Imagine you’re a business owner who has this amazing website all set up. It carries all the benchmarks of a successful e-commerce website including your contact information, details regarding your products and services, feedback forms and so many more.
It’s so exciting and vibrant, and you are all pumped up about it. However, traffic is slow. No one seems to be visiting your website and you are left wondering why.
In reality, you may have the best e-commerce website there is but that doesn’t suffice. You must learn how to drive traffic to your website.
If the shoes fit, we urge you to continue reading as we explore how to get traffic to your website with the help of Google.
What is Driving Traffic Important for Your Website?
As a business owner, it is crucial that you know how to promote your website on Google. The reason being, the majority of your customers will be online.
In this modernised era, online marketing is deemed the most effective marketing strategy. The trust is that a website establishes the basis of your company’s online presence, this is especially true if you’re running an e-commerce business.
Driving a high amount of traffic to your website is important for two primary reasons:
a. Increased Conversion Rate
Your website is the public’s one stop shop for all the information they seek about your business. It also acts as a ‘base camp’ for all your online marketing efforts.
The term ‘traffic’ is defined as visitors to your website.
The higher the number of visitors, the higher the number of people will be converted into customers.
We refer to this as ‘conversion’ whereby web traffic translates into sales.
Generating a high conversion rate means you’re also generating quality traffic.
Quality traffic is thus defined as visitors who are likely interested in your products or services, and ultimately purchasing them.
b. Increased Brand Awareness
Whether you realise it or not, more website visitors will positively impact the general public awareness of your company, products and services.
These visitors may not need your products or services right now, but they will be able to spread the word to the people around them, including their friends and family, thereby increasing your influence and reach.
What are the Types of Website Traffic?
Before we delve into the “how to promote your website on Google”, we must first understand where relevant traffic comes from.
There are two main sources of traffic for websites: free or organic website traffic, and paid traffic.
Free/ Organic Traffic
Free traffic refers to website viewers who reach your website through unpaid methods such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social media links.
Free or otherwise known as organic traffic, attracts visitors naturally and doesn’t employ a search engine’s targeting algorithm.
Social media links are straight forward. You can post internal links to various parts of your website to your social media content.
Audiences who find your content intriguing will click those links to read or find out more about a specific topic so you can start driving ‘real free traffic to my website’.
The link to your website should also be displayed on all your social media profiles, so that users have a place to go to find out all the information they need to know.
Aside from that, optimise your website with SEO keywords—keywords that are related to your products or services.
When you’ve done your SEO keyword research and other website back-end optimisation properly, you stand a chance to prominently rank your website in search engine results.
In layman’s terms, SEO can make your website appear higher in Google SERPs. The more prominent your website is, the higher the chances of users clicking on your website’s link.
Paid Traffic
Paid Traffic involves generating site traffic from monetary methods such as Pay Per Click ads.
These ads will help push your website to the top when anyone searches for any related keywords.
On Google for example, you have to prepay an amount of money to have a PPC ad.
Every click your link receives will be deducted from the initial amount. When you run out of prepaid clicks, your ad expires.
Other than paying for traffic on Google, you can also choose to pay for ads to promote your site on social media.
Paid traffic usually delivers a higher conversion rate when it comes to visitors. This is because it’s specifically targeted at demographics with higher prospects of converting into customers.
What is Quality Traffic and How to Drive Them to Your Website?
Now that we’ve talked about free versus paid traffic. The thing you need to realise is that even if you successfully increase these two types of traffic to their maximum levels, they won’t necessarily translate to sales.
In short, you need quality traffic with high conversion rates and engagement rates.
Simply because it’s useless having an increased website traffic with a majority of visitors who show little to no interest and intention of buying your products or obtaining your services.
Here is a low down of how you can promote your website on Google by generating quality website traffic:
1. Mastering Social Media to Drive Website Traffic
Social media is currently the number one driver of your website traffic. Social media is a brilliant place to capture the user’s attention by demonstrating expertise, highlighting your brand value, and interacting with your audience.
If you’ve been wondering as to how to promote your website on Google for free—do it the organic way. Instead of spamming your products on services on social media platforms, start creating and sharing relevant content.
Be in the shoes of your audience and think about what interests them, and link posts to your website. With that, your audience will have a reason to visit your website and browse through what you’re selling. And that’s on how to drive traffic to your website using social media.
2. Optimise Your Website
Being one of the most powerful marketing tools to improve a website’s organic visibility on Google SERPs, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) helps you obtain natural traffic and higher search engine ranking.
