Work From Home: How to Save Your Company's Website Traffic During This Pandemic
The effect of this coronavirus pandemic on businesses all over the world cannot be overemphasized. To curtail the rate at which this virus spreads, governments in many countries put a temporary restriction on movement. This restriction has impacted both offline and online business activities.
If your company's website traffic is dwindling, don't despair. A decline in your daily visitors does not mean the number of searchers online has declined. It's quite the opposite. According to Internet World Stats, on March 3, 2020, the number of internet users was estimated to be more than 4.5 billion. This is largely due to the heightened number of COVID-19 infections and the massive migration of workers and students online.
So how can you get a significant part of these users to your website and promote your products or services to bring in more sales this season? The solutions aren't far-fetched. Here are some tactical ways to get traffic to your website fast.
Related: We Lost $140k in Sales in Less Than 30 Days. Here's What We're Doing to Fix It.
Carry out deep keyword research before you create your blog content
Creating content with no audience to read it is no different from a man beating a dead horse. Thankfully, keyword research has given smart marketers an opportunity to channel their energy.
Keyword research involves looking for trending keywords or phrases which are less competitive. By trend, I mean topics that most internet users currently search and talk about. And in terms of competition, these are low competitive keywords that will be very easy for you to rank your company's website on Google's top pages.
You can carry out keyword research using Google Trends to see search terms that have a high volume this period. There are also free and paid keyword research tools you can use. In line with that, there's Twitter, Reddit, and other top social media pages to use in your quest to discover potential keywords. Twitter, for instance, shows topics or hashtags that are trending.
Let's say you've found trending long-tail keywords -- which are easier to rank -- such as "coronavirus symptoms day by day" or "coronavirus death toll.” How in the world can you target either of these? If your company's website is centered on affiliate marketing, you could target "[products] to detect coronavirus symptoms day by day." And if you're running an entertainment blog, your target keyword could look like this: "best songs to take your mind off the coronavirus death toll." Related searches on Google can also give you a good idea of similar search terms to incorporate into your next blog content.
Engage in social media marketing
While Google, Bing, and other top search engines are good sources of traffic, it may take days for a new and updated post on your website to get high rankings. There are also on-page and off-page SEO techniques to implement. So while you get things in place, take advantage of top social media pages like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit for traffic. Thousands of users log into these platforms daily as a source of reliable information. Reddit, for instance, revealed that its traffic increased by about 20-50 percent to certain subreddits in March 2020, around the same time coronavirus became a global pandemic.
Related: 4 Tips For Pivoting Your Brand in the Current Crisis
It's important to actively promote your company's website on social media. And remember, promote using trending terms to get the highest number of clicks. It might be wise to hire a social media marketer who will share your website’s links and respond to users' queries accordingly. Ads can also be run on Facebook to push your website right to your target audience.
Build quality backlinks
Actually, it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, building quality backlinks takes time, dedication, and patience. Backlinks improve the page authority (PA) of pages on your site and increase page rank on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
Build high-quality backlinks from websites that are similar to yours especially if they have high Domain Authority (DA) to get the best results. However, exercise caution to ensure you are not building these links too fast or coming across as spamming. Google will sandbox your website.
Email marketing
Now's the time to make the most of those emails you've amassed. Use them to drive more traffic to your website. Sending timely updates to your customers via email to keep them informed of your existing or latest products and services. A 2015 survey revealed 82 percent of B2B and B2C companies use this strategy. Another study showed email has three times the number of active users than social media.
Take the bold step and draft interesting content that can be used to redirect customers to your website. Think of it this way, if the same promotional email was sent to you, would you click on it? It's also smart to create a schedule of when these messages should be sent. Space them out as to not overwhelm your target. You don't want the emails to be redirected straight to the spam folder.
Giveaways or contests
One more way to drive massive traffic to your website is giveaways or contests. People love freebies, and that's why you'll be attracting visitors to your site by offering free incentives. It will encourage shoppers or potential customers to get to know your brand. There's also the word-to-word marketing you stand to gain.
To begin, set a budget on how much you're willing to spend and how much return you expect. Let's say you run AdSense ads. You'll need to know if the traffic at the end of the day will yield a good enough conversion to make up for the expenses -- and just maybe leave you some profit. Likewise, you need to know the potential for a product or service to be purchased for every 10 or 20 people that visit your website. This means that you have to offer these freebies to people who are interested in your product or niche for the best results.
Conclusion
Working from home can become something to look forward to if you can drive significant traffic to your company's website. It should be easier now that you know how to increase your website traffic through Google and social networking sites. Whichever route you take will attract potential customers to your site and increase your income -- even in the face of a pandemic.
