Having a professionally designed website which shows your company brand in its best light is a great idea… but it is not enough to put it live and expect that you will get a flood of visitors.
Getting sufficient visitors to your website takes some effort. If you have a physical shop, you wouldn’t create an eye-catching window display and then leave it unchanged for months. You wouldn’t send out one mailshot and expect that to bring visitors to your shop for the rest of the year. You wouldn’t take one advert in a local paper and expect that to promote your business for ever. In the same way, you need to ensure you refresh the content on your site and actively encourage visitors.
10 ways to improve the traffic to your website
1.Add new content on a regular basis. Make sure it is written by someone who is involved in your business. Create high-quality, engaging and valuable content written with a specific audience in mind. This is the most valuable way to improve traffic to your site. There are no magic wands I’m afraid!
Increasing traffic to your website takes effort and time.
Google is now very adept at recognising genuine, useful content rather than spammy keyword-stuffed content. It is no longer sufficient to fill in the keyword section in your CMS and the meta description and rely on that to draw in the search engines. A well-written meta description can help to encourage a potential visitor to click on your link when it does appear in the search results, but it won’t help to bring you into the results in the first place.
The aim of all search engines is to serve up the very best pages in response to search terms, so if you have high quality content on the specific search term, then you are much more likely to appear in their search results. The more people who follow that link to visit your site, the better the genuine web traffic will become.
2. Encourage other genuine users to share your content – NOT robots posting links on multiple sites which have no connection to the service or products you offer. Having visitors follow a link that takes them to your site and just to bounce straight out again because the content is not what they are seeking will have a negative effect.
3. Use social media to spread links to the new content on your website. Having a blog with help files and advice is a great way to add fresh content and sharing this through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn drives traffic.
4. Remember social media is just that – social! Get involved. Join conversations, offer expert advice and help and share content. It will all work in your favour.
5. Develop a mailing list so you may send out snippets of information on the new content you have created, linked to the full content on your website. Even an avid supporter needs to be told when new content has been added to your site.
6. Avoid “tricks” because “ web traffic” is not the same as encouraging engaged visitors who are likely to buy your products or services.
7. Think very carefully before employing an SEO company. If you take this route, ensure you understand what they will do to promote your company brand and what reports they will provide on an ongoing basis which will show how successful their services are. If you don’t understand the report – request explanations. It is very easy to be paying for SEO after the effect of the company’s input has ceased to make any significant difference.
8. Install Google Analytics on your site and take the time to analyse what it shows. There’s no point having it if you never log in and review the stats.
9. Don’t just rely on online promotion to encourage visitors to your site. Networking in person and giving out business cards with your web address on will drive genuine traffic to the site.
Make sure your website appears on all printed matter you send out.
10. Use video. Creating short video content and posting this to YouTube is a great way to encourage engagement from potential visitors. YouTube is used as a search engine and so it is a great idea to have content on there.
If you share the video on social media, that is likely to draw more attention to your content. Facebook in particular, encourages the use of video and is more likely to show your content to visitors if it is presented in this way.
Learn more : What does Google actually do?
