the above section, we talked about the major factors that affect website traffic. Enhancing and taking care of these factors will increase your website traffic in no time. The factors include:
- Â Â Â Providing people with high-quality content.
- Â Â Â Make your website user-friendly.
- Â Â Â Optimize the website for Mobiles.
- Â Â Â Use keywords.
- Â Â Â Use better headlines and meta descriptions.
- Â Â Â Links.
What is good traffic for a website?
It is hard to give a number to answer that question. However, to know if your website is doing great or not you could look at the bounce rate of your site and compare it with your competitors. What is a bounce rate? According to Google, it’s defined as “the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.”
To enhance your website traffic, you should reduce the loading time of your website to less than 3 seconds. Otherwise, people will get bored and leave.
That’s it for today’s article, if you need any help or if you have any questions visit our website S&M solutions.
