Every publisher knows that in the world of ad monetization, traffic is king — and monetizing that traffic can mean major revenue. The challenge is that in order to work with most Ad Ops providers, including Sortable, a minimum traffic threshold has to be met!
So how do you go about getting more of it? Is all traffic equal, or are there types of traffic that mean more to your site?
We’ll be answering all of these questions and, hopefully, you can use them to get your traffic soaring to new heights — and start turning that traffic into real revenue.
Let’s start by talking about what “quality traffic” really means. All types of traffic are not created equal, so focusing on high-quality traffic will not only endear you to the Ad Ops partner of your choosing but will maximize your ad revenue as well.
Types of traffic sources
- Organic traffic
Often considered the king of all traffic sources, organic traffic is highly sought after, and hard-earned — mostly because it’s seen as a metric for how interesting your content is. Organic traffic is traffic earned from search engine results. The more interesting your content is to the public, the more likely it is to command top advertising dollars from brands around the world.
- Social traffic
Social media has become a true force in the marketing world and can do a lot to swing traffic metrics your way. This traffic comes from sharing content through your social network, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram. Developing a social media following of people who love and engage with your content can be a game-changer. Don’t leave social media out of your content strategy!
- Paid traffic
Any site traffic that you receive as a result of advertising spend is considered paid traffic. But even within this category, not all traffic is equal! Make sure that the traffic you’re buying is coming from valid users — or that it’s not coming from a bunch of bots. Generally speaking, Google or Facebook are great sources to buy traffic from.
How to boost high-quality traffic
Now that we’ve looked at the kinds of site traffic, let’s look at ways to boost your traffic:
- On-page SEO
The best content strategies start out by knowing the difference between high and low-quality content. Is your content adding value to the internet? Have you expanded upon a topic in a way that provides new insight into a particular topic or concept? If you can’t answer a big, fat yes to these types of questions, we would suggest a quick trip back to the drawing board until you can.
Once you’ve honed your content to make sure that it’s in fighting shape, you need to make sure that it’s being indexed properly by the web crawlers that Google and other search engines are using to catalogue the vast quantities of information on the internet.
Title tags
This one is fairly simple and involves wrapping your content titles in an H1 tag and your subheadings in H2 tags. This helps Google determine the structure of the page and identify whether or not there’s a subject matter match between the content, the title of the article, and keywords in the search parameters used by people using the search engine.
External links
These links are to reputable websites that are not your own content. They function to raise your search engine ranking by showing Google that you’re an authority on the subject in question and that your page contains useful information.
Internal links
Internal links are links to your own content — content that’s on other pages of your website. This helps increase your authority with Google and increases the amount of time that users are spending on your page.
URL choice
This may seem straightforward, but many folks are still relying on automatically generated URLs, and this can really affect your SEO. Make sure that your URLs are easy to read, contain keywords that are relevant to the article, and are relatively future proof — if you make changes to the architecture of your website, making the appropriate redirects can be a complete pain.
- Backlinking
Backlinks are coveted in the world of SEO because they represent a sort of social cache that can have a major impact on how much of an authority Google and other search engines believe your website to be. Generally speaking, a backlink is when a site that already has domain authority links back to an article or page on your website. Many companies employ a backlinking strategy where they contact sites with articles relevant to their content and ask to be featured within it. Some also offer a link trade — where each business features a link to relevant content within an article or page on their website.
This strategy only works if you’re working with businesses who have a higher domain authority than you do — so make sure you check! If you’re looking for a great tool, check out Moz — they have some great free SEO tools! (See what we did there?)
- Social media
This should surprise no one, as social media platforms are a way to encourage mass sharing of content — and that’s exactly why it relates to SEO and improving your site traffic. The more people interact with and view your content, the more relevant Google and the other search engines deem that content to be. Especially since the more people interact with your content, the more people will likely link back to your content, and then backlinking and SEO come into play as well.
Lastly, the more people interact with the content on your social media accounts, the less expensive your pay-per-click advertising campaigns are — so it’s a win-win!
With these tips and areas of focus for your upcoming content strategy, you should have traffic knocking down your metaphorical door in no time — and we hope you’ll get in touch with us when it comes to maximizing your return on that investment by upping your Ad Ops game.
Until then,
The Sortable Team
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