types-of-traffic

What Are the Different Types of Web Traffic & Why Do They Matter?

Web traffic refers to the data exchanged between a website and its users. Web traffic is essential for any website to succeed, and it plays a critical role in determining its level of success.   

Understanding the different web traffic types is crucial because it can help you understand where your visitors are coming from, what your audience is interested in, and how they engage with your content. This data helps improve website performance, boost traffic, and achieve your online goals.   

What Are the Different Types of Web Traffic?  

There are seven types of web traffic mentioned, and each has its unique characteristics and implications for your website:  

  1. Organic traffic 
  2. Paid traffic 
  3. Direct Traffic 
  4. Email Marketing 
  5. Referral Traffic 
  6. Social Traffic 
  7. Other Campaigns 

Organic traffic  

Organic traffic refers to the visitors who visit your website through unpaid, natural, and non-promotional search engine results. Organic traffic comes from the clicks on those non-paid, algorithm-driven search results. When someone searches for something, Google’s algorithm shows a relevant answer to that query.   

This type of traffic is also known as unpaid and organic traffic because it is generated through the website’s content and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts rather than through paid advertising. Organic traffic can be a valuable source for website users since it is generally more cost-effective and sustainable over the long term than paid traffic sources.  

Paid traffic  

Paid traffic refers to the visitors who come to your website through any paid campaign, promotion, or advertisement. Here are some examples of paid campaigns:  

  • Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
  • Influencer marketing
  • Retargeting ads
  • Native advertising
  • Display advertising 
  • Social media advertising (Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Twitter)  

Direct traffic  

Direct website refers to visitors who enter your website through the URL directly into their browser or click on a bookmark to access the website. In other words, users know your website address and intentionally type it into their browser to visit your site.  

Email marketing  

Email marketing is a form of organizational promotion or informational message to groups of people through emails. The purpose of email marketing is to promote a product, service, or brand, drive traffic to a website, or build a loyal relationship with your customers. This is an effective method to reach your targeted audience.   

Referral traffic  

Referral traffic comes from the visitors who visit your website through any other website. Referring websites can be any external source like social media promotion, search engine results, guest blogging, infographics, affiliate links, etc. Referral traffic is important for boosting your website visibility and driving more traffic.  

Social media traffic  

Social media traffic refers to the visitors that come to your website through any social media platform like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. These visitors click on links and posts you share that lead to a website. Social traffic is an important metric for websites and businesses to track. It can help them understand the effectiveness of their social media marketing efforts and how well they are engaging with their target audience.  

Other campaigns  

Other campaigns are a category that tracks all the traffic that cannot be attributed to a specific source or campaign. When any user clicks on a link or advertisement to visit a website, the website can track where the traffic is coming from by using the parameters of a campaign.  

These campaign parameters identify the traffic source, such as the search engine, social media platform, and specific ad campaign. While “Other Campaigns” is a catch-all category, it doesn’t mean that the traffic is not important or ordinary. It could include traffic from a wide variety of sources, such as affiliate links, email campaigns, direct traffic, etc.   

Importance of Web Traffic Your Online Business  

Website traffic plays a vital role in analyzing a website’s popularity and effectiveness in achieving its goals, such as increasing web traffic, boosting sales, brand building, providing information, and brand awareness. Web traffic can also impact a website’s search engine ranking.   

When determining a site’s relevance and authority, Google considers the number of visitors to a website and the duration of time they spend on your pages. Websites with high traffic and user engagement get better search engine rankings, which brings even more traffic to the website.  

Conclusion

Understanding different types of web traffic is important for any business or website looking to increase traffic. All web traffic types have unique characteristics that can provide insights into a website’s performance, audience, and digital marketing efforts. Ultimately, by leveraging the power of web traffic data and using it to develop compelling internet marketing strategies, your business can gain online visibility, attract more users, improve conversions, and engage your targeted audience.  

Schedule a consultation with an Agency Partner Interactive internet marketing specialist for more website traffic tips and strategies to maximize your online presence! 

Boost Website Traffic with Agency Partner Interactive  

Agency interactive Partner is a leading Dallas-based digital marketing agency that offers comprehensive solutions to help businesses improve website traffic, generate more qualified leads, and increase conversions. We understand the importance of web traffic and how to use raw data to form compelling strategies to add value to your brand.  

Our content marketing experts create high-quality creative, engaging, and SEO-optimized content for your websites, like blogs, guest posts, social media posts, and more, to engage your audience and help you achieve your brand goals.  

SEO is a long-term process, but our clients are happy to achieve results in as little as 3 months. On average, our clients see as much as a 430% increase in their website traffic and a 113% increase in their top 3 keywords rankings.   

