5 Ways To Establish Online Traffic Rates

How to establish online traffic rates for your website

According to a list of internet statistics and facts, there will be more online traffic by 2017 than all previous internet years combined!

It’s no secret that the online world is growing rapidly. By establishing solid online traffic rates your business will experience great growth, too.

There are many ways to help boost your online traffic rates. From having people easily find your website in a search to actually getting them to stay on your website for more than two seconds, having high traffic rates can benefit both your Google ranking and the amount of business you bring in.

In this blog post we’re going to take a look at the different ways to increase your website’s traffic. This is a topic that many people have questions about and we’re going to give you the answers.

1. Mobile-friendly website

Google, the most popular site on the internet, confirmed earlier this year that over half of its total searches were done on a mobile device. With this statistic alone it should be a no-brainer that your website must be mobile-friendly.

A lot of the time a business’ website will differ slightly from their desktop website. This is mainly because of the need to reduce the amount of information available on their mobile page.

This isn’t to suggest that you need to delete a bunch of your content but rather shorten it and really highlight the most important information you want consumers to see. It’s because mobile pages are obviously on a smaller screen than a desktop and you’ll have to do some design work to ensure everything looks great.

It’s also important for your site’s speed, or the time it takes to load on a consumer’s device, which we will get into a bit later.

A great tool to check if your website is mobile-friendly is Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

2. Low bounce rate

Owning a low bounce rate is a fantastic way to measure your online traffic rates.

A bounce rate, defined by Google, is the percentage of single-page sessions of a visitor’s experience. Essentially this is whether or not a person visited another page of your site after landing on the entrance page.

A high bounce rate occurs when people are coming to your website and leaving without clicking on another link or page. A low bounce rate indicates that people are doing the opposite and browsing your site. A low bounce rate is what you want because it means people are interested in the information on your website and increases the chances of them contacting or buying from you.

There are a few reasons why people may have high bounce rates. Single-page websites, poor design and slow load times are some of the reasons why people may opt to leave your website without clicking on anything else.

Ensuring you have quality, engaging content on your site combined with an easy navigation and clean design are some ways that can help improve your bounce rate.

3. Fast site speed

Google uses site speed as a ranking factor but that shouldn’t be the only reason your site has a fast load time. There is perhaps nothing more frustrating for a consumer than a webpage that takes forever to load.

How fast should your website load time be? Google says that 2 seconds is the benchmark for e-commerce website acceptability, however they aim for a load time of under half of one second. The average time that a website takes to load is around 5 seconds which indicates that many websites still aren’t properly optimized for site speed.

Having a website that loads quickly on both desktop and mobile is a crucial factor in increasing online traffic rates.

A great tool to see how fast your website load time is is Pingdom’s Website Speed Test.

4. Great content

We touched on this when we previously talked about bounce rates, but having great, quality content is another way to establish online traffic rates. Having content that provides value to a reader will entice them to look at other parts of your site and share your link with others.

Regularly creating fresh content and posting it to a blog on your site is another way to get readers to keep coming back. Relevant and new content that a reader sees as useful to them will work wonders for your online traffic rates.

When creating content, ask yourself if your ideal customer will find the information useful. Will they find value in it? Is it so valuable to them that they’ll want to share it on their social media accounts to their friends and followers?

Now, great content doesn’t necessarily mean having a 1000-word blog post going on and on about something. In fact, a 500-word post with to-the-point, useful content is much more powerful than a post that has over 1000 words but doesn’t really provide much value.

The better the content on your website the better your traffic will be.

5. Be SEO-friendly

You’ve got a great website design with killer content, but what good is it if people can’t find it?

Making your site SEO-friendly for both on-page and off-page optimization will help direct people to your website that are looking for your product or service. Properly optimizing your page for things like keywords, meta tags, content and URL’s are on-site ways to optimize your site. On the other hand, building quality links and guest blogging are forms of off-site optimization.

If you want to know how to tell if you can outrank your competition on Google, check out this post.

Generating quality backlinks is a very powerful off-site way to boost your site’s traffic rates and the above tips can help in achieving this. If you’re an expert in your field don’t be afraid to contact popular blogs or even podcasts and see if you can appear as a guest. This will help boost your credibility, exposure and even generate a link to your site.

Having your website properly optimized so people can find you when they’re looking for your product or service will have a positive impact on your site’s traffic. This is especially true when it comes to local searches when people who have the greatest intent to purchase are specifically looking for what you have to offer.

You can learn how to setup and optimize a Google My Business page for your business here.

Conclusion

Use these 5 tips if you’re looking to establish online traffic rates and see your website reach new heights in terms of people visiting your page. Each of these steps will help drive your overall traffic numbers in an upward direction.

If you want to have our team review your website and give you a free 30-minute consultation where we show you how to generate more local customers from your website, click here.