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4 Important Steps to Take as Your Website Grows and Gets More Traffic
A growing website is a great thing, but success can be a poisoned chalice if you aren’t prepared for the new problems you’ll face as its popularity increases.
To give you a head start, here are some things you can do to help your site thrive, rather than being encumbered by the influx of fresh visitors.
Consider Upgrading Your Website Hosting
You may be relying on a shared or basic web hosting platform for now, but as you bring in more visitors these plans are often not enough.
A higher-tier enterprise hosting solution will include features like faster loading speeds, increased storage capacity and improved security measures, all of which can dramatically improve the user experience, and make managing content easier.
If you have specific needs, such as video streaming or enhanced database management, then an upgrade might be necessary to ensure everything runs smoothly. In short, investing in quality web hosting is key when scaling up a growing website.
Analyze Your Audience and Monitor Traffic Patterns
By understanding more about who visits your site, you can better cater content to those visitors. This includes analyzing the source of the traffic and seeing which proportion of visitors are generated by things like organic search, referral links, social media clicks and so forth.
Tracking how long visitors from different sources stay on each page, and which pages get the most views, will provide important indicators of engagement and success, or lack thereof.
Moreover, by keeping tabs on where people are coming from in terms of geography, and also delving into demographic information, you can make better marketing decisions, and come up with killer content strategies, which we’ll discuss more later.
Optimize for Search Engines to Increase Visibility
If you want the growth of your site to be sustainable, rather than a flash in the pan, you need to get serious about SEO.
In order to increase visibility on Google and its counterparts, it’s important that your content is easily discoverable. This can be done by creating keyword-rich titles, meta descriptions and page URLs, all of which should reflect what potential customers are looking for.
Having a sitemap in place also helps ensure that Google can crawl through each page quickly and accurately during indexing runs. And considering things like page load speeds and the role they play in impacting search rank will put you ahead of competitors in the same niche.
Develop a Content Strategy to Keep Visitors Coming Back
As we mentioned earlier, a good content strategy can propel an up and coming site to new heights, so you need to focus on developing one that clicks with your core audience, while also being capable of bringing in newcomers as well.
One way to do this is ensuring that the content actually gets to the people who it’s aimed at. This could include creating an email list for regular updates, adding new blog posts regularly, and creating interesting visuals to draw attention to key points made on landing pages.
You may want to consider repurposing existing content into different formats, such as videos or podcasts, as this can help reach audiences who prefer these types of media over the written word.
And of course, having a social media presence is essential in today’s digital landscape, so building a following that you can share your content with will generate more traffic for your site, and unleash its potential with time.
Final Thoughts
You can’t tread water when your website is growing, or else you’ll end up sinking in the long term. It’s better to be prepared to scale up your operations, and get to grips with what visitors want, so you can give them it every time they arrive on your site.