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“Build your marketing towers” was a phrase that stuck with me from a great presentation by SEO industry leader Dixon Jones. Marketing towers are the digital marketing methods that serve as launch pads for your communication.
They represent the strength of your brand, the number of followers on social media, the number of backlinks on the web, the content on your website, and the number of email addresses in your newsletter database.
It reminded me of Istanbul, with its many towers and the calls for prayers sounding across the city at set times throughout the day. I believe the best way to generate more website traffic is by growing the size and reach of those towers and optimizing the frequency with which you communicate from them.
To understand website traffic, let’s look at the seven main inroads to your site, then another three marginal types to complete the palette of traffic types.
One of the best types of traffic is click-throughs on links in content on other websites. These can come from a PR campaign you staged, or they can come from people who spontaneously link to your website because they like, value, and appreciate what they see. The stronger your brand, the more spontaneous linking will occur. This traffic is valuable because the user behind the click is motivated when they arrive on your site.
Your business profiles will generate some traffic. They’re important because they convey your company information in several places outside your website. Your business profile on Google My Business and Bing Places for Business is essential for local SEO.
It’s worthwhile to build a business profile on Facebook and other social networks too because they will help you reach more people. Business profiles are important, but they’re not major traffic drivers to your website.
Before the internet, people relied on this giant yellow directory full of company names, addresses, and telephone numbers called the Yellow Pages. In the early internet years, Yahoo was an online directory referenced by a majority of users to find sites and companies. Whereas search engines have taken over searches of all kinds, many directories still exist, and some still drive traffic to sites.
If your company or site is in a reputable directory, its link may even be replicated in other sites. Today, people mostly submit sites to directories to create links which in turn help them rank in search engines, but they can also be a traffic source in their own right.
Search engines are one of the biggest sources of traffic for sites. People sometimes think you have to master SEO to get that traffic, but in 99% of cases, the search engines will identify, crawl, and index your site with no effort on your side.
Many years ago, you had to submit your site to search engines to be indexed, but today those search engines crawl the entire internet and detect your site as soon as you create a link to it.
What SEO (search engine optimization) does, as the word says, is optimize that traffic to get as much traffic as possible based on the content you have on your site. That’s why you need robust SEO tools to make decisions on the basis of meaningful insight from those tools.
Social media traffic can be another significant source of visitors. But that will only happen with an active, well-engineered social media posting plan that actively drives traffic from your social media profiles to your website. A well-executed social media presence can accomplish many of the things your website can, so you may get the best of both worlds by getting traffic to both your website and to your social media profile.
Traffic from emails can also be an important source of traffic. Perhaps your site is mentioned in your email footer and people click on the link, or maybe you send a newsletter to a list of subscribers who have consented to receiving information from you. Always include a link with a call-to-action in your emails -- it will often drive users to your website.
The last major source of traffic on our list is advertising. It can appear as sponsorship that drives traffic via links that look like content links, or it can appear as banners on social media or content sites users click on. It can also be search advertising or affiliates driving traffic to your website.
In this case, you want to monitor the traffic from both sides of the click: the reporting for your advertising on one hand, and your site’s website traffic report on the other. Advertising can be an important traffic driver. The only limit is your budget.
Website traffic can be counted from two sides: From the site where a user clicked on a link to go to your website, and from your analytics showing the visitors who actually arrived on your website.
It can also be estimated by monitoring the entire web and evaluating your traffic sources. Most of the time, you only have access to data on your own site, allowing you to use web analytics or log analyzers.
Let’s look at the full range of sources for checking traffic.
The method most commonly used to measure website traffic is a tag-based web analytics tool. One of the most popular tools is Google Analytics because it’s free, but it’s far from the only tool in the space. The Russian search engine, Yandex, provides a similar free tool called Analytika, and a number of providers offer open-source tools or paid SaaS tools to perform web analytics on your site.
Web analytics is based on tags you insert into your pages, whereas log analyzers look at the activity on the web server that hosts your pages. Log analyzers were the first generation of tools used for site analysis. They tend to be slower and less reliable than tag-based solutions because of caching, a process by which a page can be shown without creating a lengthy server request.
SEOs use them to track crawler activity on a website that would be invisible to a tag-based analytics solution. Web hosting packages often include them for free.
When you pay for advertising, you get detailed reporting on all the data from your campaign. Some advertising is CPM-based, where you pay for the number of views of your banner or content. Others are CPC-based, meaning you pay for each click on your ad. For the latter, the advertising platform will report on the number of clicks that were sent to your website.
This is a great tool for measuring traffic to your website. Be sure, however, to double-check the traffic you can measure on your own site with web analytics. If the gap between the two is too big, stop your advertising or claim some money back, with proof in hand.
Some external tools such as Alexa and SimilarWeb let you estimate your site’s traffic from the outside by analyzing your website ranking in search engines, advertising campaigns, and social media activity. The SEO tool Ahrefs does this on the basis of backlinks and keyword ranking, providing detailed traffic estimates even for smaller sites.
Most website owners are thirsty for traffic to their website and feel they have too little. That’s why you need marketing to grow that traffic. Let’s look at 23 proven ways you can increase your traffic.
The higher these towers, the more impact your communication initiatives will have, and the more traffic you will generate to your website. Pay particular attention to these towers:
On the internet, it’s almost as if your domain name URL were your brand. The advantage of a URL is that it can be clickable in many cases. Needless to say, your URL should be highly visible in any communication material you create.
Here are some places you can put your URL:
You’ve built your marketing towers, you’ve made sure your site is findable, now you need to call out to people from those towers and invite them inside. You do this differently with each tower, but the message and frequency of your callouts could be the same across the whole range of towers.
Don’t do everything at once. You’ll get better results by concentrating on a few of the suggestions above, pushing them as far as you can. These aids will help.
We’re all impatient to increase our website traffic, and with all the possibilities available to us via SEO, social media, and email, it’s easy to get carried away. The key to building significant volumes of website traffic is to patiently build your towers one by one to reach a higher starting point for each of your call-outs.
Creating new content and messaging on a scheduled, recurring basis, systematically monitoring what you do, optimizing your system, and learning from best practices will give you an additional edge to continuously improve your traffic.
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