There are over 200 ranking factors on Google, you may focus on the ones listed below that work around your budget.
- Keyword Research and Targeting: Research and target the right keywords users actively searching for. Say you’re an online women men shoes store, your website should target people who are searching for “men shoes” online. There are various keyword research tools available on the internet you can make use of such as Ahrefs, SemRush and Google Keyword Planner.
- Inserting keywords to your website’s content: Once you have targeted some right keywords, it’s time you put them into use such as your website’s URLS, meta tags and content.
3. Perfect Your Google MY Business Profile
Signing up for a Google MY business profile is essential these days, especially for businesses that rely on local customers. These include businesses with a brick and mortar store who are based in a specific geographical location.
Examples of localised businesses include digital marketing agency, pharmacies, dentists, restaurants, beauty salons, just to name a few,
If this is you, ensure that your Google MY business profile is well-optimised, especially your local SEO. The process includes but is not limited to updating your business’ address, contact number, location pin on Google maps, operating hours.
Providing your business’ address is an effective way of increasing organic traffic. Once users search for a term, and your profile appears, they’ll click on your website to find out more.
4. Use Relevant Hashtags
Hashtags are words that are able to link content of the same topic on social media sites such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. These tags can be clicked on all the content on that social media site where the hashtag is displayed.
To do so, use unique hashtags that haven’t been used by anyone else. It has to be catchy and contain your brand name or a reference to it.
Posts with hashtags should also include a link to your website as well, so that you can raise brand awareness and ultimately increase your website traffic.
5. Perform Effective Keyword Research
We can’t stress enough the importance of keywords. Inserting the right keywords into various content on your website will help make it more noticeable on SERPs.
These keywords should be placed in content such as the landing page, meta description, blog articles, title tags, and many more. Mastering the process of identifying the right keywords is crucial to improve your ranking on Google.
There are plenty of SEO keyword tools you can utilise, like Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush and Ahrefs, three of which are the top tools in use today.
Though there are other free tools available on the internet, they usually come with limitations when it comes to their functionality and comprehensiveness.
If you don’t want to splurge on a pay-per-month keyword research tool, seeking help from a professional SEO agency like Marketing Signal Lab could do the job for you.
6. Earn Backlinks Through Partnerships
Another effective way to increase your website’s visibility is by featuring it on someone else’s website. To do this, you need to form a partnership with another brand or company.
Essentially, you’ll come up with a content that includes a link to their website, then, they’ll feature your website on their content. These links to your site from other websites are called backlinks.
The more partnerships you form within the industry—partnerships with relevant businesses or individuals whom you share the same target market with—, the more backlinks you’re likely to generate and the more qualified your traffic will be.
7. Consider Email Marketing
Email marketing may appear simple and archaic, it can actually help drive traffic to your website significantly.
The process involves you mass sending emails to a sizable number of addresses, many of whom have purchased or dealt with your brand before. Email marketing is therefore useful for repeating customers, especially when you have promotions going on or launching a new product.
8. Get Listed on Listing Websites
Online directories or listing websites are platforms of the internet that list out businesses in a particular geographical area. Foursquare and Yelp are two examples of such sites.
If your business has yet to be featured on these sites, it’d be helpful to register yourself on them. Remember to include a link to the homepage of your website as a guide for prospective customers.
Being listed on as many online directories as possible will also mean that you’re being seen by many people, who are likely to click on your link and interact with your content.
9. Get a Guest to Post About You
Guest posts can be done either by a company or an influencer. The process involves an external party producing content on your site, and then shares it to their circle of influence.
Say you’re an air purifier brand, you can request a lifestyle influencer with more than 5k followers to write a blog post on your site. The influencer will then share the blog post on their website or social media platform, prompting their followers to click on it and land on your site.
As an exchange, you’ll be able to reach a wider audience through that guest post.
10. Keep Your Content Up to Date
Fresh content should be posted on your site on a timely basis, and you should renew outdated website designs that are slowly hindering user experience. Similar to interior designs, website designs have trends that improve user experience.
To keep your website looking up to date, allocate a budget for a fresh, new overhaul every three to four years.
There are certain aspects of your website that need to be updated every few days, this includes your blog and promotions sections. New content also means that you have more relevant information to share on your social media platforms or partner sites in order to promote your website.
11. Prioritise User Experience (UX)
It’s paramount that you optimise your site regularly to ensure that visitors feel welcomed and comfortable while surfing.
Brutalism is a popular theme today for website layouts, featuring minimalist design with wide open spaces on the page, along with subdued colours rather than vibrant ones.
