6 Ways to Increase Your Website Traffic: Q&A w/ Online Marketing Expert Neil Patel

If you could snap your fingers and be granted one wish for your real estate business, what would it be? An endless stream of deals? More customers? Something else?

Since you aren’t finding a magic lamp anytime soon, the next best course of action is: what is the main driver of all the things on your wish list (more deals, more buyers, more private money, etc.)?

The answer: your website. If you can increase the visibility, viewership, and conversion rate of your website, then your wish list should take care of itself.

One of the best entrepreneurs out there that teaches business owners how to optimize their website is Neil Patel. He is a marketing and online expert with many distinctions, including Top Influencer on the Web (Wall Street Journal), Top 10 Online Marketer (Forbes), 100 Most Brilliant Companies in the World (Entrepreneur Magazine), Top 100 Entrepreneur (President Obama).

In our recent conversation, Neil provided his sage advice on how to drive more traffic to your website. In the following Q&A, you’ll learn when to focus on increasing traffic vs. increasing conversion, how to increase your unique visitors and optimize conversion, what to do when starting a blog, how to increase SEO ranking, and the common mistake made when establishing an online presence.

Be sure to visit Neil’s blog for even more marketing and online guidance.

1: If I had to pick between the two, which should I be focusing on: increasing traffic or increasing conversions?

“It depends. If you don’t have a ton of traffic, then you should focus on traffic. If you have a lot of traffic, then focus on conversion.”

“I usually say if you’re under 10,000 [unique visitors per month], focus on traffic. If you’re over 10,000, focus more on conversion. Unless you’re in a B2B segment in which each customer is worth hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars. [If that is the case], the moment you’ve reached 3,000 visitors, focus on conversion.”

2: What is an easy way to increase my number of unique visitors?

“One of the simplest ways [to increase unique visitors] is go look up all of your articles that you have written, or podcasts or videos that you have produced, go put in competitor ones or ones that are similar – you can google to find them – and put in that URL into search.twitter.com. You’ll see everyone else who shared it. Message them and try to get them to share yours. They already shared similar content, why won’t they share yours?”

“Little things like that work extremely well, and if you do those over time, you’ll get more social shares, you’ll get more readers, more repeat visitors, and your overall traffic will go up.”

In other words, find the competition, see who is sharing their articles, and ask those accounts to share your content too.

3: Once I have over 10,000 unique visitors per month, how do I convert those visitors into customers?

“The way I drive conversions is I use tools like Hello Bar, I do e-mail pop-up sliders, modal [window]”

“I also do things like running A/B tests, I do user recordings to see mouse movements [to identify] where people are getting stuck, to see where the drop off is within your funnel, and that’s the area you probably want to focus on first.”

4: I want to create my first blog. What advice would you give me for maximizing my success?

“I would actually say use WordPress, and make sure URL structures don’t have dates in them; a lot of times WordPress likes putting dates in URLs. With one click of a button you can get rid of that.”

“When a URL has dates – I used to have that in 2016, and when I removed the dates, my search traffic went up by over 50% in less than 30 days, the reason being when your URL… Mine is NeilPatel.com, and then it’s /date/coast-title, Google associates it with the date, so then over time it doesn’t continually rank well. When you remove the dates, they realize that ‘Hey, this article is related to marketing (or real estate or whatever it may be) and not a specific date,’ then you rank better.”

“The biggest thing other than using WordPress is just focus on content and focus on what’s popular. You can put in competitor URLs on Ahrefs and BuzzSumo and you’ll see what terms and what content that your competitors are writing are really popular.”

“From there, what you want to do is write similar articles, but that are just more detailed and better. But the key is if you see what other people are.”

5: What are the best practices for increasing my SEO ranking on Google?

“More detailed and better content, and then from there, reaching out to everyone who shared all the other online marketing articles on Twitter and asking them to share mine.”

“Then cross-linking for my own posts. Anytime I reference online marketing, I link to that main ‘cornerstone’ content, which would be that guide on online marketing.”

“With cross-linking, what I mean by that is let’s say you write an article on how to sell a home and make money as a realtor. Let’s say you have a detailed guide called ‘The Beginner’s Guide To Being a Realtor,’ but now you’re writing this new blog post called ‘How To Make Money Selling Homes.’ Let’s say you talk about ‘Yeah, right when you get your realtor license and you’re just starting off…,’ you may want to link that ‘Hey, when you’re getting started as a realtor and you just got your license and you’re starting off’ – whatever that phrase may be, link it to that guide on ‘The Beginner’s Guide To Being a Realtor.’ That’s an internal cross-linking.”

6: What is a common mistake you see entrepreneurs make when they’re establishing an online presence?

“A big mistake that I’m seeing when people are trying to [establish an online presence is] they expect results right away and they don’t stick with things… The reason being is marketing in general – content marketing, or any form of online marketing – takes time to see results and build that brand. To build that brand you have to do different types of marketing; you can’t just be like ‘I want to build a brand,’ right?”

“Whatever you’re trying to do and you’re trying to market, it takes time, and its consistency. Most people, when they’re trying to build that personal brand or get more traffic or grow their business, they’re doing it for a month or two and then they just stop.”

“It takes six months to see some decent results, one year to see good results, two years to really start seeing it flourish and grow.”

“You need to be writing content multiple times a week, you need to be sharing posts on the social web multiple times a week, you need to be participating in the community multiple times a week. You can’t do everything; you should do SEO every week, content marketing, social media marketing… But pick one or two channels of those and then go from there. So whatever it is, do it multiple times a week and just pick two or one if that’s all you have time for, and then as you have more time, expand into two, and then expand into three etc.”

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as an offer to buy or sell any securities or to make or consider any investment or course of action.