How to increase website traffic

Website popularity affects greatly both your ad earnings and product sales level. Many wonder how to increase website traffic or ranking.

In this article we will give you several advice on what you should and should not promote. We will also tell you how to make your content always rank high in search engines.

If you will systematically and strictly follow these rules and adhere to chosen strategy, then you will surely achieve the results. So, what do you need to know?

How to increase website traffic

Skyscraper technique – how to increase website traffic

The so-called skyscraper technique has been built up by the guy named Brian Dean. It offers simple and clear way to attract massive audience. It consists of four following steps:

1. Creation of high-quality content on a certain topic with a certain search volume.
2. Preparing and adding of content with even higher quality.
3. Appealing to right people for generating links for ranking.
4. Repeating all steps with content on different topic.

Using the image of skyscraper, Brian is trying to get out his message that in order to get anything done in the city and differentiate yourself from the others, you need to build the tallest skyscraper. No one gives a damn about the 6^th of 8^th tallest skyscraper. Everybody cares only about the tallest one. That’s why your task as an author is to write the fabulous content and spread the word about it.

But it’s not that simple.

The significant element that is missing here is your website’s authority. If you want to outdo the world-leading publishers like The Washington Post or The New Yorker from square one, 40 links to one page are not enough. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you don’t get a chance to achieve anything. But if you are willing to deliver results faster and not only for one page, than you ought to use something else too. It is so-called KOB (Keyword Opposition to Benefit) analysis. Using it together with the skyscraper technique, you may reach an ideal model for gaining high popularity.

Keyword Opposition to Benefit analysis

This analysis allows taking into account the profit generation potential along with competition of a certain keyword. It would be perfect to find words with high revenue potential and ultimately low competition. Knowing competition metrics, you will find out if you manage to rank. Knowing revenue possibility, you will understand how much you can get if you succeed to rank. Content should have high benefit. At the same time you need to be sure that you are able to compete when using the exact keyword.

KOB value is calculated according to this formula: Benefit/Competition. Benefit of a keyword is calculated as cost per click (CPC) multiplied by the traffic volume of the top-rated page on this topic and for this word. Competition is calculated using various tools. It indicates how hard it would be to challenge in this topic using the certain keyword.

We will analyze “content marketing” as an example of a keyword. To define its competition you may use a tool for determining keywords difficulty.

The results will show that if you use this phrase as a keyword, you will face high competition level (difficulty level is 76%). On the other hand, lots of people are searching for this keyword (search volume is several thousand queries per month). We need to define the potential value of each of these visits and if there are any other long-tail keywords in this topic, which may increase the value of our keyword.

We use Google and SEMRush for this purpose. What we do is enter our keyword into a search box and copy one of the first links from the search results. In our case, it is Content Marketing Institute (CMI) page.

We then copy this link into SEMRush to find out about the traffic volume and estimated page value based on bids for similar traffic.

Estimated traffic is 11 500 visits per month when using 936 keywords. Tool counts that approximate traffic cost of high ranking for “content marketing” and other related keywords in this topic is equal to $215,000 per month. We then divide this value by keyword difficulty (76%) and obtain that KOB is equal to 282,894. One may make a conclusion that this word has very high value. However, considering that it has rather high competition, it will be quite complicated to achieve high results. Domain authority is extremely important, and it’s quite low for the new projects.

Expanded keyword analysis – how to increase website traffic

The research of topics perfect for writing articles is quite a new thing, since SEO is commonly based on keywords. We will show you several methods on how you may do it.

SEMRush tool supports feature that will help you quickly find the pages of any website with the highest traffic volume. With it you may find worthy topics that bring your competitors enormous traffic, and write content in the same topic area.

Another tool is Ad Group Ideas of the Keyword Planner from Google. Apart from placing ads, here you may pick up the appropriate subject matter.

