You’ve had your new website designed and built. It’s wonderful. You love it. It looks great, you’ve got fantastic content, but you’re lacking visitors… what gives?
Well ask most business owners what they want for Christmas, and they’ll probably say “more customers” – and what’s the best way to get that? More users on your website, finding out about your amazing service, product or promotion. So, today, we’re making a list of the top 10 ways to increase traffic to your website. Some are free, some are paid for, but all are effective!
Advertising
The most obvious of our list, but the one that does tend to yield the highest results in terms of pure visits to the site. Paying our friends at Google or Yahoo to be the featured listing in their search results will undoubtedly get you more clicks to your site. The down-side to this? Users tend to have a bit of a mis-trust of advertising, and if you’re coming up as a sponsored link, it begs the question that you’ve had to pay to get there, so are you as good as you say? The other down side of course, is that it’s a paid activity, and depending on your market, your budget may need to be quite vast to see any real return on investment.
Let’s Get Social!
It’s one thing to have that great website, but it’s another kettle of fish to promote it properly on social media. You can’t just splatter your brand out there and expect to get noticed. Make it interesting, visual and engaging for your users. Twitter is great for short, sharp bursts of activity. Instagram is fantastic for being hyper-visual, and Facebook allows you to really promote your company with offers and such like. Get your social media plan on point, and the website visits will come in thick and fast.
Get your SEO strategy right
It’s the hardest one to nail, but if you have your SEO sorted, then you’ll naturally get better organic results, and therefore more visits. SEO is really quite simple. Content is king, so create lots of it. Make your headlines snappy, and don’t spam your keywords. Great content will speak for itself if you give it half a chance. Make sure you use your H1 through H6 tags properly within your CMS of choice (WordPress, at a guess, right?). Once you’ve got your on-site SEO right, the rest will follow. Yes, links back to your site are hugely important, but you can only get those if your site has content worth sharing to the world.
Long Tail Keywords
This is a big one that people don’t often work towards, and we have a great example. Long tail basically means a longer keyword search, so rather than saying ‘Kitchen Fitters’ You could target ‘Kitchen Fitters in Cambridge’. Yes, it’s going to get a lot fewer people searching it, but also, you are more highly targeted in your search, so you’re more likely to come up first and therefore get more traffic, as well as traffic more likely to convert as they are local. We’ve used this ourselves as a real world example. We know that the market of ‘Web Design’ is very very competitive, so we’ve marketed our SEO strategy around both Web Design Cambridge and Web Design Leicester – we know that both of those will yield us much better, and more targeted results in the long term.
A Great Internal Link Structure
Google really appreciates being able to crawl your site quickly and efficiently, so having a site structure that just makes sense, is worth it’s weight in gold. Google likes to think of itself as being in the very highest ranks of UI, so we should be treating Google like a normal user. If a normal, everyday user can find the content on your site, so can Google. Don’t hide things away and make them impractical to get to. Remember, your aim to have all content available to your user within 3 clicks.
Make sure your site is responsive
There is nothing worse than hitting a site on your phone, and realising it’s just not compatible. It doesn’t respond in any way, and you constantly have to zoom in and out to read content. It seems so simple, but your bounce rate will be through the roof if your site isn’t mobile friendly out of the box.
Make sure your site is quick
The quicker the better really. Nothing makes a visitor leave quicker than a white screen, waiting for your site and content to leave. They aren’t a visit, if they’ve left after 4 seconds of waiting for your content. So make sure your site loads nice and quick, and you’ll engage your users that much quicker. Giving you the chance to turn a visit, into a new customer.
Get vocal in comment sections
Blog comments are there for two reasons. First for people to have an opinion on what they have just finished reading, but also to be able to sneakily leave a link to your site. Now, we in no way condone spamming these blog posts – as they don’t provide you with genuine back-links. But if you can honestly write a solid comment that adds value to an article, and happens to show you off as a bit of an authority on a certain subject, then we say ‘go nuts!’ – if the article is within your field, and you feel like you have some valid comments to add, then it’s only going to aid your traffic.
Email Marketing
A tough one to really get into – but if your site allows it, and has a reason to, then capture user details for marketing later down the line. Got a product to sell, why not offer a discount in return for a newsletter signup? Once you have those details, very clever and targeted email marketing will ensure repeat visits to your site. Keeping that stickability as high as it possibly can be.
Meet Real People
Wether it’s at conferences, networking events or just through friends of friends. Have a business card handy, and always be proud to point people towards your website. The more traffic you get, the higher your chance of converting users to customers.
So, hopefully those tips help you. Make sure you really review your website and make sure it’s working as hard as it possibly can for you. There is nothing worse for you than getting a ton of traffic, but seeing the bounce rate go through the roof. If you’re not sure that your website is really helping your business, then feel free to contact us for a no obligation chat and a free website audit that covers all of the above, plus site speed checks, security checks and more.