The internet is the sole place where we can say “great, more traffic” and actually mean it. If the traffic to your website looks like any big city interstate — your business is likely booming. Born just 38 years ago, the internet has transformed the world. It has shaped entirely new forms of interaction, what purchasing decisions we make, and how modern businesses thrive.

Developing a website effective in drawing in new clientele is vital to maintaining your business and building your brand. Driving up website traffic has become a massive industry with some niche companies focusing entirely on the expansion of website traffic. Despite the specialists, taking the first steps into improving your website’s traffic and maintaining a steady stream of users is often free and somewhat simple after taking the initial dive.

We admit the internet is intimidating, though it remains a democratic (certainly unruly) place allowing individuals and businesses without much background knowledge on web coding and design itself to build their own successful website traffic strategies.

Where Users Come From

As previously mentioned, search engines power a user’s path to your website. Search engines like Google collect data and search habits of individual users whether we realize it or not. Data profiles include users’ geographical location, age, gender, and more. Most of us have a Google account and even if we do not, search engines recognize a device’s unique IP address and develop a profile on each user.

The collection of this data helps search engines direct a user back towards that item they’ve had in their cart for two months but haven’t purchased. Outside of referrals from friends and family or an email newsletter, organic visitors may be in need of the service or product you offer and their search habits and user profile determine how search engines sort their results.

The Importance of Analytics 

One great option for an analytics system is Google Analytics, which displays the demographics of your website’s visitors and helps you track visitors in real time and over time. Tracking your website analytics via Google Analytics is one of the easiest steps you can take to evaluate the users on your site and narrow down your target demographic.

Knowing your audience is key. For example, if you sell a specific type of top-shelf countertop, your market likely includes middle-upper class heads of households in up-and-coming cities where renovations are skyrocketing. In developing your site with target demographics in mind, the work completed by the search engines falls into place by the parameters and targeting you have completed within your site.

Methods of Boosting Traffic

Remember those unappealing bacon-flavored lozenges we mentioned earlier and how search engines dissect search terms to filter results?

This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play – its ultimate aim is to increase the quality and quantity of visitors to your website. In the technological world, where a website helps drive traffic directly to your business, SEO is first about knowing your audience in order to correctly position your business centered in their online view.

With the majority of online traffic driven by search engines (and how they rank you and your competitors), SEO is a key solution to drive up your online traffic. SEO can include keywords on your website pages like “bacon” and “lozenge” and convincing material or content on why the user might want to indulge in a bacon-flavored mint. Clear-cut titles on your website’s pages are also helpful in boosting your website towards the top of search results.

Another simple step in boosting website traffic is optimizing website page speed or load time. With the saturation of information consumed by web users every day, attention spans are increasingly short. Page speed is an important measure search engines take into account when filtering results. Optimizing page speed includes a “less is more” mentality when it comes to content. By this, we mean selective imagery on your site, all of which should be optimized to the smallest possible file size. Prioritizing important content (especially when it comes to photos and videos) is key in decreasing your website’s load times.

Like most corporations, Google is not in the business of allowing others to master their search engine strategies. SEO, therefore, is ever-changing.

However, all the strategies we have mentioned, including tactics of guerrilla marketing, positioning keywords, content relevant to the product you sell, optimizing website loading times, and tracking analytics are all easy steps whose rules are unchanged over time by search engines. These steps ultimately drive traffic towards your site.

So, take a deep dive into the world wide web, expand your online presence and visitors to your website all while trusting the remarkable technology the internet offers (mostly for free) to help boost your website traffic and in turn — your business.

written by

Francisco “Kiko” Ramirez-Mercado

Founder / Website Guru

Avid outdoorsman, project starter (and finisher) and the guy you call if something breaks. Always entranced by the power of coding languages, technology and graphic design.