Website traffic is fast becoming an elusive commodity. You’d be hard pressed to find a niche without any competition. This makes it incredibly difficult to rank well on search engines, thus leaving you at the mercy of paid ads to drive traffic.
The conventional wisdom around increasing website traffic is no longer enough. Yes, you can work on a well-rounded content marketing strategy, do SEO and run link building campaigns. This is just one part of the puzzle now. There’s a greater need now to leverage your social media presence in order to increase website traffic.
It’s easier said than done, though. Getting people to leave a social network that they want to spend a lot of their free time on to visit a website is difficult. With enough optimization and focus, it’s entirely possible, and it works out well there’s nothing quite like it.
As one of the leading social media networks of our time, Instagram is a great resource to leverage when trying to increase the traffic on your website. It’s particularly useful if you already have a decent presence on the social network. Those followers can be converted into regular website visitors fairly quickly.
Why Instagram is so important when trying to increase traffic to your website
For marketers, Instagram is a goldmine. It’s one of the most effective social media networks with an audience that’s ready to engage. Instagram also happens to be pretty big across the globe. It has over 1.4 billion users across the globe, making it the fourth more popular social media platform in the world. Studies have also shown that people tend to spend more time on Instagram compared to some of the other networks.
Instagram’s focus on discovery considerably levels the playing field for brands, enabling startups and established businesses alike to tap into an audience that’s actively looking to find new content that appeals to their interests.
Such an engaged audience can be hard to come by on other social networks and this is precisely why Instagram is such an important tool to use when trying to increase traffic to your website.
How Instagram makes things difficult
It’s never too easy. Instagram has made a conscious decision to not make it too easy for brands to send people off the app. That’s understandable, the Meta-owned social media network obviously wants people to not leave the app as much as possible. That might be why it doesn’t allow clickable links in posts.
No matter how much engagement your posts get, the caption can’t include a clickable link. This makes it difficult even for people who want to visit your website, since it requires a bit of manual work from them, and that’s one of the easiest ways to make potential visitors lose interest.
Fortunately, there are several different ways through which you can use Instagram to direct traffic to your website.
How to increase website traffic from Instagram
- Make the most of the Link in Bio
You’ve probably heard your favorite Instagram influencer mention this multiple times. Instagram allows users to add just one external link in the bio on their profile page. So it’s imperative that you make the most of this allowance.
Think of the Link in Bio as the prime real estate on your Instagram profile. You can put the link to your website here or if you’d like to have multiple links, use one of the many Link in Bio tools available to create a landing page that includes as many links as you want.
Since the Link in Bio is a treasured commodity, be sure of the goal you want to achieve. Whether it’s just driving traffic to the home page or a specific landing page, offering an incentive or growing your newsletter subscriber base.
- Remind people that you have a Link in Bio
Remember, there are no clickable links in Instagram posts. Simply adding a Link in Bio isn’t enough. You need to remind your audience that they need to click on the link in your bio, otherwise they may not know that it even exists.
Your Instagram posts can include a reminder in the caption that invites the audience to check out the link in your bio. If you tend to post videos on your feed, that’s another great opportunity to get them to click the link.
Instagram users are very familiar with the Link in Bio. It’s widely used across the entire platform so there’s not going to be a learning curve here for them. They know exactly where to find it and how to use it.
- Don’t sleep on Instagram Stories
Instagram may not have invented the stories format, but it has surely made it its own. Shoppable stories are particularly useful if you’re in the ecommerce business, as you can send visitors directly to a product page.
A shoppable story has a “swipe up” link, so viewers only need to swipe up on the content in the story to be taken to that page. If they’re even remotely interested in your product, chances are they will swipe up.
This is a simple yet powerful way of bringing more organic visitors to the site. The people who follow you on Instagram likely check out the stories that you’re posting. Simply by relying on this feature you could be sending a big chunk of them to your website.
- Use a smart Call to Action with every post
A call to action is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. It sounds very simple, just telling people what you want them to do, but you’d be surprised just how effective it is online.
So whether you’re posting just an image, a video or a story, be sure to include a call to action that invites people to check out your website. The golden rule here is that your call to action shouldn’t appear to be pushing a sale.
It should feel natural, one that stokes the curiosity of the viewer and compels them to visit your website to find out more about the brand.
- Optimize your website for mobile
Think about it. People use Instagram on their mobile devices. When you send them to your website, they’ll still be on their smartphone. If your website is not properly optimized for mobile viewing, they’re more likely to leave it without even seeing what you have to offer.
So while you focus your efforts on trying to get more people from Instagram to your website, do make sure that it’s optimized for mobile. Otherwise, all those efforts will have been for nothing.
Boost your efforts with Instagram marketing
Your marketing efforts on Instagram should go far beyond getting people to the website. There are a plethora of tools offered on the social network that you can utilize to grow your Instagram presence further and increase engagement.
Remember, the more popular your Instagram account, the larger the audience is going to be. Even getting a fraction of them over to the website could prove to be very beneficial.
