Don’t get discouraged if your website isn’t getting the traffic you know it deserves. A lack of traffic is an obstacle that most great sites must overcome in order to succeed. Think of traffic issues like your website’s natural growing pains.
One of the best ways you can increase the traffic to your site over time is to improve its overall quality. Higher-quality websites tend to attract more visitors, after all. And, thankfully, there are some clear steps you can take to reliably improve the quality of your website.
But how do you make improvements to quality? Well, rather than take potshots in the dark, there are different tech tools you can use to do just that. Read on to learn about four ways you can use tech to improve your website so visitors come back again and again.
1. Brainstorm Quality SEO Content
One thing that can significantly limit your website’s growth is a lack of quality content. When you first started your site, you probably had lots of ideas for different articles, images, and other posts. But, as time goes on, your content can start to feel repetitive. Thankfully, you don’t only have to rely on your brain to come up with good ideas anymore.
Over the last year or so, the development of generative AI has come leaps and bounds. Now you can ask an AI to generate virtually limitless ideas for content relevant to your exact niche. That way you can keep delivering high-quality content for your readers to enjoy.
While ChatGPT is the most popular text-based generative AI model, there are others. Google Research has developed a query-answering model called T5. And Salesforce has developed CTRL, designed to enable you to have finer control over its outputs. So if you feel like you’re struggling to perpetually create quality content, incorporate AI tools into your content strategy.
2. Optimize Content for SEO
So now you’ve got plenty of ideas for quality content that you know your audience will love. However, you’ve got to make sure that they’re able to find your content in the first place. You could be creating the most interesting content in the world, but it won’t mean much online if no one can find it. You’ve probably heard of it before, but if you haven’t, search engine optimization (SEO) is the name of the game.
There’s a lot that goes into developing your website SEO, and there’s no one way to do it right. But a good place to start is to make sure you’re incorporating niche-relevant keywords and meta-tags into your content. Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Moz are just a few tools you can use to research keywords. Once you find the best keywords to target, you want to incorporate them as naturally as possible.
Crawlability is another important element of your website’s SEO to focus on. For search engines to operate, little bots “crawl” through your website to index its contents and determine the quality of its architecture. This helps them know what articles to bring up when users search. You can use tools like Google Search Console, Yoast SEO, or Screaming Frog to generate an XML site map. Then you can submit that map to Google to help the crawlers index your site. You may be surprised to find how big of an effect little improvements to your website’s SEO content can have.
3. Test Performance Speeds
Imagine you’ve just found a great new website relevant to your interests and you’re devouring its content. Each post is interesting, entertaining, engaging, and you just can’t get enough of it. The only bad thing: you could find a decent match on Tinder in the time it takes to load one page. That’s a big problem.
Unfortunately, this is a problem that occurs far too often, and is the bane of many a website’s existence. In this age of instant gratification and endless content, people don’t want to wait for a website page to load. If you want your website to succeed, you need to optimize its performance.
WebPageTest, Google PageSpeed, and Lighthouse are three tools you can use to test your website’s performance. TinyPNG and Kraken.io allow you to compress images without significantly cutting their quality. And UglifyJS will help you clean up your website’s Javascript files where CSSNano removes redundant CSS files. These are just a few tools you can use to decrease loading times and increase visitor satisfaction.
4. Optimize for Mobile
These days, virtually everyone has a powerful computer with a phone app vibrating in their pocket. And many people use those little pocket computers as a primary way to browse the internet. In May of this year alone, roughly 52% of all online traffic came through mobile phones. So if you haven’t yet optimized your website for mobile, you’re way behind the times.
Many website development platforms provide tools that allow you to optimize your website for mobile. This includes the popular ones like Wix and Squarespace, and the lesser-known like Duda and Jimdo. The latter actually take a mobile-centric design approach so you can rest easy knowing your site will look great on a handheld rectangle.
The other advantage of optimizing your website for mobile is that it increases its integrability with social media. Imagine: a potential user is using their favorite social media app (maybe Facebook or Instagram) and sees a link to your site. They’re intrigued, so they click it and go to your mobile-optimized website. Because the transition is seamless you’ve decreased the chance they’ll have a bad experience. Accommodating mobile visitors is just one more way you can improve your website’s overall traffic.
Tools in the Toolbox
There are so many tools you can use to improve the quality of your website. In general, the more tools you have in your toolbox, the better. And there are many more than those listed here. These are just a few bits of tech you can use to start improving the quality of your website today.
