This article presents ideas you can implement, both instantly and/or gradually that can not only increase your website’s traffic (users visiting your site) but also reduce the bounce rate. Bounce rate in a nutshell is a measure of how long a user stays on a website. While the internet is full of such ideas, the ideas in this article are unique and not common among many articles.
This article is divided into the following:
- An explanation of what good and bad website traffic is
- Ideas on how to increase website traffic
An Explanation of What Good and Bad Website Traffic Is
Not all visitors who visit your website are beneficial to you. For the sake of understanding let us divide site visitors into three categories: Not important/harmful visitors, information seekers, and potential clients.
Harmful Visitors: These are visitors who do not mean well to your site. Such traffic can include hackers who for some reason want to gain access to your website. This applies to websites that contain a backend – a place where the site owner logs in to the site. The traffic can also include attacks which come in form of multiple users trying to access your site but instead, they are requests that are automated in order to weigh your server down. These attacks are mostly referred to as DOS (Denial Of Service) attacks which are meant to make the site inaccessible to its intended users.
Information Seekers: These are people who want to get information for reasons other than what you intend it for. They include but are not limited to your competition or just general researchers.
Intended Users: These are your target audience
Now, the harmful visitors are the bad traffic. If you are experiencing such you should get help from a web developer with experience in such matters – feel free to reach out if you need help with this.
The information seekers and the intended users are the kind of traffic that we want for our website. While it may look like the information seekers are not beneficial but they actually are. Seeing that search engines do not know whether the person visiting your site is actually your intended user, the information seekers help increase your website ranking as they actually count as website visitors.
Ideas on How to Increase Website Traffic
Now that we know who we are targeting, this article discusses the following ideas that can help increase traffic and reduce bounce rate:
- Wish list feature
- Variability feature
- Compare feature
- Articles
Wish Lists
A wish list is a feature prevalent amongst e-commerce websites. This feature allows users to put items they want to purchase but not at that particular moment. Most people use this feature for various reasons. For instance, they stumbled on something they did not plan to do while perusing the items on the site. Due to that excitement, they decided to put it on their wish list to check on it later. Sometimes they found substitute products. Being overwhelmed by the weight of decision-making, they decide to wish-list the substitute product. They will then revisit it later.
You can find this feature on many e-commerce websites like Amazon, Alibaba, and Udemy just to name a few.
Some websites refer to the feature in a different way. For the sake of this article, we will categorize them under the wish list category. E-bay has a somewhat similar feature called watch list. Based on how the site works, the name watch list sounds appropriate.
Watch lists, wish lists and other names not put in this article are a strong source for increasing traffic to one’s website. Having these lists means your visitors plan to come back to resolve the reason they put the items on the wish list in the first place. Be it to wait for a sale or to wait until they get money. These lists create some sort of loyalty slash commitment to your site causing the visitor to come back thereby resulting in increased traffic in form of revisits.
Moreover, the time the visitors take to put items on a list means they spent ample time on your site. This in turn reduces the bounce rate. If you do not have this feature on your site, you may want to consider it.
Variability
Variability when it comes to websites is not a real term. We are using it in this article to pass a point across. In this sense, it is a feature that allows site visitors to play with the variables/options available for a particular product/service on your website to get its different perspective that matches what they feel comfortable with. You can find a good example of this feature on Apple’s website. Say you want to buy a MacBook, the website allows you to configure its specs to whatever you want and in turn, it changes the price. You can increase the size of the hard disk, the memory etc.. after which you will notice how the price fluctuates.
While this feature is helpful to showcase the different variables of the product, it has an impact on your website. It helps reduce the bounce rate by keeping the visitors on that page longer.
There are other ways websites implement this feature that you could use for your website. Some websites have different colours for their products which visitors can play around with. This is true for clothes, cars, electronics etc…
Some websites differ the price by offering sections of the entire product. This way you can view the price of the product/service as a whole or its price if it did not have some parts. A good example is a company offering website development services. On their website, they can include a feature where you select the different features of your site. The features you would want for your site can include social-media links, subscription forms etc… As you keep adding these features you notice the changes in price. If you visited such a site for your website development needs, you will stay longer just varying those options compared to if you just had one fixed website development price.
Compare
Am sure in your shopping experience you have found yourself in a dilemma many times if not once. Remember the time you wanted to purchase a new laptop, or a mobile phone and the options were all over the place? What did you do? Many people memorize features after bouncing from one website to the other. Well, thanks to the compare feature we can spare our minds from this enigma.
Having this feature on your website is a guarantee that you will have massive traffic. This will not only attract visitors, but it will also keep them on your site reducing bounce rates.
A good example of a website that optimizes this feature well is the GSMArena. The website allows you to compare up to three phones at once. How cool is that? You can choose the phones of your choice and view a list of all their features side to side. Below is a section of the screenshot showing a comparison of three different random phones from the site.
Articles And/or Blogs
Articles are another way of increasing your website’s traffic while reducing bounce rates and winning your client’s trust. Writing them in form of blogs or just plain articles establishes you as an authority in your field and is a sign that you are reliable. Reliable in that, If you took the time to give me free information regarding a subject area for free, it may mean you are passionate about it and are willing to help out, therefore I can depend on you for help when I need it. This can be even better once visitors have confirmed in one way or another that the information you gave them was true and helpful. It will build trust.
Having free articles that answer questions that are common in your area of business not only increases traffic but can also convert that traffic to actual clients.
If you are not sure what to write about, you can start by writing about questions your clients frequently ask. If you are in the car business you can write about how to get a good insurance policy, likewise, if you are in the laptop business you can educate people on what laptops to buy for different scenarios.