Chances are you’re reading this article for one of three reasons:

•    You’re getting website traffic but aren’t converting this traffic into leads.

•    You want to improve the quality of your traffic to maximize the investment in your website.

•    You’ve just redesigned your website, and you are looking to increase targeted website traffic.

Our goal is to not only provide actionable tips to help you attract the right traffic but also to make sure you have the right foundation for success. Before we dive in, it’s imperative for you to uncover, understand and establish strategic objectives and a well-defined buyer persona. With these in place, you will be able to develop an effective marketing plan.

Once your two foundations are squared away, you can start to implement these five actionable tips for attracting targeted website traffic.

Tip # 1: Keyword Research

Keyword research serves two purposes:

• It helps visitors and prospects understand if your website contains the information they need as they scan for the keywords they have searched for.  

• It helps search engines understand the purpose of your web pages to appropriately match them with search queries.

Your keywords should meet the following criteria:

• Have a low ranking difficulty. The lower your keyword’s difficulty score, the easier it should be to rank well in search results. To find out the ranking difficulty of a keyword, you can use a keyword difficulty tool, such as the ones available from Moz.org and SEMRush. Most of these tools require a paid subscription. They present keyword difficulty scores as percentages, and scores below 60 percent are generally considered to be desirable.

• Have a moderate monthly search volume. You can find a keyword’s search volume — an estimate of the number of people who search for the keyword each month — by using the Google AdWords Keyword Planner. This tool requires you to create an account if you don’t already have one. There are other software options that offer monthly search volume data, but I find the Keyword Planner to be very straightforward. When it comes to monthly volume, you want to try to strike a balance between terms that are general and those that are more targeted. More general keywords often garner a large number of searches, but many of those searches are not as targeted. Terms that are more targeted could have fewer searches but may be tied to more qualified traffic. Use your judgment to find keywords that are appropriately targeted but still generate significant volume.

Action plan:

• Create two lists: one with the keywords you would like to utilize on your web pages and the other one with keywords for your blog, which you’ll need for future posts.

• Read each web page’s content and identify at least two keywords that are most relevant to the overall page content.

• Find the ranking difficulty and monthly search volume for each keyword. If the specific keywords you have selected don’t meet the criteria mentioned above, search for variations or closely related keywords.

When going through this process, you’ll run into keywords that do not fit any of your web pages. When this happens, you can either create a new web page utilizing these keywords or use the keywords for future blog posts.

Tip #2: On-Page Optimization

The purpose of optimizing your web pages using target keywords is to ensure that they are formatted correctly for indexing by the search engines, so they can be found by your prospects.

Action plan:

• Ensure that your keywords are in your page title, meta description, URL, headline tags, page content and image alt tags for all your current pages.

• Develop and optimize any new pages that need to be created for additional keywords.

Tip #3: Blogging (Don’t Skip This One!)

Do you think that people in your industry don’t read blogs? Well, before you decide to skip this tip, we urge to read this blog post: “To B2B Companies: Why You MUST Have a Blog. Evolve, Adapt, or Die.”

Blogging activities will bring more organic visitors to your website. We recommend that you publish at least two or three blog articles per week, but you can start by blogging once a month.

Action plan:

• Ensure that your blog is set up and integrated with your website.

• Create a blogging calendar to keep track of published content.

• Using the keywords you found in Tip #1, write and publish blog articles.

• Ensure your blog has an image, a call to action, and bold, important, compelling text.

Tip #4: Social Media Promotion and Growth

Social channels provide an excellent opportunity to promote your content and bring it to the qualified traffic that is searching for it through the available social channels.

Action plan:

• Promote blogs posts on your social media accounts.

• Keep in touch with your audience by asking questions and responding to any interactions.

• Invest time in growing social channels.

Tip #5: Analyze and Assess Your Progress

Measuring the effectiveness of your traffic-growth strategies is important for making improvements. You will want to analyze how well your strategic keywords are working to help people find your site, how your social engagements are performing, and how you are progressing toward your traffic-growth goals.

Action plan:

• Understand how your efforts have affected traffic growth. You can use Google Analytics or other traffic analysis software.

• Review your social interactions to discover how you can drive more traffic to your website.

• Based on your analysis, make adjustments to your traffic-generation efforts to ensure you’re on track to reach your traffic-growth goals.

Attracting qualified web traffic might seem overwhelming at first, but the payoff will be well worth the effort. More qualified traffic means more qualified leads, and soon the sales manager will become your best friend.

Need help attracting qualified traffic to your website? As part of our online marketing programs, we work with our clients to define the best traffic-growth strategies to help them progress toward their desired objectives. Schedule your complimentary consultation today!

Download the e-book below to find more tips for attracting qualified traffic, converting this traffic to leads and, ultimately, converting those leads into customers.