What website traffic is and how you can improve it
A commonly overlooked and misunderstood aspect of website design and maintenance, website traffic has been the largest portion of internet traffic since the mid-1990’s. With global search engines regularly updating their algorithms, your website is sure to see a fluctuation in visitors both unique and repeated. Understanding the difference between good and “bad” traffic is key to understand what you can do to improve your website’s views.
What is website traffic?
Website traffic is the volume or amount of data sent and received by visitors to a website. If you run a business, understanding how many visits, or sessions, your website is getting will give you a better understanding of how popular or accessible your site is.
Being able to understand and analyse your website’s traffic means that you can find out not only how many visited, but also finer details that can help you better understand your customer base. When monitoring your website’s traffic, you will notice the following information categories:
- How many visitors between dates or for a specific day
- How many times a page is viewed by each visitor – higher numbers can be indicative of how many visitors explore your site.
- Visit duration – how long a user spends on your site on average, typically the more time spent can be indicative of how interested they may be.
- How long a page is viewed on average
- Domain class information contains the IP Addressing information which is required to load web pages and make the content available
- Busy times can show you when it is the ideal time for promotional campaigns and even when to perform maintenance without interrupting customers.
- Which pages are the most popular
- Which pages are first viewed by a visitor and attract the most people, usually this will be your home page, but not always
- Most requested exit pages – This feature can help you find 404 pages, broken links, and even pages with an external link
- Top paths – like in a board game, this feature lets you see the routes visitors take through your website. Some may stay linear and go from home to information to contact, while others may start on a random page and click through as something catches their eyes.
- Referrers – Your website hosting can generally track where your website traffic is coming from and show you which sites are sending visitors your way.
Using analytics services
Analytic services such as Google Analytics can help you evaluate the overall performance of your website. If you don’t have a company monitoring and maintaining your website for you, understanding the key metrics available to evaluate the traffic can be confusing. If you love data however, feel free to learn more about Google Analytics by clicking here or speaking with one of JezNorthWeb’s team members.
Analytic programs can show you how many pages an IP address visited and how long they spent on each page. You can also see what the bounce rate is, this is where someone visits your site but navigate away after viewing only one page. This is a good indicator that your homepage is boring, off-putting, or doesn’t load fast enough for most viewers.
By engaging with your site’s data, you can also see what percentage of your visitors age new verses returning, and with some systems you can also see what percentage of visitors purchased something from your online store if you have an ecommerce option available.
How to improve website traffic
There are a ton of ways to improve your website’s traffic and many companies out there that have built product to help or offer services like JezNorthWeb.
Social media
While social media platforms can be contentious, they are still a good way to increase traffic to your website. No matter which social media platform you choose to use (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, Reddit, or LinkedIn) you will need to learn how to start conversations and get your audience talking, clicking, and sharing. By being active on whatever social media you choose to use, will help to engage your followers by sharing with them high quality content encouraging them to click through to your website.
Video content
If you’re a fan of creating video content, be sure to use platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram and share it with any of the other platforms you use. Video content can be a wonderful way to show potential and current clients the work you are doing and can also be a great way to do an engaging Q&A session.
SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) can be confusing but is an important set of practices which are designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results. Here at JezNorthWeb we want to help maximise your Google ranking for your best conversion through keywords and phrases to attract potential customers, helping them to find and contact you before your competitors. By creating a SEO campaign, you can increase your site’s ranking and attract more visits.
Automated email marketing
Another option is to use automated email marketing software to send your contacts and clients discounts and offers. These emails can be engaging and full of information, links to parts of your website, links to blog posts or social media specials, and are a great way to drive traffic to your website. Make sure though to have an opt-out option for those who view such marketing materials as spam.
Old content refurbishment
Many of our clients have found that refurbishing old content boosts traffic, just because you’ve already written about a topic doesn’t mean you can’t rework it to add new information or rebrand it to fit with today’s society.
Website speed
Increasing your website’s speed is another great way to help your website’s popularity and increase engagement. It’s been found that 47% of users expect a website to load in two seconds or less, and 39% will give up if the images don’t load or take too long. Google’s ranking algorithm also takes speed into consideration, so be sure to downsize your images, remove broken links, and even consider upgrading your hosting.
Write guest posts
If you like to write, consider writing guest posts for other websites – it’s a great way to increase your brand’s professional reputation inside an industry and draw more attention to your website. Make sure that the publication you’re working with allows you to backlink to your own website for relevant information which will increase your brand awareness and raise your Google rankings. You can choose to do the reverse as well and have your own guest blogger who can create content you never thought of.
Mobile responsiveness
Finally, but possibly most importantly, with mobile phone usage accounting for at least half of all website traffic, it’s very important to have a website that is accessible and user-friendly for a range of devices and has good mobile responsiveness. Nothing is worse than loading a website on your phone and not being able to properly navigate it.
Contact JezNorthWeb to improve your website’s traffic position
No matter where you are in the process of your website, the team at JezNorthWeb is here to help you create and maintain the best site for your business. Contact us today on 0455029199 or fill in our contact page for your FREE website consultation.
