6 Common Things Between High Traffic Successful Websites
What distinguishes the High Traffic Successful Websites from the rest? That is a question that every good SEO asks themselves regularly as they strive to outrank sites that appear to dominate Google for every relevant keyword (like Wikipedia or WebMD).
The top high traffic successful websites all serve different purposes and target different audiences, but they all share basic internet marketing concepts that help them succeed. These marketing concepts can help any small website succeed.
Because they helped establish and sustain billion-dollar companies, the marketing concepts you can learn from the best of the best are powerful. These aren't complex strategies or tactics, and they won't set you back as much as you would imagine, so any small business can use them to grow and see an increase in traffic and potentially conversions.
We've prepared a list of qualities that high-performing websites have to help you better understand what makes a website successful. Optimize your website by reviewing the factors outlined below and see improved results.
1. Focus on broader target audience
Smaller firms with limited funds prefer to target an individual who is most likely to buy their product. There's nothing wrong with this, and it's a good idea if you're on a tight budget. Targeting an audience that isn't likely to convert is a waste of money. However, if you want to increase your overall traffic and hence your pool of potential buyers, you'll need to broaden your audience.
All five of the most popular websites on the internet cater to the general public. Facebook began focusing on college students but has since expanded to include your grandparents. Even though women make up most Pinterest users, men are also increasingly joining the world's biggest picture bookmarking website. Both Amazon and eBay cater to the average shopper. Every year, Google's platform handles over 2 trillion searches.
These websites are focused on marketing that helps them establish a name for themselves in the market. The audience should be the emphasis of your business model if it's focused on large transactions. As a result, you'll need to reach out to a broader audience. These businesses have figured out how to provide value in a way that appeals to consumers of all ages.
2. Quality content
The quality of content on most top-ranking websites is well known. Okay, some websites may not always post high-quality content, but every high-ranking website produces premium content at least some of the time.
Remember that high-quality content does not always imply that it is longer or more thorough than others. It might include unique research that no other business could hope to replicate.
When it comes to SEO, high-quality content can assist in boosting several ranking factors. It generates backlinks, reduces bounce rates, and results in a higher clickthrough rate (CTR).
On the other hand, top-ranked websites rely on more than simply the objective quality of their content. They also take steps to improve its performance in Google. That includes including keywords into header tags throughout the content, the page title, and the URL.
It's not easy to create high-quality content, especially when there are no objective means to assess its quality. Your users are in charge of this. However, you can still take steps to increase the likelihood that your users will think favorably of your content.
The first step is to ensure that an expert wrote it. For specific high-ranking sites, such as media outlets, this is a straightforward task. Journalists are experts on particular topics by default. However, nothing prevents you from writing about your skills or employing professional writers.
You can even follow some health websites' lead and have content created by a professional writer and then fact-checked by a medical professional. Doing so has the benefit of having information produced by a good writer who is also medically accurate.
3. High-Quality backlinks
The top-ranking Google sites all have a significant number of backlinks. High-quality backlinks nearly usually imply high ranks, as we all know. According to Backlinko, the top Google result has 3.8 times the number of backlinks as the rest of the first page's results.
Google's top three results generate more new referring domains than the rest of the sites, according to Ahrefs's research. New domains are considerably more likely to refer to pages appearing first and second in the search results. Those pages that rank top acquires between five percent and 14.5 percent of backlinks every month.
It's not simply about having a massive number of backlinks. They must also be of high quality. What is a high-quality backlink? It originates from a reputable domain, is incorporated in its content, and is relevant to your website's topic.
Assume you run an automotive blog. Because it is far more relevant to your topic, a link from another high-ranking auto blog carries more weight and has higher quality than a link from a large health website.
Internal links, on the other hand, should not be overlooked. The most popular websites (particularly news outlets) nearly always make a concerted effort to ensure that every new piece of content connects back to many previous posts.
Internal linking makes it much easier for Google to crawl your website and index your content. The more easily Google can crawl your site, the more likely it will find and rank your content. Internal links may not have the same strength as backlinks, but they can improve results.
All of this means that if you want your site to compete with the industry's top brands, you'll need to get backlinks in a scalable manner.
