Choosing to invest in your website can never be a bad thing, especially if you are running an online store. It’s basically the same thing as investing in your store, and since more and more people choose to shop online nowadays, this appears to be one of the best investments you can make. Your goal is to have more traffic and to increase your conversion.

In other words to bring more people to your site and to turn those visitors into customers. The following article will give you some ideas on how to pull this off. Chances are you are probably using some of these techniques already, but let’s cover them all in order to be fully equipped for this task. Here are seven things you can do to increase the traffic on your website.

Pick a better theme

There are a lot of WordPress themes you can use for your website, and if you have just selected a random one, then you’ve probably missed out on a lot of potential. First of all, when you are choosing a theme, you need to decide if you want a free one or if you want to purchase one. Free ones are good, but if you want to be more professional then you should probably purchase one, considering how these are way better.

Next thing you need to do is pick a theme that corresponds to your line of work. There are themes specifically designed for magazine websites, restaurants or café websites, hotels websites, or simply company websites. A theme is designed to help you sell your product or services, but it can do so much more, since it has an impact on user experience on your website.

Do you know why a lot of potential customers can be lost? The answer is your website or page loading speed. If it takes too long for content to appear, or if your customer can’t check out the product because the website is slow and continues to crash in the middle of checkout process, then you’ll bounce rate will skyrocket.

As you know every theme has a code and the complexity of the code influences the speed of the website. Also there are themes that come with an in-built toolkit for SEO, which can be really helpful when it comes to increasing traffic and boosting rankings.

Another thing worth mentioning is your hosting provider, since the quality of web hosting has initial influence on the website’s loading speed. Look for hosts that will upload your site on many distant servers, that way you can ensure that people who are located further have a quality experience while on your website.

Add a blog section

Don’t allow your website to be a simple store, turn it into a place where people can get some useful information. You can do this by adding a blog section to your site, and write some relevant and useful content to help out your customers. For example if you are running a website for gym, you can put out some workout programs, and blog about diets etc.

A blog has another good use when it comes to increasing traffic, which will be explained a bit later. Another reason why a blog is useful, is because new content is put on your website regularly, and this sends out positive signals, and there is more room for internal linking. Also, never blog just for the sake of blogging, make sure your posts are insightful and helpful.

Start guest blogging

Here’s one good reason why you need to have a blog on your site. When you have quality content, then the whole guest blogging campaign will be a lot easier, and guest blogging is an amazing way to drive more traffic to your website. Basically, you find blogs that have topics which are relegated to your niche.

You can either create an account on those blogs, or ask some of the authors to feature one of the articles from your blog as a part of their content. This is why quality posts on your blog are important, because short and fluff content will only get rejected, and is not suitable as guest blogging material.

Guest blogging is one of the SEO tactics to increase the ranking of your site, and it is one of the ways how people naturally end up on your website, so it would be wise to go in this direction. Moreover, you target the places where most of your target audience hangs out, so it is a good way to draw in the potential customers.

SEO

SEO usually requires you to have a blog and to continuously use guest blogging services, but it is so much more than that. You specifically create content to rank for particular keywords and to target a searcher’s intent. To elaborate, you’ll need a list of relevant keywords or keyword phrases that you want to rank for, and it would be wise to use long-tail keywords in order to be more specific.

Then there is a whole topic relevancy issue that requires you not only to use your desired keywords, but also keywords that are topically connected to the ones you rank for. This is because you want your posts to be deemed relevant, and to gain quality. Lastly, you need to use those elements in a content that targets searchers intent. Meaning, your blog should consist of “how to” articles, tutorials, reviews and comparison articles etc.

SEO is one of the best forms of marketing nowadays, but it’s also something that has no end. You always need SEO in order to maintain your relevance. Since it yields such positive results people tend to outsource these tasks to experts. The whole point of SEO is to have more links that lead to your site, to have content that is perfectly optimized in order to be more visible, and website that is adjusted to be user-friendly, responsive and that works on both computers and smart phone or tablet devices.

It would be for the best to find an SEO agency that is up to the task, so make sure you go through some reviews before you employ your SEO team of experts. You can look up rankings of the best SEO companies, in order to find which one had the most success over the past few years and start to negotiate with them.

Socialize more

When we are talking about website traffic, it’s impossible to omit social networks as rich sources of visitors. First of all, you can purchase Facebook services to promote your content, and they will also display it to those who are interested, or to your target audience, to be precise. You can create an account or a page for your store on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, and Instagram.

It all depends on what you are selling, for example if you sell clothing or fashion accessories, your primary focus will be on Pinterest and Instagram. You can also use tools to help you out with social network management, you can set a schedule when you want something to be posted, you can track the activity and get useful metrics, so that you’ll know when your posts are most impactful etc.

Another important thing to remember is to be responsive on these social networks, because people do not like to be handled by software. Many potential shoppers love to use social networks to make a purchase and some business owners decided to use this to their advantage. The most recent incentive was “Tweet for Pizza” by Domino’s Pizza restaurant. And people could order pizza simply by tweeting and tagging Domino in their post.

Use videos, high quality pictures and infographics

It is also important to impress your visitors in order to increase the conversion rate, meaning, you’ll need to put on interesting and enticing content on your website. You can do this by having high quality videos that display your product or services, use high quality pictures as well, or create infographics to sum up your points.

This one is a no-brainer, since almost all business owners use high quality photography and they also have a photo edited in order to impress the viewers, and the same goes for video. Real estate websites, clothing and fashion accessories online shops, all use quality photography to boost the sales of their products. Infographics are usually used to exemplify how you can save money or be more efficient if you were to buy a particular software or tool.

These are some basic tactics that you can use to increase the number of visitors and to convert those visitors into paying customers. Remember to use all of these techniques not only a few of them because they all work in synergy and are quite effective.