Are you ready to take your brand to the next level? Reach out to us today, and let us help you drive more traffic, leads, and sales for your business. 

api-vulnerabilities

API Vulnerabilities and How to Protect Them Part 1

Expert Tips For API Vulnerabilities and How to Protect Them Part 1

Cybersecurity has never been more critical. In the last several years, APIs have taken center stage for modern stakeholders dependent upon qualities like productivity, reliability, and programming among others. So many of these things modestly exist under the radar of attention-grabbing, leaving them prone to at risk for attack by bad actors. To help you gain a better understanding of what to look for in keeping your site’s APIs protected, here’s a breakdown of the most common types of attacks and what you can do to prevent them.

What Is An API

API stands for Application Programming Interface, a collection of tools used by web developers and programmers to build new ‘middle man’ software that sends information for a task between a site or app and its user. A site or app’s API(s) is like a car’s engine. APIs can also act as layers of security, too, which we’ll be focusing on here.

Why APIs Are A Big Concern

Why does API security matter so much? Well, sometimes that information transfer includes sensitive data, especially when dealing with business APIs, about the customer, user, or even the business itself. Thus keeping the APIs safe and secure helps prevent those interfaces from becoming compromised in any way. 

Typical API Security Risks

The biggest causes for concern when it comes to the risk of API security are

  • sensitive data exposure
  • misconfigured security
  • inadequate monitoring
  • broken authentication
  • rate-limiting and lack of resources

The implications of these and other risks are huge.

Exposure to DDoS Attacks

This type of attack, a Distributed Denial of Service, generally is led by a network of bots to overload a target with artificial traffic. This prevents genuine users from accessing the site, rendering the site inoperable, and so it typically results in damaged brand reputation and loss of customers and sales.

Parameters Attacks

A parameters attack focuses on the URL field, manipulating the site target without the user’s knowledge or consent. This can involve data like a user’s credentials, product information, etc. Because URLs often follow a pattern, they are popular aims for attackers. 

Broken Object-Level Authorization

broken object-level authorization or BOLA means the application did not actually verify the user has the necessary approval to access an asset of another user. Nearly every single company has an API at risk of BOLA.

Insufficient Monitoring and Logging

When lacking information logs or lacking the right context, format, storage, etc, a company’s APIs can therefore also lack the resources to detect a break in security. If these logs aren’t backed up, intruders can erase the logs, essentially covering up both their tracks and their identities. This is especially dangerous for the financial and medical sectors.

How to Protect Against API Security Issues

Identify Vulnerabilities

In order to know the “how”, you first have to know the “what” – What API vulnerabilities are you or your company most prone to? No easy question to answer, especially as a company grows and integrates more and more APIs. A good first step is using an Extended Detection and Response (XDR). It’s specially designed to check for security flaws and support proper authentication.

Use Access Tokens

Using tokens is always a good idea when it comes to securing APIs. They allow sharing of information without necessarily having to share credentials, too. The tokens are always confidential.

Data Encryption

This is the foundation of securing APIs from attacks. Agency Partner recommends you use TLS or Transport Layer Security to scramble any and all data, especially the uniquely identifying kind. It’s also important that valid identifications be required so that only approved handlers have access to said critical data.

IP Whitelisting

Consider this your VIP list. Only specific IP addresses are granted access to the network. This is very helpful in preventing any unauthorized entry that can affect APIs within a particular private network. Whitelisting tends to work best in centrally administered locations that typically deal with a steady task load. This system can take effect in as little as 24 hours, and If any attack does happen, you can be sure that it came from within. 

API security issues are a real and present danger to businesses of all sizes. By understanding the vulnerabilities that exist and taking steps to mitigate them, you can protect your business and its data. Agency Partner is here to help you do just that. We have the expertise and tools necessary to secure your site or app APIs against attack, so contact us today for a consultation!

 

 

increase-website-traffic

22 Ways to Increase Website Traffic

Expert Tips For 22 Ways to Increase Website Traffic

It’s totally normal for web traffic to be down during the holidays, but maybe you’ve noticed traffic to your site hasn’t picked up again yet as we get further into the start of the new year. Perhaps it’s time to shake things up a little! We here at Agency Partner have put together our top 22 ways and strategies to increase website traffic to get your analytics back on track for 2022!  

1. Leverage on-page SEO 

  • It’s never too late to optimize for SEO. This is a great way to increase site traffic without spending a dime. Meta tags, internal links, alt texts, descriptions, readability – all simple opportunities for higher ranking on SERPs to boost traffic  

2. Cross-promote across social media account channels 

  • Your business has at least one social media channel, right? (…right??) Why not use it to promote the latest blog post on your site to naturally drive traffic? Do the same with your email newsletters? Draw attention by featuring an element of your site as a teaser on your socials that pays off for the user when they follow the link for the full article or freebie exclusively found on your site!  