4. Competitive page load speed
Have you ever waited for the New York Times to load a page? Because top-ranking sites understand the significance of delivering content as quickly as possible. Since 2010, Google has used page load speed as a ranking factor for desktop searches, and in 2018, Google stated that it will now use it for mobile searches.
If you want to compete with the top-ranking sites, you'll need to optimize for page speed. However, it's not so much about gaining an advantage over your competition by making your site 0.1 seconds faster. It's all about having a site that loads quickly enough to avoid degrading the user experience.
According to Google research, if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load, more than half visitors will abandon it.
You will be penalized for more than simply the load time if your site takes too long to load. You'll also be penalized if your bounce rate is high since users become tired of waiting and go to another website instead.
Google's PageSpeed Insights tool is the simplest way to check your page performance. It will tell you how fast your site is, provide a score out of 100, and identify areas for improvement.
5. Great design.
The very first thing your visitors see about your website is its design. Furthermore, 75% of them will assess your company's credibility based on the appearance of its website.
The website layout, navigation menus and buttons, color scheme, and other design components must work together to provide your brand the best possible image. If visitors dislike your site's design, they'll probably press the "Back" button and go to another website.
Apple.com offers a platform that is simple, plain, and very easy to navigate around. It does not have a crazy design, annoying Flash animations, or even pop-ups. The homepages of all ten of the best-performing websites in the world have a white background. White is a basic, transparent hue that makes a perfect canvas for highlighting your other color scheme.
Small businesses frequently make the mistake of building fancy websites with all the bells and whistles. When it comes to website design, the reality is that keeping things basic, clean, and professional is the best way to go. It provides an easy user experience and is reasonably priced.
For that, we would recommend building your website on WordPress. We are saying this because Google loves WordPress. Build with high-quality, standard-compliant code, WordPress generates semantic markup. That, in layman's terms, makes Google and other search engines love WordPress. In Short, its google friendly.
5. Cost of building a website on WordPress
Now you might be wondering how much does it cost to build a website on WordPress? While the WordPress software itself is free, the cost of a website is dependent on your budget and goals.
We can break down the cost of a WordPress Website into the following categories:
WordPress hosting
Domain Name
Design
Plugins and Extensions (Apps)
Starting a WordPress website might cost anywhere from $100 to $500 to $3000, or even up to $30,000. It mostly depends on your requirements.
It's essential to understand what type of website you're building and what you'll need for it since this will directly impact your budget.
6. Content that matches user intent
You ever noticed how some of the high-traffic websites have a plethora of content that all appear to have a slightly different angle on the same subject? That's because they understand the importance of user intent and how much Google values it.
For each inquiry, Google strives to provide the finest and most relevant content. A big part of it is figuring out what the user is trying to achieve with their search. Is it possible that they're attempting to learn something? Are you looking for a topic to research? Do you want to buy something? For each purpose, Google returns different results.
Google, for example, shows e-commerce pages when it believes the user is attempting to make a purchase, but blog articles for information-related queries.
Knowing what type of content Google thinks people want to view is crucial to becoming a top-ranked site because content that fits the user intent for each target keyword is far more likely to rank. That's why so many high-ranking websites contain similar content aimed at the same topics to capture all user intent.
It's also not only a matter of informational vs. commercial content. Users may wish to access a variety of different sorts of informative content. It's a listicle in some instances. Other topics may be better suited to a video.
Taking the effort to learn about the user intent for each term or topic you're targeting can pay off big time. When CoSchedule, a marketing SaaS, aligned content with user intent, they experienced a 594 percent boost in search traffic.
Final Thoughts!
You won't be able to make your website a top-ranking site overnight. You can, however, learn a lot from them and use their strategies to boost your site's Google ranking. As you've discovered, they have quite a few things in common.
You can ensure a solid online presence that drives traffic, engagement, and conversions for your brand by incorporating these factors into your website.
The best thing young athletes can do in any sport learns from the top. This idea applies to online marketing as well. Although your business, product, or website's goal may differ from that of these sizeable online web beasts, you can learn principles that can help you take your website to new heights.