You’ve paid for a new, mobile friendly website for your business, worked with the developer to get the design and wording exactly as you want it on every page and it’s finally gone ‘live’. You finally have a shop window to showcase your brand message, services or products. So where are your customers?
Unfortunately, when a website goes online, it’s not a case of sitting back to watch the site traffic and conversions grow. It is difficult to get traffic to your site and even tougher to turn visitors into paying customers.
Luckily, there are a number of things you can do to get potential customers visiting your site so you can convert those visits into business for your company.
Here are 5 tips for increasing your website traffic
1. Optimise your site with commonly used industry keywords and phrases.
Search Engine Optimisation is key to getting people visiting your website. If your site isn’t optimised to enable web users to find it, you cannot expect potential customers to find you at all in the result pages of search engines. If your website is built using WordPress, we recommend using an SEO plugin like Yoast or Ultimate SEO to focus each page on a specific keyword (and variants). Make sure your sitemap is up to date and submit to a site such as Entireweb to get the search engine crawlers to visit your site.
It is worth spending some time to see what keywords your competition have used to optimise their site. Is your business dependent on customers in a specific area? Make sure you mention the areas you serve in the website content.
2. Devise and maintain a weekly or monthly newsletter
A great way to increase return visits to your site, encourage new visitors and develop a loyal following is to produce a weekly or monthly newsletter. Unless you manage to turn website visitors into customers on their first visit, many of those who visit your website may never come back. By offering a regular update, straight to their inbox, you keep your company name, and your products or services, fresh in those peoples’ minds. Take some time each week to keep up with the latest news in your industry, take note of any major projects your business is involved in and share your professional opinion.
By providing regular, informative emails, you can position yourself and your company as an online ‘influencer’ in your industry, which will itself bring more visitors to your site.
3. Use Facebook Ads
A presence on the popular Social Media platforms is almost as important as having a website now. We recommend maintaining a Facebook page for your business, a Company Page on LinkedIn and a profile on Google+ at least. Twitter can be a great way of attracting visitors to your site too, but it is important to realise that each platform is used differently and you should spend some time learning how people use each and the best way to promote your business on each.
A great way to build an audience is to utilise Facebook’s advertising platform. Facebook holds a wondrous amount of user information, allowing you to target who sees your adverts from an extremely detailed list of factors. You can target Facebook users by their age, gender, location, interests and browsing habits, just to name a few.
You can also use the advertising platform for different purposes. If you need to increase the number of people who ‘like’ your Facebook page, you can create an ad campaign to do just that. Or if you would like to increase the number of visitors to your company website, you can devise an ad campaign to do that too.
4. Use Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Google Adwords is the largest advertising platform online. If you have optimised your site for search engines and are awaiting the organic fruit of your labours, Adwords can kick start your web traffic as well as provide you with information that will benefit your website and business in future.
Much like Facebook advertising, Adwords allows you to target quite specific demographics and can help determine what keywords web users are searching for to find your site. If you are looking for an immediate improvement in your website traffic, Pay-Per-Click advertising (or PPC) is the most effective, if costly, way to guarantee visitors.
5. Create content for both customers and influencers.
There is nothing that search engines like more than new content. If you can devise an industry-focused blog, a compendium of helpful, relevant tips or a news section for your website and keep to a regular schedule, you will soon position yourself and your company as authoritative within your online industry.
It is important to create content that will interest potential customers, reassure them that you are the best at what you do and help convert them to paying customers. It is also important to consider creating content that will interest other professionals and influencers within your trade. If you create great content that other businesses want to share with their audience, you gain instant access to a whole new demographic of potential customers that you can poach away from your less online-savvy competitors.
Increase your web traffic
By taking a proactive approach to your digital presence and creating regular new content in conjunction with paid advertising and SEO, you will soon find your visitor statistics improving. Establishing yourself as an influencer online may take some time but the benefits are well worth it. Good luck! We hope these 5 Tips For Increasing Your Website Traffic have helped. For SEO related services please complete this form for a free website audit.