5 Tips to Capitalize On Your Inbound Website Traffic

As Inbound marketers, we're always working on creating content that interests prospective customers. Some of this traffic converts on a Call-to-Action (CTA) or visits your website and contributes to your overall traffic.

Some of your marketing campaigns are designed to help drive an influx of traffic to your site. If that's the case, you want to make sure the experience visiting your website - and what your visitors digest while they're on your website - works to your advantage. 

To help you capitalize on your website traffic, here are 5 tips that you can review and use to update your website and make the most of all the traffic you are generating. Even if you don't have a massive influx of traffic today, it's important to be prepared and ready for it. 

Here are 5 website must-haves for any inbound marketer who wants to capitalize on the traffic coming to their website. 

#1. A concise headline and value proposition

If you run any inbound campaign that is designed for the top of the funnel, you could see an influx of traffic. Regardless of whether the amount of traffic is significant or small, any website that doesn't clearly communicate the value proposition will be confusing. Try keeping your headline and value proposition to a few words and use terms that your audience will immediately understand.

One of the key ways to see if visitors understand your value proposition is to watch bounce rate. If you are using the HubSpot Website Add-on, you can integrate with Google Analytics in one-click to see this metric:

1. Log in to your HubSpot account, and go to Content Settings.
2. Click the box for "Integrate with Google Analytics," and enter your tracking ID.

Your bounce rate should be as low as possible, but many experts consider 35-50% or lower to be "good." If your bounce rate is 70% or above, it's time to consider what is causing visitors to exit your website quickly and address it as quickly as you can. 

#2. SEO components for long-term traffic

An immediate influx of traffic can be great for business and sales, but you also need to ensure you maximize the influx of traffic to grow long-term.

To sustain and grow your website traffic, your content needs to show up where individuals are searching. As a result, you should optimize your most important pages so they're found in search.

Here are a few SEO-tips that you can implement to continue to grow traffic:

1. Ensure that each page has a page title which is relevant to that page. You may have encountered some page titles that are just labeled "homepage", or a descriptive label that is not unique to the company and does not help with search. If you utilize the HubSpot Website Add-on, you can create and edit your page title under "Settings" in the top navigation for an individual page:
   
   
   
   
2. Ensure that each page has a meta description. This is the description that shows up in search results and ideally should be 160 characters or less (think Tweet-size). Make sure the meta description is relevant to the page, and it's even better if it contains a few key terms or phrases that define what that page is about.
   
3. Add alt text to images. Search engines cannot read images in the same way they do text, so Google relies on the text description that you place within the image to describe what it is. Often times when looking at images, you may notice the alt text is just the original file name. But if you have an image about your product, update the image with the product name and a brief description.

These three SEO tips are only scratching the surface of what is possible. Although they may appear like small details, these minor updates can have major impact on organic search traffic over time. 

In addition to setting up your website for SEO, try aligning a page around large traffic drivers. 
For example if you have won any awards, or your company is part of any associations you can create pages that align with these terms based on search. Keep a close eye on Google Trends and take advantage of the growth in search terms that are related to your business.

#3. Relevant Calls-to-Action (CTAs)

Establishing a conversion path for each of your buyer personas should be crucial. Depending on the stage of the buyer's journey they are in, the information they are looking for is vastly different and that also means you need to adapt your CTAs accordingly.

At HubSpot, we utilize Smart CTAs based on lifecycle stage of a contact. Any Marketing Mary leads see a CTA that is focused around starting a trial, and existing customers receive a CTA about the free Inbound Certification course. Here's an example of how you could set up Smart CTAs in HubSpot:

To implement this on your own website, consider your different buyer personas and the conversion path for each. Then, create CTAs that are not only specific to each persona, but relevant to the buying stage they are in. Smart CTAs work well and convert better, too. In fact, we looked at 93,000 CTAs and found that personalized Calls-to-Action converted 42% better than their counterparts.

#4. Follow-up nurturing campaigns

A successful website is a collection of all of your marketing, and one critical component of that is nurturing. 

The company Rent Like a Champion did this extremely well as their seasonal business is primarily designed around football. On the thank-you page for the contest registration, Dave Longwell, Director of Marketing, added the ability to select from a number of upcoming games based on teams selected. Each of these games has a specific date and as such, Dave can nurture all their new contacts around the time of the game to utilize the Rent Like a Champion service.

For your own marketing, ensure that lead nurturing is tied into all of your core forms and campaigns. You don't necessarily need to create an advanced nurturing campaign right from the start - but the campaign should be tied back to relevant information about that contact. If it's information you captured from a form, or CTA clicks, you can use that within your nurturing campaign.

5. A mobile-optimized website

As Benedict Evans, well-known venture capitalist from Andreessen Horowitz recently said on his blog, "mobile is the Internet." The point is, if your website does not look great from every mobile device, you are potentially missing out on leads, and even damaging your brand reputation.

When Google introduced the mobile algorithm change that impacted websites that were not mobile friendly, Entrepreneur Magazine found that 44% of the Fortune 500 websites were not ready. 

So what can we all take from this, besides just the importance of mobile? There are a few things you can do today to help improve your mobile experience:

1. Do you already have a mobile friendly website? Open up your company site on your phone or tablet and see how it looks. Ideally, it will simply be scaled down appropriately for the device, but if you find yourself having to scroll left-to-right to read content - it's likely you have to work on your mobile site a bit more. One quick suggestion: set your website viewport tag for mobile. 
   
   Note: HubSpot Website Platform customers automatically have responsive design built-in to their website and as a result do not need to make any changes to be optimized for mobile.
   
   
2. Go through your website on a mobile device and try interacting with all the videos and media. For example, if you have a video encoded using Flash and you are using an Apple iPhone, it likely won't work. If iOS represents a large (and growing) part of your website traffic, this can be an important finding. Beyond just video, you'll need to ensure that every media element is properly sized, and loads how you would expect it to.

What are some other tips that you have used to prepare your website for additional traffic? Let us know in the comments.