Designing for the 4 Types of Web Traffic, Part 2

Designing for The 4 Types of Web Traffic, Part 2

Last month, we took a look at two of the four types of traffic your site should accommodate. We covered organic search traffic as well as paid search traffic, two sources that rely on your site to have a strong presence in search engine results. Today, we’ll be covering the two traffic sources that have nothing to do with search engines: referrals and direct traffic. Like we mentioned before, each traffic source requires different design techniques to generate the optimal results. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some ways you can design your site with referrals and direct visitors in mind.

Referrals

These are visitors that got to your site from a link on another web page. They were, in essence, referred to your content by another web site. What would make other sites more likely to refer their visitors over to your site and generate more traffic for you? How do you make sure referred visitors find your site relevant enough to stay and not simply bounce back to the site they were on?

The best answer to both of these questions is to pack your site full of engaging, useful, shareable content. If other site owners think their audience will find your content useful, they’ll want to share it to increase engagement with their own audience. Interesting or enlightening blog articles, well-made infographics, software or design asset packs, and other unique assets make for great content to link to. The more unique, one-of-a kind assets your site has, the better.

Direct Traffic

Finally, we have direct traffic: any visitors that reach your site by directly typing a url into their browser’s address bar. These are often visitors already familiar with your site, but keep in mind that urls can spread through word-of-mouth. In both instances, more visitors will be inclined to reach your site if it has simple, clean urls that make sense and are easy to remember.

The first step to memorable urls is to choose a domain that makes sense for your brand. The closer your domain is to your actual brand name, the easier it will be for potential visitors to remember it. For example, say you have a brand called “Peppermint Bark Dog Biscuits”. You’d want your domain to be “peppermintbark.com” so that anyone can find you online, even after only knowing your brand name. It can sometimes be impossible to get the exact domain you want, however, so something close like “barkdogbiscuits.com” would also work nicely.

All of your individual pages’ url slugs should also make sense and contain simple words separated by hyphens. Try to avoid numbers, symbols, and other things that would make your url slugs unintelligible and difficult to type out. Going back to our dog biscuits example, if you have a page dedicated to your dog biscuit flavors, your url slug should be something simple like “peppermintbark.com/flavors” or “peppermintbark.com/biscuits”. The same goes for any blog articles or other pieces of content your site has—make sure your urls are as easy to type as possible, and you’ll be more likely to get those direct traffic visitors.

That’s all of the web traffic types we have to cover. We’ve gone over organic search, paid search, referred, and direct traffic sources, as well as some techniques you can use to design your site with all of these visitors in mind. Web design can be a real challenge with innumerable things to keep track of. If you feel like you don’t want to go it alone, remember that you can always contact a professional team of web designers like the one at tekRESCUE. We’ll use all of our knowledge and experience to drive as much traffic to your site as we can!

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