How to generate traffic on your website with a company blog?
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Are you running an online store or other online business, and you want to increase the traffic on your website? Here’s where the company blog comes in to save the day. It’s one of the cheapest yet most effective ways to generate organic traffic when it comes to e-commerce. Read on and learn how to increase it with the help of published content.
In this article, you’ll find out:
- Why monitoring traffic on your website is the right thing to do, and what specific data can be discovered with competitor analysis
- How to generate more traffic to your website by utilizing a company blog
- How more traffic influences the ranking and visibility of your website on Google
Website traffic — where does it come from?
Website traffic is one of the most important KPIs when it comes to content marketing activities. In simple terms, it’s the number of unique users that visit your website. They often find it through search engines, by clicking on both free and paid search results.
The former is usually referred to as organic searches. In order to appear there, we need to take care of the quality of the published content as well as its positioning. The latter typically occurs in the form of an ad and is frequently skipped by users or even blocked by browser extensions.
The source of the website traffic doesn’t necessarily have to be the browser. The user may also go to your website directly by typing in its address or by clicking on the already saved bookmark. Free entries may also come from newsletters. However, it’s worth noting that this kind of traffic is intentional — it applies only to users that are already familiar with your brand.
Traffic on the website may also stem from the fact that a specific user clicked on a link that links to your website. To fully utilize the potential of external links, it’s worth dedicating some effort to link-building activities. This is what we call referral traffic.
What’s interesting is that social media traffic is considered to be a separate category.
Not all traffic is the same
It’s worth considering the fact that not all traffic is equally valuable. Visiting a website doesn’t have and usually doesn’t end in conversion, i.e., a purchase, newsletter signing, or leaving a phone number.
To reach your business goals, which oftentimes are increased sales, we need to look past the number of visitors and focus on the average visit time, number of viewed subpages, and finally, the amount of income.
The cost of traffic acquisition is yet another important factor. It’s perfect when it’s low and the conversion probability is high. To increase valuable traffic, you need to measure and analyze it first.
How to measure your company’s website traffic?
To establish which activities are bringing good results and which ones require more work, we have to focus on the website traffic analysis. You may use a wide range of different tools to do so, but the most significant one, without a doubt, is Google Analytics. And of course, there’s a reason for that. Even though the tool may seem complicated, it offers a plethora of possibilities.
By analyzing the traffic coming from various sources, we can get an idea of how many new and recurring visitors there are on our website. What’s more, we get to know how the bounce rate changes along with session length and the user’s behavior, which means their every interaction. By using Google Analytics, we can filter the results by the exact time frame, device, or even region. The possibilities are almost endless.
To check the organic traffic on your brand’s website, we may also use the Google Search Console. After typing in the URL, we will see the number of clicks along with the click-through rate (CTR) that shows if the content resonates with users.
How to measure traffic on the competitor’s website
Millions of people are using Google’s browser every day. To attract new users that are interested in products or services offered by the brand, we need to be more efficient than the rest of the countless competitors in the industry. In order to know what we need to fix, it would be a good idea to track the activities of the rest of the “players”.
So how do we check the traffic on your competitor’s website that fights for the same kind of users? To estimate the statistics, we can use a universal tool, which is Semrush or Semstorm (its Polish counterpart). A downside to both is the fact that they aren’t free tools in their entirety. Only a fraction of both is available for free.
To analyze traffic on a website that doesn’t belong to us, we can also use Ahrefs. By paying for access, we can also get support on building the domain visibility.
Tracking the Google visibility of your competitors can also be a good idea. What we mean is the number of keywords for which the given website ranks highly during a certain period of time. Tracking data in Senuto and flexible reactions can help us take the lead when it comes to website traffic.
How to increase website traffic with the help of a blog?
When we think about acquiring new users and generating numerous entries, we often imagine well-described products and services. Huge potential also lies within company-related or specific industry content, i.e., guides, comparisons, news, or expert materials.
Valuable information is worth sharing with your potential customers on your blog. Each publication will have a higher chance of reaching a wider audience.
According to HubSpot, marketers who prioritize blog content have a 13 times higher chance of return on investment than those who don’t pay attention to it.
So, how do you increase traffic just by having a blog? Let’s find out together.
Publishing valuable content based on keywords
Behind each Google inquiry, there’s an intention, and we have to remember that when creating content for the blog. Users, who happen to be on the other side of the screen, may be looking for a solution to their problem, or they may already have decided on buying the product. Different articles meet their needs, that’s for sure.
Competitor analysis and keyword research will definitely help us find keywords with high search volume and topics to write about. Writing a piece of quality content to rank for the most popular keywords may not always be a good idea. If our brand’s position isn’t strong enough, it’s worth focusing on a less popular subject and facing less competition for ranking high in the browser.
If we don’t know what to write about on our blog, we can always use the Google Trends tool. It allows us to find out what things are trending at the moment.
