Hitting the ground running with newborn websites is a difficult endeavor. It requires strong will and determination to keep going until your website reaches some sort of following among online users and gains traction. This is when you will start encountering web traffic, the sources of which can be different as well as the quality of the traffic. This article will show you about the new websites traffic sources.
With a newborn website, your goal is to ultimately generate lots of traffic (otherwise what is the point of running the website?). Regardless of whether you have a business website for e-commerce or just a place to showcase your hobby, every visit to your website counts as it potentially leads to an action that you may benefit from. Moreover, if there was ever a digital equivalent of “brand awareness” for websites, traffic would be a key indicator of it.
As stated previously—and perhaps unsurprisingly for anyone with a bit of Internet know-how—web traffic comes from various sources (we will delve deeper into that shortly). But what is also significant is the quality of the traffic you receive. The difference between good and bad quality traffic simply boils down to conversion rates. In other words, if you have an e-commerce website, for instance, which gets visited by thousands of people on daily basis, yet that does not translate well into sales, then it means your traffic is of bad quality.
Understanding where your traffic comes from helps determine what works on your website and what does not. In doing so, you can re-evaluate on what aspects to focus on financially and effort-wise. With that said, let’s count down the main sources from which your website can receive traffic.
Traffic that comes from search engines falls under this category. Organic traffic is when people find and visit your website through search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yandex. Using advanced analytics, you can look through data to see which keywords that you have used were effective in bringing new visitors to your website. This helps to develop a better SEO (search engine optimization) strategy by utilizing hot keywords and making them a key focus of your content. This, subsequently, leads to more visitors and customers if you operate your website as a business. Though it has to be mentioned that with its latest update, Google introduced SSL encryption which effectively hides that information. Therefore, website owners no longer have as much information pertaining to keywords. This was partly done in an effort to prevent websites from spamming keywords in order to get more traffic, but legitimate businesses are now affected negatively because of it.
Any traffic that comes through other websites by inbound links is referred to as referral traffic. Sometimes your website may be linked by other similar websites, so this gives you plenty of business opportunities to explore such as SEO partnerships or guest blog opportunities.
Social media’s immense popularity worldwide ensures its place among top traffic sources. And you will be surprised to learn just how much of global Internet traffic goes through social media. In essence, it is similar to referral traffic in that traffic comes through inbound links. However, since it has become a source of its own—given that marketing focuses on social media separately—it is important to distinguish between social media traffic and referral traffic. Social media traffic can come both through your own posts on your social media pages and people sharing them.
E-Mail marketing has been widely popular for a long time now and chances are that a portion of your traffic comes from emails. If you are running an email marketing campaign in which you embed links to your website (whether it is for them to visit and read/watch your content or purchase stuff), you will start receiving traffic from that source.
Links embedded on SMS messages as part of SMS marketing campaign work similarly to email and can also bring traffic. For ideal results, your text messages should be highly targeted, with appropriate demographics in mind. No one likes receiving unsolicited and irrelevant text messages, so make sure you do not spam anyone and only send relevant text messages to people who have opted into your marketing campaign. This way you will get more traffic while simultaneously increasing your conversion rates.
This is traffic that comes through a Pay-Per-Click campaign. If you are advertising your website through a PPC provider (i.e. Google), you will start noticing additional traffic coming through those advertisements. Obviously, if you are running a PPC campaign, traffic comes second to conversion rates in importance. Nonetheless, PPC campaigns in and of itself is a great way to drive traffic to your website.
Like the name implies, this is the traffic that comes from no other channel or source—people type your website link to reach it. In most cases, what this means is that your website, as a brand, is growing and if you are receiving a lot of direct traffic, people know your website by name. For most newborn website, the ultimate goal is to reach this kind of status where most of the traffic or at least a significant portion of it is direct traffic. However, there is a little catch to this. “Dark Social” as a referral source falls under the category of direct traffic. To put it simply, this is the traffic you get from people visiting your websites through shared links (shared as in people sending your link through private messages or emails) on email or instant messenger platforms. To give you a perspective, let’s say you have a product on your online store that has become trendy. A lot of people interested in the product will start forwarding the link to each other and you will notice a spike in direct traffic data. This is not a bad thing necessarily, however it makes the job of tracking where your traffic came from a tad harder.
Obviously, as far as efficiency is concerned, some sources are more effective than others and you can, rightfully, focus on them to drive more traffic to your website. Nevertheless, it is vital that you keep getting traffic from a variety of sources because solely relying on one channel may doom your website once the source dries up.
With newborn websites, the issue that most people face is how to get it going when it is barely known to people. It takes hard work and perseverance as well as strategic planning not only to gain some traction for your website (consistent traffic on daily basis) but also a level of popularity. That is where you will need to understand which traffic sources to utilize best to maximize your results.
Each source of traffic has its own pros and cons. For newborn websites, PCP advertising might work best in the beginning because it puts your links on top of search engines or in places where people would best notice them. However, this can get expensive pretty fast—not to mention that some PCP platforms will send irrelevant traffic your way which does not do much for your conversion rates, if that is a priority of yours.
Organic search is the best option for long term but it requires strategic planning of content. It is very important for one of the newborn websites traffic sources. It is more of a slow burn, figuratively speaking, but it pays its dividends eventually. Basically, you will need to incorporate SEO marketing tools to better optimize your content for search engines—utilizing hot keywords and keeping up with trends—which will consequently bring more traffic as your web-page climbs to the top results.
Social media and referral traffic is also helpful and plays a vital rote for the new websites traffic sources, though the sustainability of the latter is much more hard to achieve. Social media is a sure-fire way of gaining traffic, whether you do so by sharing your own website’s links on your social media account or people do that themselves. On the off-chance your link goes viral, it will spread like a plague on the virtual space and you will gain lots of traffic.
Referral, though similar in essence, would require other websites to share your link. If your content is of decent quality, some websites will start linking to you. Since newborn websites do not have much authority/credibility, you will need to form partnerships with other websites ranking similar to yours as part of the link-building process. Also look for guest posting opportunities where you can also plug your website.
It is evident that with so many sources of traffic available, newborn websites—despite all the hardships they may face along the way—have clearly plenty of chances to progress and succeed. If you are oblivious to where most of your traffic comes from, it is time for you to stop leaving it up to chance and instead start paying attention to it. Correct and strategic use of the sources as well as awareness which ones work in your favor will result in more traffic down the road.
We believe that we have covered almost everything about the new websites traffic sources. You can also learn more on various things related to websites in our Blog Section. You can also share your ideas on newborn websites traffic sources. You can choose our award wining WordPress Themes for your websites. They are SEO Optimized, user friendly, features rich, elegant and professional for company to personal sites.
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