Traffic to your website
Your website can be beautiful, but the most important thing is to attract visitors! Ultimately, the idea is to attract customers to your product or service and, of course, you have to do something to increase the number of visitors to your website. There are an awful lot of different sources of traffic to your website. So there isn’t just one right or effective way either. It is (as so often in online marketing) about the right mix of different things. Want to know what traffic sources are out there and then how to measure your own website traffic? Then read this blog!
Different types of traffic
Direct traffic
Direct traffic is all traffic that arrives at your website because the URL of your website is typed directly into the browser. So these are people who know the URL of your website by heart or have set it as a bookmark, for example.
Organic search traffic
The first source of traffic comes from google (or other search engines). These are people who either targeted (by using your name or your company name, for example) or unknowingly (by using another related search term) find your website in Google. Improving this is called search engine optimization (SEO)
Social media
Classified as social is all traffic coming to your website from social media. This is quite broad and of course can be done in many different ways: for example, through a link in a post or in your ads campaign. Or someone clicks through your social media profile or a link in your stories, et cetera.
Referral
Referral is all the traffic that have been referred to your website from another website. For example, if your website is linked on another website, or in a blog.
These are logically all the people who clicked to your website from an email. This could be an e-mail from you yourself, such as a newsletter, or a newsletter from someone else in which your website is linked.
How to attract traffic to your website
SEO
Perhaps many of your customers can’t find your website properly yet because you don’t come up in the search terms they use. Or because you don’t have information on your website about the problems they are facing. You can use SEO (Search Engine Optimizing) to optimize traffic to your website from Google. This will not happen overnight, but with a long-term approach page by page. If you want to know more about increasing your traffic with the use of SEO, read this blog.
Join Facebook groups where your ideal target audience is. Answer questions that are within your expertise and share your knowledge, ask some questions yourself, provide insights from your work, and be relevant so that people want to get to know you. You can also create a Facebook group with your own community, but make sure this group is open to everyone so your community can grow. In this group you can share content from your website, such as blogs and your daily work.
Youtube
Video is on the rise and many people watch videos on Youtube. You can use this platform to share your knowledge in tutorials, vlogs and knowledge videos. You can apply SEO here, too, by making sure you optimize the video with tags, an easily findable title and by adding the right keywords in the description.
And don’t forget to add links to your website, blog posts, other YouTube videos and to your social media channels.
Guest on other channels
If you have just started your online presence and don’t have an audience yet or if you want to grow your audience, it may help to form a partnership. For example, by writing a guest blog or, for example, a guest webinar. You can share your knowledge and attract new visitors and potential customers. You can also offer the same to others on your blog. Thus, they can provide new traffic.
How can you measure that?
To know through which channels your customers come to your website, you obviously need to be able to measure it. This can be done through Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a service provided by Google to collect statistics from a website and display them in detail. The goal is to give you, the site administrator, a clear picture of visitor flows, traffic sources and page views, among other things. So very useful to look into this. If you want to know more about this, check out one of our other blogs on Google Analytics.
UTM links
If you really want to properly measure how many people come to your website (and maybe even purchase) after a certain marketing action, you can use the so-called UTM links. A UTM is a piece of code that gets attached to your link, allowing Google Analytics to know where it came from. This can be quite interesting if you want to run different campaigns, for example, or if you specifically want to know if your social traffic is coming from Facebook, Instagram or ads.
