When creating a website for your business, you’ll hear a lot about website traffic (the number of visitors to your website) and how important it is to the success of your business. But do you know how to find out your website traffic? And when you do find out, do you know what to do to improve it?
We understand that developing a website is an overwhelming task. Once you’re done with it, it’s just easier to let go and pretend it’s going to get you leads through some Internet Magic™. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case!
There are so many variables involved in the performance of a website, and the worst thing you can do is leave it all to chance.
That’s why it’s important to routinely check on your website performance and do everything you can to optimise it for success! Keep scrolling for the answer to how to find out your website traffic number and what to do to improve it when you do.
There are several reasons why you should obtain website traffic information for your website. But here are a few important ones!
When you check your website traffic and keep a close eye on site statistics, you’re learning how and why people discover your website.
It also shows how long people stay and which pages are the most important. And this is the first step in ensuring even more traffic arrives at your website.
Developing that instinct will help you create web traffic strategies that actually work.
Whether you’re creating a lot of content, promoting your website on social media, or investing in digital advertising, it’s important to track your marketing efforts to see if they’re actually working.
Your return on investment (ROI) will enable you to make informed decisions about your marketing and allocate your budget and efforts effectively.
Checking your website traffic gives you a detailed view of which parts of your digital marketing strategy are working (and which ones aren’t!).
The content on your website is key to its success, so having a clear understanding of what type of content brings the traffic will help guide your content marketing strategy.
When you know what content resonates with your target audience, you can make more of it. Remember to also break this down by the different channels and which demographics are visiting your website.
All this talk about building a beautiful website doesn’t matter if you’re not optimising your website for lead conversion! In a nutshell, lead conversion refers to turning visitors into customers (or newsletter subscribers, if that’s your goal).
Your website traffic to lead conversion rate is a useful metric to track when it comes to website traffic and how well your website is converting leads.
Fortunately, a variety of online tools and websites are available for tracking website traffic.
Checking your website traffic has never been so easy.
However, it’s important to note that each online traffic tool or website will have its own strengths and weaknesses, so it’s essential to do your own research before committing to any paid plans.
We also encourage you to use at least two different methods to track your traffic, because it’s the best way to get the most accurate view of your website traffic performance.
With just a few clicks, Google Analytics can help you view the traffic sources of all of your website’s pages, including landing pages. It’s also one of the few tools out there that allows you to view all your traffic sources, including social media and email marketing.
You can also use Google Analytics to track a whole range of other metrics that are important for your website’s performance.
The free version of this tool is sufficient for small businesses and solo entrepreneurs.
We highly recommend using Google Analytics as part of your website traffic tracking efforts.
Alternatives to Google Analytics include Amplitude, Mixpanel and Woopra.
Every analytics tool has pros and cons. Additionally, with these lesser-known tools, there tend to be fewer resources available. So, you need to make the decision that’s right for you, your budget, and your business.
Yep, another tool by Google to help you check your website traffic.
Using Google Search Console is a quick and easy way to track all your website traffic that comes from Google searches.
By using the Performance Report, you can group and filter your website traffic data by the various dimensions, including keywords, landing pages, user location, user devices, and even how your website was displayed in the search results.
When using Google Analytics, the search console (formerly known as Google Webmasters) will provide you with many of the keywords considered as ‘not defined’ in your reports.
Often cited as one of the best keyword research tools on the web, SEMRush also makes it easy to get a detailed analysis of your website traffic.
You can view anything – from which external websites are bringing the most traffic to your website and the pages on your website that get the most traffic, to the volume of traffic that you get each month and the keywords that get you the most traffic.
One of the best things about SEMrush is that it not only allows you to analyse your website metrics, but you can also view your competitors’ website traffic for organic search. All you need to do is input a competitor’s URL into the search bar.
While the tool also provides estimates for other traffic sources, please note that these are estimates.
You can even bulk search for multiple competitors. This is an excellent way to benchmark your website performance.
However, if your competitor receives fewer than 10,000 monthly visits to their site, this information may not be accurate or readily available due to how the tool operates.
This is one of the most beginner-friendly website traffic and keyword research tools out there, and even its free version is impressive. In fact, the free version of Ubersuggest gives you access to 3 whole months of data. To start using it, all you have to do is enter your website URL and click ‘Search’.
Ubersuggest has a traffic analyser feature that provides a detailed look at your website traffic, including the keywords that drive the most traffic and the most popular pages on your website. Meanwhile, the traffic overview will display the total number of organic keywords for which your website ranks in search results, as well as the corresponding organic monthly traffic.
