Feeling like your company’s website is underappreciated? Don’t worry, we’re here to help you increase your website traffic for free.
Many businesses report struggling with how to drive visits to their web pages. To help you overcome this challenge, we’ve put together a list of tips so that your website can get the recognition it deserves.
Produce Interesting Content
The best way to convince more people to visit your website is to draw them in with content that is important to them.
Types of Content
What do your customers want to read about? Once you know the answer to this question, you can design articles and blog posts around those topics and see the number of hits your website gets increase rapidly.
But how do you find that answer? And what do you do once you have it?
Ask. Do your research. Send out surveys, visit public forums discussing issues in your selected field, and take note of what kind of questions people have. What kinds of answers are they looking for?
For instance, say you’re a beauty supply company who sells hair care products to small business owners with their own hair salons. What do your customers want to read about? First, you send out a short survey to a select group of customers. Then, you visit a couple of online hair salon forums like SalonGeek and topix. Afterwards, you discover that a problem many have is advertising their salon. Now you can write articles and blog posts, with catchy but accurate titles (no clickbait!) to draw in your reader, about how to advertise specifically in the beauty industry.
Make sure to keep your tone light and casual. Talk to your customers about the subjects they care about. Educate them on topics within your expertise that they may be struggling with. Don’t be overly salesy and design entire articles around how great your business or products are. At the same time, don’t be afraid to mention when one of your services solves a common problem that many people in your industry have.
Search Engine Optimization
You’ve probably heard people talking about SEOs and how important they are when it comes to marketing and advertising your business. But really, what is search engine optimization? And how can you do that for your blogs, articles, and other published content?
To keep things simple, search sites such as Google has algorithms to rank your website and determine the placement of your site within theirs. They do they by looking at the relevancy of your site in terms of certain keywords.
Let’s go back to the beauty supply company example. If you sell beauty supplies, then when someone types in the words ‘beauty supplies’ into Google, the hope is that your company’s site will pop up.
There are many ways to increase your ranking on Google and ensure that people find your blog posts when they are searching for information on topics that you have written about. First off, pick specific SEO keywords for your posts. Did you just write an article on advertising for hair salons? Use ‘how to advertise your hair salon for free’ or ‘advertising your hair salon on a small budget’ as your keywords so the people who search those terms will find you. Use keywords that will be popular enough to drive traffic, but not so common that your content will get lost in the sea of web pages and blogs.
Use images and videos in your articles and make sure each image or video is primed for SEO. Give each image and video a title that people search for on Google Images and on other search sites.
Many sites have plugins to help you produce content that is optimized for search engines. WordPress, for instance, has the All in One SEO Pack plugin to help you optimize your content on your website.
Channels to Publish Content
Once your content is optimized, you need to think about where to publish it. Naturally, the posts themselves should be on your website, but there are many other sites to advertise your posts. This will help you bring attention to your business and your website.
Social media is a great way to spread the word about new posts on your website. Tweet about your article. Share a link on Facebook. Create a post on LinkedIn. Snapchat about it or Instagram a photo reminding people to read it.
There are also blogging websites that you can post content to in order to further maximize your reach. Publish articles on Medium and StumbleUpon, or any other sites that may garner visits.
Also, don’t be afraid to guest blog on other companies’ sites or invite guest bloggers on yours. This will create strong partnerships between businesses and address a larger pool of viewers in your industry. Engage customers and potential customers in conversations on forums and direct their attention to your posts. Maintain two-way communication and show people that you care about what they care about and you want to help them.
To bring this attention back to your website, make sure you use backlinks in your articles to take people to other pages on your site.
Analyze Your Website Traffic Data
You don’t need to fix what’s not broken, but you do need to capitalize on it.
Your company is already doing great things to increase your website traffic for free. You need to know exactly what those are, just how well they are doing, and what you can do to maintain and increase their success.
Try out some different analytics softwares, like Google Analytics or Spring Metrics. Those platforms will be able to tell you who is visiting your site, their geographic location, how long they spend on each page, where they found out about your site from, and so on.
Maybe your email marketing is working really well and the link you include in each email is driving more traffic to your site. Keep launching new and innovative email campaigns to maintain and increase customer engagement.
Maybe your witty tweets or insightful Facebook posts are making people want to learn more about your business. Push that further with fresh, new content. Tag experts in your field and engage with thought leaders to expand your reach even further.
Are most of your viewers female? From the United States? Small business owners? Structure your content and your services around them and target them specifically in email marketing, social media,or advertising campaigns.
Improve Content on Your Website
So you’ve followed the instructions in this blog post and more people are clicking on your website. That’s good! But it doesn’t mean much unless the quality of the content on your site is high.
If the site itself is unappealing or confusing, people won’t stay on it long and nothing will come of their visit.
The point of directing people towards your website is to increase engagement and convince your customer to take action, whether it be to buy your product or use your service.
Responsive Site
Your site should be mobile and tablet responsive. People are reading and watching content on their phones and tablets more than ever before. Nobody likes a difficult-to-use web page on a smartphone because the site was only designed to be used on a laptop or desktop.
Well-Written Content
Nothing takes away from a person’s experience on a website quite like typos, pretentiousness, and confusing language.
Show your customers that you’re real people who want to communicate with them on a personal level. Develop that relationship from their first interaction with your site by writing in a conversational, genuine, and easily understandable manner.
Double, triple, quadruple check your grammar and spelling. If you’re trying to show your expertise in a certain area, you can’t go around using the wrong they’re, there, or their.
People should know exactly what you do from the moment they click on your website. Do you sell shoes? That should be clear. People should not go on your site and leave thinking you run yoga classes if you’re trying to sell them a pair of sneakers.
Videos
In our modern day, many people don’t take the time to read content anymore. Draw people’s attention and keep it by using short videos to provide useful information in less time and with more visuals.
If you’re not experienced in creating videos or if you simply don’t have the time and money to produce video content the traditional way, try a simple and affordable platform like Viddyad. You can create quality videos in minutes with less hassle and more creative control.