Growing your website can seem like such an unreachable task, especially if you are new to the whole online scene. You may often wonder how to grow website traffic, and reach your desired target audience. Your competition is already out there, pulling in more and more clientele, and you need to up your game. Well, this article will give you some insight on some of the best tools to help you grow website traffic, and help you increase your rankings, which in result will put you in front of more potential clients and increase your sales and profits in the long run.
These tools are mostly based on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but can certainly help in other areas too, like Search Engine Marketing. First, let us look at why these tools should be important to you:
- You get to discover ways in which you can grow your website through organic methods.
- You can find holes in your marketing strategy and fix them before wasting time and money.
- The opportunity to closely monitor your website, plus rate its growth and progress.
- You can easily spot any irregularities and bugs on your website, and get to fix them quickly.
- You can get ahead of your competition.
Ahrefs is an SEO suite that has a few different analysis tools that will help to grow your website traffic, research your competition and monitor your space. Ahrefs will help you find out why your competitors are ranking and tell you how to beat them organically.
The Ahrefs suite comes with a backlink tool that allows you to research your own backlinks and your competitors’ links as well. Using it is simple, all you have to do is put your URL in the site explorer, and it will give you tons of useful information.
The awesome Ahrefs tool also has other amazing features, like its rank tracker, and the content explorer, which both allow you to identify sites that are ranking for the same keywords that you are targeting.
SEMrush is an all-around marketing toolkit that helps with SEO, Search Engine Marketing and Social Media.
SEMrush allows you to view your competition’s top keywords and also look in on their organic content strategy.
SEMrush helps you discover new organic competitors that may be gearing up to take your existing traffic and move in on the traffic you’re trying to get.
SEMrush also has a great social media posting tool that allows you to schedule your posts across many different networks.
SEMrush can also help you research your paid search marketing competitors. You can snoop on your competitor’s campaigns, keywords, and even their ads to see what works for them and make it work better for your business.
If you have a WordPress website the Yoast SEO plugin is one of the tools to help you grow your website traffic. Yoast is perfect for on-page SEO optimization, the plugin will help you optimize each page on your website for it’s chosen focus-keyword and it will even help you tell Google exactly what your page is all about.
Out of the box, Yoast comes with a readability checker that lets you know how good or bad your writing is and you can get a preview of your Google search result for each page of your website.
Yoast will also help you:
- configure your breadcrumbs
- avoid outdated content
- avoid duplicate content
- create internal links
- preload post settings for Facebook and Twitter
Google Analytics is a completely free tracking tool from Google that will help you analyze and grow website traffic. Analytics is a robust platform that allows you to track every aspect of your search engine optimization, search engine marketing or social media campaign. With Google Analytics you can see exactly where your visitors came from and gain insight into what they did while they were on your website. In Google Analytics, you have access to a host of different audience reports such as:
- Active Users where you can look at your visitors’ on-site or in-app interactions for the last 30 days.
- Lifetime Value helps you understand the value of each user based on their activity across different sessions.
- Audiences will show you a cross-channel or multi-channel view of your created audiences.
- User Explorer allows you to see the individual user’s behavior on your website.
In Google Analytics you will also have access to a ton of reports that will help you analyze and make improvements to your online advertising campaigns. Google Analytics can help you track paid campaigns from Google Ads, YouTube, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, and Yahoo Gemini just to mention a few.
Moz Pro helps you understand your visitors better by finding out how they are searching for your products or services. Knowing what keywords visitors used and what questions they asked will help you create better quality content that will grow website traffic.
You can track your rankings with Moz Pro to find out what’s working and what’s not working on your site. You can also track or keep tabs on your competition. Moz Pro will help you understand local and national searches by showing what the search sees.
You can crawl and audit your website to find any harmful issues and find easy ways to fix them. You can rest easy as Moz will find any problem that prevents search engines from fully crawling your website.
Moz will help you optimize your pages by ensuring that you have the maximum potential to rank for your target keywords and search terms by analyzing your page content and making specific recommendations for improvements.
BuzzSumo is another great tool to help you grow your website traffic. Out of the box, there are 4 main features to help you. With BuzzSumo you will never struggle to create content again because they are a factory of ideas.
Content Discovery will discover new content ideas by scanning through topics, trends, and forums and letting you know which ideas are performing good or bad.
Content Research scans through billions of articles and social media posts to help you harvest the best insights. BuzzSumo constantly crawls the web and will find you the most popular content from any niche.
Find Influencers as you might have guessed will help you find authors and creators with genuine authority on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and across the web.
Monitoring allows you to track mentions, trends, and updates for you or your competition. You can set alerts so you are instantly notified of important events and updates. You can monitor Keywords, Authors/Creators and their outlets, and Backlinks.
Answer the Public is another tool to help you come up with great content ideas. Just enter a related keyword and you get tons of topics to choose from. The tool auto-suggests ideas based on results from Google and Bing. If you’re looking to grow your website you need to have great content and this tool will give you the topics and the ideas that you need to get more traffic.
The results from Answer the Public are categorized by:
- Questions
- Prepositions
- Comparisons
The results are also displayed in an aesthetically pleasing visualization that is very easy to read and understand.
Google Search Console is another free tool from Google. This tool can be connected to Google Analytics for better performance measuring, as the two works great together. Google Search Console was previously and still sometimes called “Webmaster Tools”, this is where you find performance information to help you increase the search visibility of your website.
Here are some of the things you can do with Google Search Console:
- Submit your XML sitemap – Submit your site to Google
- See with keywords or search queries lead visitors to your website
- See the impressions, clicks, and position of each search query
- View your index coverage to see if Google has the newest view of your site
- Get email alerts of problems on your site
- Understand how search engines like Google see the pages on your website
- Analyze and optimize your site’s mobile usability
- You can optimize and enhance your visitors’ experience using AMP and Rich Results
Google My Business is also called GMB and is yet another free tool from Google. GMB will help your business stand and engage with customers of Google for free. In the past, Google My Business was just a simple business listing but today it is so much more than that. Your business profile allows you to connect with current and potential customers across Google Search and Google Maps.
You can now post pictures, offers, events, and products to your business profile to show what makes your business different from your competitors and give customers a reason to choose you.
GMB also allows you to give customers different ways to reach you like by calling, messaging, or leaving reviews.
Google My Business now shows insights into how customers engaged with your business profile. You can see clicks, calls, bookings and follows and will as map and direction views.
If your business is local a GMB profile is absolutely necessary for you to grow your website traffic by having your listing show up on the map and for local searches.
These are just a few of the tools that you can use to grow website traffic. There are plenty more tools out there, check back for weekly posts that you can help you and your business increase your online footprint. If you need help growing your website traffic don’t hesitate to reach out to us.