We talk to Saxon from Gravitate Digital about how to increase traffic to your website
Increasing traffic to your website is hard and finding ways to increase it long-term is even harder. But imagine a flurry of interested people so excited about your website that they can’t click the link on your products or service offers fast enough. Getting consistent traffic to your website from your ideal customer base is what dreams are made of!
But that’s not real life, is it? The truth is that we have to work really hard at getting traffic to our website and even harder to turn it into paying customers. That is why it was such a treat when we recently teamed up with traffic master Saxon from Gravitate Digital, who shared his battle-tested advice on how to turbocharge traffic to your website.
Key takeaways from our lunch and learn with Saxon:
- Build the perfect team. Figure out what content you need on your site to turbocharge your traffic and use it to run your ad campaigns.
- Great content is hard to make. But the businesses that spend time and effort creating it will succeed long-term.
- Don’t let your website be the weakest link in the chain. If you’re paying for impressions and advertising campaigns, make sure they convert!
- It’s important to ensure you keep testing, measuring and iterating to make the right decisions – Google Analytics can help with that.
At Five by Five, we build great-looking, high-performing websites, and are known as one of the Gold Coast & Australia’s leading WordPress web design & SEO agencies. We have 16+ years of experience in the web design industry. If you or your business need a new, high-performing digital solution, then contact us today and find out why we have 200+ 5* Google reviews.
Who is Saxon Farnworth?
Saxon is the director of Gravitate Digital – a leading marketing and ads agency in Australia. He loves snowboarding so much that he helped to invent a diverse range of training products and tutorials for people to improve their snowboarding abilities. He has helped to scale a garage start-up e-commerce store into an internationally recognised brand. His degree in psychology also certainly helps him understand consumer behaviour!
Digital marketing is like a game of soccer
He shared his analogy of how digital marketing is like a game of soccer with us – and don’t worry, even if you’re not a soccer fan, it’ll make sense. Digital marketing is a powerful shortcut in understanding how to increase traffic to your website while also building a larger customer base.
In a soccer game, the player who scores the goal doesn’t do it alone. He needs the other players in the team to help him get the ball so that he can score. Similarly, in the world of digital marketing, you have SEO as your star player. But you still need the other players on the field to score a goal. Google and social ads help you to get more traffic to your website and take specific action, like purchasing a product, submitting a form, or signing up for an email newsletter.
Use the stats you have
A great way to see all the players on the field and how they’re contributing is the ‘Top Conversion Paths’ report in Google Analytics.
Understanding how to plug the right players in the right positions is an important step. It can be loads of fun to look at analytics and understand your data.
To see first-hand how it works, just follow the path below:
Google Analytics > Conversions> Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths
Line up your team to score goals
Your star player, SEO, needs Google Ads and social ads to help increase traffic to your website and get it ranked higher.
SEO
SEO sounds like a mystical acronym, we know! But it’s just a fancy word for the process of helping your site rank better in Google searches (thus increasing your website’s traffic) and stands for “Search Engine Optimisation”.
Keeping your visitors interested and engaged is the most important part of a successful SEO campaign. With great content, your site should educate and provide value to your visitors, as that builds a relationship of trust, which increases your chance of success.
That’s simply what SEO is all about. It’s a powerful way to drive traffic to your website and a great long-term solution because all your efforts will gradually compound over time, leading to an increased, steady, organic baseline of clients.
Google Ads
Once you have SEO solidly in place with a website people want to explore, you need to ensure your website appears at the top of Google searches, and Google Ads can get you even higher than SEO can – you can appear above position 1.
You can do this by running Google Ads that target the keywords that bring the most value to your business. This increases your website’s traffic and conversions by getting your website in front of more people, and the best part is you only pay when a user clicks on your ad. That’s why it is called Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. And every single day, hundreds of thousands of people jump online to search for businesses exactly like yours!
These ads get people into your sales funnel. A sales funnel is a way to gradually move people from being unsure about what you’re selling to becoming customers and buying your product or services.
You can run three types of Google Ads to bring in highly-qualified traffic:
Search ads: Search ads allow you to reach new clients who search for specific keywords. The more aligned your keywords are, the closer you will be to reaching your ideal client.
YouTube and Display ads: YouTube and Display ads help to create awareness by reaching new users who have never heard of you before, allowing you to reach them on a variety of platforms. You can also use them for retargeting people who have shown interest in your products or services before.
Google Shopping/Performance max campaign: Full sales funnel conversion campaigns are becoming more powerful. Google is investing a lot of time and effort to deliver on them.
Social Ads
Social ads are the lifeblood of any marketing campaign because they can help you reach a new audience and get them interested in your products or services. Social platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook Ads, TikTok (and many more) enable you to bring people into full-funnel campaigns!
Content is the name of the game when trying to increase traffic to your website
Google demands great quality content and rewards websites that take the time and effort to educate and share their expertise on their respective products and services. So to win the game, you need great content.
- Great content is the cornerstone of a clickable website that rewards you with traffic.
- If you run ads for a site with great content, it costs less to run and has a higher success rate.
- You can also run it for longer, which means a higher success rate and more data to work with.
If your website is the weak link in the chain and doesn’t have good content, all the effort from SEO, Google Ads and social ads will be wasted.
Case study
Here is a great example of how you can maximise your website results. Dan from The House of Mouth came to us because he knew his website could be doing better. We helped him make some changes, and now, as a result of our work here at Five by Five, together alongside Gravitate Digital’s Google Ads expertise, Dan’s site is converting at an incredible rate. This means more sales for his company!
We SEO optimised the site and applied some laser-focused targeting through paid ads and retargeting through social media. And the results speak for themselves.
- 226.5% increase in transactions
- Paid ads are delivering a 421% increase in site traffic
- 29.94% increase in conversion rate
- Overall transactions increased by 6.52%
- 2.26% in e-commerce and 365 transactions
The performance comparison for Dan’s site is impressive. The orange line shows the 2021 performance, and the blue line is for this past year.
The game is afoot! SEO, Google Ads and social ads are all ready to pounce on your behalf. All you have to do is line them up correctly and watch as they create the results of your dreams!