Much like SEMRush, this tool allows you to easily check your website traffic data based on organic search results. However, you do have to pay to use Ahrefs – in fact, even the 7-day trial isn’t free.
However, a paid account allows you to filter your website traffic report to view the traffic stats for the year, the last 30 days, or all time. This is in addition to heaps of other data that will help you analyse other useful website metrics as well.
There’s a vast variety of different techniques and strategies to improve your website traffic. Some might require more effort than others, while others may be too technical to attempt on their own. However, we’ll be sharing some of the quickest and easiest ways to increase website traffic right here!
Simply put, SEO is a combination of different things you can do on and off your website to direct traffic your way. All these activities are meant to help your website rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs), which plays a massive role in making your website more discoverable when people search for keywords related to your business.
SEO is a non-negotiable if you want your website to have any hope of success. In fact, if you do nothing else to improve your website traffic, you must commit to SEO! We’re so passionate about SEO that we’ll explain more about the importance of SEO in the next section.
We’ll say it now: it’s tough in today’s digital climate to boost website traffic without social media. The fact is, your audience (AKA target market) is on different social media platforms at any given time. If you’re not discoverable to them on there, you’d be hard-pressed to direct traffic to your website.
As a matter of fact, as of 2021, there are 4.14 billion active social media users worldwide – and this number is growing at an average rate of 2 million each day. Research has also shown that we spend roughly 15% of our waking lives on social media.
Please note that this should not be the only web traffic source in your strategy. Generating website traffic from Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn is not the primary function of these platforms – they are primarily used as marketing tools for brand recognition and community engagement. But they can and do drive traffic to your website and shouldn’t be ignored.
Marketing funnels are an age-old concept that explains the journey a customer takes from discovering your business to making a purchase (or other kind of conversion).
In the digital realm, this data is more trackable than ever, making your digital marketing funnels a valuable way to guide your strategies and improve your website traffic.
While the traditional marketing funnel has been adapted for the digital marketing world, we argue that the more customer-centric love marketing funnel resonates more readily with today’s audiences.
By taking this approach, you’re putting your customers at the heart of what you do, which makes a lasting impression.
Aside from organic digital marketing, you also have the opportunity to invest in paid digital marketing to increase your website traffic – for instance, Google Ads. When you search for something on Google, you’ll see websites appearing at the very top of the search results with the word “Ad” just before the URL.
This is actually a brilliant form of paid advertising that puts websites at the top of search engine result pages for targeted keywords or ones they’d be unlikely to rank for.
Aside from doing everything you can to place your website on the first page of organic search results, paid Google ads can also be something to consider to drive traffic to your website.
Another way to increase website visits is to create a website that users genuinely enjoy using. This is called ‘user experience’ or UX. One reason you should do this is to ensure your customer experience is solid, even in the digital realm, because it reflects a lot about your credibility and overall brand experience.
Another reason your website should prioritise UX is that Google considers it when ranking your website on its search engine results.
A few different metrics, which Google have named Core Web Vitals, are deemed necessary by Google. Improving these metrics will be key to achieving long-term website ranking and attracting more traffic to your website.
When you use an unreliable or untrustworthy website hosting provider, it really knocks down your credibility points.
For one, it may signal to Google that your website isn’t secure. Secondly, if your website is known for being too slow or experiencing frequent downtime, customers are more likely to visit a competitor’s more reliable website to make their purchase.
Finding the right web hosting provider will require a fair bit of research, but it’s a worthwhile endeavour if you want to maximise website traffic.
Search engine optimisation is the most important method for driving traffic to your website. By optimising your website and making it SEO-friendly, you’re encouraging Google to list your website high up on search engine results.
Why is this important? Research has shown that the first five organic results on Google account for 67.60% of all clicks. If you’re not on that first page, you’re simply a lot less likely to get the website traffic you’re hoping for.
Google uses over 200 different SEO ranking factors when determining search rankings.
However, SEO specialists and researchers have identified several key SEO ranking factors that help Google recognise websites as valuable, helpful, and worthy of a high ranking. This is how SEO can improve your website traffic!
As mentioned above, several factors are taken into account by search engines when ranking your website.
While you can certainly DIY it, we highly recommend outsourcing SEO so you can get the best advice and strategies tailored to your website and business.
We focus on best-practice, ethical SEO marketing that prioritises organic growth for small businesses.
Our focus is on getting your website fully optimised for SEO first, and then moving on to off-page strategies to maximise traffic to your fantastic website.
At the end of the day, what’s important to us is helping you understand how SEO helps your business and providing you with the strategies that will actually work now (and in the long term) for your business growth and success.
Contact us today or check out our DIY resources.