That aside, ensure that your website is intuitive enough to use, which means that all the necessary, important links are obvious and within range of vision. Your page loading time should also be reduced as much as possible and there shouldn’t be too many pop-ups.
12. Make Use of Infographics and Visual Content
Nobody likes reading a large wall of text, giving you all the more reason to present information on your website with as little text as possible.
If there’s too much information that needs to be displayed, consider presenting it in the form of an infographic—it’s easy on the eyes, and fun to interact with.
13. Learn About Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one beneficial tool that presents all the data you need to know about your traffic. This data is displayed in the form of graphs.
You can track information about the visitors that land on your website, including the time and day when most of them arrive, their whereabouts, their gender, age and so on, all free of charge.
Paying attention to these data can assist you in implementing effective changes to your website, both at the front end and back end, allowing you to improve engagement rate.
14. Set Up Google Ads
There are various types of Google Ads and you don’t necessarily need to implement all of them. Two of the most widely used Google Ads are search ads and display ads.
If you opt for Search Ads, your business will be displayed at the top of search results whereas for Display Ads, you will show up as side banner or horizontal banners on relevant websites. Both of them are equally effective in driving traffic.
Planning and designing these ads includes figuring out how many ads you should implement per ad group and selecting the types of Google Ads you want to run.
15. Host Promotional Contests and Giveaways
Promotions and giveaways are some of the easiest ways to drive traffic to your site. Let’s be real, who doesn’t love freebies? On top of prizes and giveaways, try to play around with coupons, cashbacks and other incentives that’ll make your customers’ shopping and purchasing experience better.
16. Run Ads on Social Media
Google aside, feel free to post ads on social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Amongst the most versatile platforms to post your ads would be Facebook, whereby you can post all sorts of ads and boost your content. Its algorithm is by far, one the best in bringing your ads to the right demographic. Not only that, it also provides you with more control over the parameters of targeting, which will directly affect how much you’re spending on it.
17. Retargeting Customers
In the world of marketing, retargeting means advertising to audiences who have purchased from you before, or have visited your site before but have since become inactive.
There exists multiple algorithms that can help you go about this, but after all, you still need the help of experts, who are familiar with elements like cookies and Google Ads network to track and retarget those who have previously shown interest in your site.
18. Adopt Influencer Marketing
Influencers are individuals or celebrities who are able to promote your brand to their pool of followers or fans, most of whom have not seen or known about your brand before. Investing in this method allows you to bring in more prospective customers into your website.
How Do You Choose the Best Strategy and Tactic to Boost Your Website Traffic on Google Malaysia?
Attached is the checklist of factors and criterias that’ll help you select the best strategy and tactic aligning with your current requirements and resources.
a) Your Budget
When it comes to deciding how to increase website traffic, think about your budget. Some businesses have no budget whatsoever, in which case they need to opt for organic strategies. Bear in mind that while paid strategies do not necessarily require a high budget, they’ll need you to spend consistently over a period of time in order to see visible results.
b) Your Level of Expertise
Certain strategies like SEO, require a higher technical skill, than, say, influencer marketing. Choosing a less technically complex strategy can still yield effective results, so don’t disregard them.
c) Your Campaign Goals
Setting goals ensures that you’re moving toward the direction you desire. The nature of some strategies are more suited for certain types of goals than others. To exemplify, increasing referral traffic with backlinks can help raise brand awareness within a relevant community and rarely beyond.
Moving Forward
Suppose your website is already up and running, but you don’t know why it’s not performing the way you expect it to, come and talk to us and we’ll help you understand how exactly you can drive traffic to your website in order to reach its full potential! At Marketing Signal Lab, we don’t just help when a client wishes to get more clicks, but rather, we provide full consultation on how you can maintain those website impressions too.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Can I drive traffic to my website without SEO?
Yes. However, SEO is one of the most effective ways to increase your website traffic in such a way that’s effective and consistent. And yes, doing SEO all by yourself can be rather challenging, so let the trained professionals assist you.
2. Can I increase website traffic via marketing without an agency?
It’s possible, but an agency will save you ample time and resources in the long run as it has more technical knowledge and experience compared to say, a freelancer.
3. Can I buy traffic from traffic generators?
There’s no guarantee as to how much this can help increase your website traffic. Plus, there’s a likelihood that you may be penalised by Google. In result, you may find your website untargeted or banned.
4. How can I make money from website traffic?
More traffic means more sales as they’re more visitors to be converted into customers, which can end up creating monetary value for your business.