How to create content that ranks

KOB is an excellent parameter that will allow promoting keywords with low competition and high benefit. But this doesn’t mean that you should instantly choose the topic with the highest KOB value. One must consider his domain’s authority. There is a bunch of tools for defining the level of your website’s authority. One of them is Google TrustRank.

In order to rank #1 you need to set a baseline based on authority, quality of your content and the funnel level your content is related to.

For instance, if your website features authority equal to 40, then it’s better not to use keywords with difficulty level over 60%. But if this value is about 60-70, then your mission is not to determine the chance of ranking. The entire process comes down to definition of the keywords, using which you may appear in the search results without promotion. This is a great virtue that those with lower authority are missing. The topic authority also matters. If you have a website dedicated to flowers, and all your content is focused on this topic, then you may try using keywords with higher competition. But if you want to write articles on general topics, then you will need to increase difficulty step by step in order to compensate the lack of authority.

Content layering is your key to onward growth

This is one of the most significant parts of the successful sales increase. If you may create content that attracts visitors, ranks perfectly and layers on top of your landing page, you will not only increase your traffic, but also make your landing page popular much more likely.

Consider the example of snowboarding company Evo. When purchasing such type of product, it’s important that it matches your height. Probably one will look for charts showing snowboard sizing and follow the Evo’s page. If you may show similar quality and detailed content to your visitor in the first place, then you will be able to greatly increase conversion rate.

The sense here lays not so much in the funnel, but in the layering. This layered page will allow increasing the probability of clicking your link in particular, considering the brand recognition that was just created. Generation of links to this page may help in increasing topic authority and funnel relevancy of the landing page. This page will also allow getting extra links to the landing page in the process of promotion. Thus you may increase the position of landing pages in the bottom of the funnel.

In case of Evo snowboards, 5,400 monthly searches of this layering page allow to increase traffic to a page for buying snowboard with more popular keywords that provide up to 40,500 visitors. If you will do the same thing for every product in your portfolio, you may get amazing results. This is actually the path to success. If you manage to create mid-funnel content that will rank very well, then you will increase your bottom-funnel content rating with confidence.

It’s not always easy to find a topic where you may apply this principle. In total, by generating links to something from the top of the funnel, one may not only make these pages to rank, but also increase popularity of the pages in the bottom of the funnel. This produces great effect. It may be not as grand as in case of snowboards, but it still is.

How to create content that will rank #1

Finally we come over to probably the hardest and the most major part – content writing. Preparing quality content is not enough. You need to do it 10 times better than your competitors. You should admit that you wouldn’t switch to any alternative to Facebook, if it was only two times better. Facebook is a secure and proven social network, and it would be pointless to replace it by something new and unknown. But if you will see that it’s really a new bona fide project that has far greater potential, perhaps you will change your mind. The same goes for quality content. Here are a number of advice on its improving.

1. Link should be as short as possible. On the average, not more than 50 symbols.
2. Use the content elements your competitors don’t use. This may include graphics, video and animation. Add interactivity. Such content has two times higher conversion rate than the static one.
3. Create better name for the article. Click-through ratio depends directly on your ranking.
4. Make your text easy to read. It should be understood even by a 15 year old pupil. Sentences shouldn’t be too long. Also try to use shorter words. With Flesch Readability you may check how easy your text is. The perfect value is 76.5 out of 100.
5. Text should be well-structured. Users want to find answers quickly. Try to use bullet lists, for instance.
6. Don’t forget about the pictures. Even the most plain and meaningful text will not be so striking, if it doesn’t include at least some images. But keep the balance between visual and text elements. Try to use a principle of one picture for 75-100 words.
7. Use pictures of the highest quality.
8. Don’t add images with big maximal size. The longer your content is loading, the lower is your rank.
9. Use floating social buttons. They increase social traffic by 27%.

This list of advice is not complete and may be expanded. We tried to tell you shortly only about the keystones that will help you in promoting content.

You may also be interested in exploring the methods of increasing the number of subscribers to your blog.