Content on different stages of the sales funnel
To gain the attention of a potential customer, it’s worth touching on a general subject to present ourselves as an expert in the industry. It’s not the time for direct advertising yet. To get someone’s interest who’s already aware of the issue or your brand, you can increase the traffic on the website by publishing a compelling article, infographic, or ranking. By doing so, you will also demonstrate the benefits of your offer.
In the next stage of the sales funnel, a key role will be played by user reviews and other indicators that will assure the user that it’s worth investing in the specific product or service. They may be presented in the form of captivating video material or a case study. To incite the need for it, we may also use different promotional offers.
The last stage of the sales funnel is equally important as the previous ones. When a user becomes a client, we need to maintain that relationship. His or her loyalty will result in more purchases and new potential customers who, for example, read a good review. Publishing high-quality tutorials and expert materials will show that you constantly evolve and work on the offer. The best type of content at this stage would be a post-sales report, FAQ, or webinar presenting the advantages of using the product or service.
Thought-through linking
Readable and clean internal links are convenient for the user. If he finds what he’s been looking for, and he finds it easily, there’s a chance that his contentment will result in a purchase. He’s most likely to visit more subpages whenever he visits our website in the future.
When talking about a specific subject on a blog, we should link to different articles and subpages related to products and services wherever we can. If we manage to include them naturally, they won’t be perceived as an ad, but rather a solution to the issue.
A well-designed and intuitive website map is also beneficial from an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) point of view — it allows for longer sessions and lowers the bounce rate. Consistent internal linking, responsible for proper navigation on the website, will also make the crawlers’ work easier. Thanks to it, they will promote blog posts more willingly, which will result in driving traffic even more.
Recycling of the old content
Old publications may still be popular among users and still generate views. To be useful, however, they need to be updated. That’s why it’s worth to regularly update the content on your website. By doing so, you will make sure that the content remains valuable, and that competition won’t get that traffic.
So, how to make your old content better? Sometimes, all that you have to do is update the information, add headings with keywords, and fill the text with eye-catching images. Additionally, if we use the alt attributes, we will get more relevant traffic to the website. Another beneficial thing would be to spice up the meta description and meta title according to the SEO best practices.
Blog promotion
To make the blog a vital component of traffic acquisition on your website, it must be read. It’s equally important to create content and promote it afterward.
If we run a newsletter, except for products, we should also include bits of helpful knowledge. A link to a comprehensive blog post may also be included on social media platforms, like Facebook’s fan page or Instagram’s story. Supporting the blog promotion via various channels may not only generate more traffic but also maintain the brand-client relationship. We could even get in touch with other websites from our industry and ask if we could write a guest post that would drive traffic to our page.
There are also paid ways to promote your website, like Google Ads, however, it’s an entirely different story.
Are you wondering how much your company blog may increase the traffic on your website? Get inspired by our clients’ stories by reading the case studies.
Positioning the blog in search results and website traffic
Website traffic is not a direct ranking factor. It means that the number of visitors to our website doesn’t directly affect the ranking of its subpages in the browser. However, these two do correlate.
Slight traffic and a high bounce rate, especially in the e-commerce industry, negatively impact the website ranking. If only a small percentage of users gets to see its contents, in time, it gets harder to find it among a vast sea of search results.
Plummeting traffic — how can a blog help?
Domain positioning is more than just making it rank higher and higher. It also means its constant development. By running a blog, we naturally increase the number of ways in which a website can attract more visitors through a browser. At the same time, we generate more website traffic.
It’s not a novelty that algorithms prefer newer content. That’s why it’s important to constantly widen the amount of information and subpages that can be indexed by the crawlers.
With constant traffic in mind, we should place our bets on topics that aren’t seasonal. There’s a term that applies to every industry, and it’s “evergreen content”. What it essentially means is a piece of content that, no matter the season or time of the year, stays equally relevant and generates the most traffic.
It’s worth spending more time and budget on crafting such content. If it manages to rank high in Google, it won’t lose its position quickly and will provide us with valuable traffic.
Effective traffic acquisition strategy through content marketing
Increasing website traffic is just one of the indicators that prove the brand’s success. The key value lies in reaching the target audience, i.e., the group of people who have the highest chance of becoming loyal customers.
How to incite interest in these users? Well, we should get to know them first, find out their needs, desires, and worries, and then, on the basis of what we’ve learned, prepare a content marketing strategy. Once we’re done with creating personas, we’ll know what topics we should write about, what tone of voice to use, and which communication channels would work best.
Help with traffic acquisition
Rising competition in search results makes it harder to grasp the user’s attention and is quite a challenge in itself. In this case, it’s worth having a specialist by your side. They may provide training on how to create engaging and well-optimized content, or they may manage a complex project that allows you to gain more clients.
To an experienced agency — such as Elephate — you can entrust more than just running a company blog. The effects of on-page activities may be supported by external publications in media and digital PR campaigns, that increase brand awareness and its position in the industry. The appearance in other media also helps. Instead of visiting a competition, a user may end up on your website.