3. Long-tail keywords 

  • Another facet of SEO, long-tail keywords are the more specific phrases (keywords of 3 or more words) users use as they narrow down what they’re searching for. They account for a big chunk of web searches, so it’s highly useful to know how to wield their highly targeted power.  

4. Influencer marketing 

  • Influencer marketing used to be all about the accounts with hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers. Now we’re seeing the power of micro-and nano-influencers and their hyper-targeted audience. Use that to your advantage with partnerships of features, promotions, and networking. 

5. Guest post on blogs 

  • Help establish you and your brand’s site as an authority by guest posting on other sites about your particular area of expertise. Pitch your content ideas for a feature to both drive free referral traffic and strengthen your position in the market! 

6. Clear out non-performing content 

  • Audit your own site for content that may now be out of date or from early on where your quality or style was still in development. Take the chance to update and revamp it. What’s old is new (and improved) again! 

7. Consider PPC 

  • No shame in Pay Per Click advertising! It’s the fastest route to results, and, exactly as the name suggests, you only pay for the ad whenever a user clicks on it! 

8. Have guests post on your blog 

  • What a great opportunity for some more cross-promotion on this two-way street with creators in similar niches or with audiences relevant to you both! 

9. Email blasts 

  • Email marketing has been around for decades already, and it’s still as powerful as ever to direct traffic to your site with mailing list blasts and automated newsletters about new services or products or blog content features. Just be careful not to overdo it. 

10. Build up your online reviews 

  • Social proof is more powerful than you probably think. Give casual users every reason to click on links to products and services on your site by building up online reviews! 

11. Sign up for Google Trends (aka stay relevant!) 

  • Focusing your content on what’s being talked about Right. Now. is such a simple, efficient tactic to reach audiences. If you’ve done the work for optimizing SEO already, too, a traffic increase is all but guaranteed. 

12. Look at competitors 

  • Get inspiration by seeing what’s working for your competitors – then put your own spin on it! 

13. Link build internally 

  • The longer you can keep your users on your site, the more useful you are to your users and the more SEO will naturally favor you. Look for opportunities in your content to reference your past relevant content via internal links. 

14. Ensure device responsiveness 

  • With mobile device access only continuing to trend upward over desktop access, do not make the mistake of devaluing the responsiveness of your site across all devices. Doing so is essentially telling your users to go elsewhere. 

15. Listen to your analytics data 

  • It’s one thing to know what analytics categories are and that they’re important; it’s another to know how to interpret them. Analytics telling you you have a load time of 4.3 seconds can tell you that your site needs streamlining and that it’s probably too slow a speed to satisfy your visitors’ patience. High bounce rate? Look more critically at your content quality. That’s a ton of valuable info about possible traffic drivers right there! 

16. Write how people read 

  • Speaking of high bounce rates, always remember that people typically don’t read on the internet – they skim. If your content is full of big blocks of text, you likely won’t reach your user in a productive way. Keep your site easily readable.  

17. Use push notifications 

  • Especially useful if you’re a business with a product or service to sell, look into setting up push notifications for your site whenever you have a new feature or sale. Just like with email marketing, though, keep aware of how much is too much for your users. 

18. Don’t forget about Pinterest 

  • People don’t intuitively think of Pinterest as a search engine, but that’s exactly what it is at heart! Do your keyword research for how to caption your pins and create interesting boards featuring your unique content. If your audience demographic is there, you should be there, too. 

19. Appreciate the power of H1 tags 

  • If your content tends to run on the long side, H1 tags are your best friend. They help make your site easier for search engine crawlers to understand the focus of your content, thus helping to boost your SERP ranking and making it easier for your site to be found in searches! 

20. Add social share buttons to your site 

  • Include social share buttons wherever they naturally fit under products or at the top or bottom of blog posts etc. The easier it is for your content to be shared, the more likely the user will help to drive traffic for you. 

21. Retargeting ads 

  • Remind the user of the items they left in their cart on your site as they navigate around the internet. Maybe they just need a gentle reminder to come back for them! 

22. Create a content schedule 

  • It’s so much easier to drive organic traffic when your audience knows when to expect a reason to revisit. Set a realistic content schedule for your output and stick to it!

These ideas will certainly help but know that success takes patience. The change will happen as you implement it wisely and stay consistent with it. It can feel like an overwhelming process as a business owner, and API’s digital marketing and development teams are here to help manage the load for you. Contact us today for a consultation! 

 

web_traffic

5 Important Blogging Techniques to Increase Website Traffic

Expert Tips For Increased Website Traffic

Blogging is a key method of improving the SEO of your website. In fact, B2B companies that have a blog generate 67% more leads than those that don’t have one. Blogging builds brand awareness and provides value to your target audience.

Since blogging is directly correlated to website traffic, it’s important to create content that will not only rank well online but also keep your audience glued to your website. Fortunately, blogging isn’t difficult if you know the right steps to take. 

These five fundamental steps will help you create a blog that is a magnet for qualified leads in your industry. 

1. Use Internal Links

Have you ever viewed a Wikipedia article? If you haven’t, then here is what one looks like:

internal_links

Do you see all of the blue links positioned on the page? These are called internal links. From a reader’s perspective, internal links aid the understanding of an audience. If a reader doesn’t know what a specific term is, like in the Wikipedia article, they can click the internal link and be directed to another page.

This is why Wikipedia receives millions of web users every day, and you can follow this strategy to boost the traffic of your website. Internal links are also great for improving your SEO

By using more internal links, search bots can crawl and index your website more conveniently. Also, internal links keep readers on your website longer and increase their dwell time.

Dwell time is an enormous driver of SEO because it tells search engines that your website is truly useful. To leverage the use of internal links, create a spreadsheet that lists all of your web pages and blog posts.
Organize them and you will be able to draw from this spreadsheet anytime you see an opportunity to create an internal link.

2. Write Engaging Content

Have you ever read a user manual before opening a new product? If so, you’re like most people, you don’t. If you eventually run into a problem with your product, you may simply refer to an online how-to article or watch a YouTube video. 

Why? This is because both options are engaging for viewers. Before writing an article, consider how you can make your content as engaging as possible. Generally speaking, what strategies are you going to employ to avoid making your article full of whitespace and text?

One of the brightest minds in SEO, Brian Dean, regularly posts engaging on his blog, Backlinko. Take a look at some snapshots from his blog.

engaging_content
engaging_content

Images from Backlinko

engaging_contentDo you see how Brian informs his audience by using visuals, snapshots, and quotes? This keeps readers following along while he’s explaining very complicated subjects. Brian also writes in a very simple yet informative tone to get his point across effectively.

It’s no wonder why that post received more than 1,500 shares on social media. Content that follows this blueprint will be shared to a wider audience and attract increased web traffic from qualified leads ready to convert.

3. Create

Headlines are very important on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Compelling Headlines
It’s important to remember that there are thousands of options your audience can choose from when browsing for websites. The headline that sticks out usually attracts the most clicks. 

For this reason, focus your efforts on creating irresistible headlines that will turn heads. After all, if you spend your time developing outstanding content no one knows about, you’ll only be wasting your time.

With that said, here are some tips for writing the best headlines for your content. 

  • If you are writing a list, create a clickbait title. This doesn’t mean that you should trick web users. Simply use buzzwords and numbers to make your article stand out.
  • Add primary keywords to your headers. This will not only help your articles rank online, but it will also show potential readers that your article is just what they were looking for.
  • Keep your headlines brief. Google and other search engines have a character limit for headlines. If your headline is truncated, potential readers may not fully understand what your article is about and move on to another web page.

4. Utilize FAQs

Frequently asked questions or simply FAQs can be added to your article to answer questions that weren’t already addressed. It’s also an opportunity to add long-tail keywords to your article. 

Overall, FAQs keep readers on your website longer, especially if they really need to understand confusing topics like life insurance. Choice Mutual, a life insurance broker, always adds FAQs to keep readers on their blogs informed.

faq

Image from Choice Mutual

Anyone who has ever gone through the process of securing life insurance knows how valuable these FAQs can be. Going out of your way to collect FAQs on the topic you’re writing about can also inspire more searches down the road.

Just look at what happens when you search the keyword “how to purchase life?”

insurance
Do you see the “People also ask” section near the middle of the SERP? Google posts questions like those to give you an indication of what people are searching for online. This is the easiest way to grab questions to include in your FAQs.

Since Google is posting these questions, it automatically means that a lot of people are searching for these keywords, giving you a great chance to rank and build more website traffic for your content. 

5. Use Visuals

The last step of increasing your web traffic is using visuals in each article. Articles with images get 94% more views than those without them. There are numerous free image providers you can choose from to find relevant images for your content. 

You can also use infographics, charts, and GIFs to enhance your content and make it more impactful to your target audience. 

Give Us a Call Today!

Do you want to learn more about how we can give your website traffic a boost? If so, give us a call at (214) 295-5845 or click here to Get a Free Quote. 

Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “5 Important Blogging Techniques to Increase Website Trafficinstead.

Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!