Website traffic is important to your business but what if you are not getting as much traffic as your developer promised you?
You have launched your business website and your friends and relatives tell you how great it is. It looks fantastic and does what you want it to. You even have access to your visitor numbers. And after a week or two they look very disappointing. Only 1 or 2 visitors per day and they are staying on the site for only a short time. What can we do to fix that?
There are several ways that you can drive traffic to your website and all of them depend on keyword research and knowing your ideal customer. In this post I will concentrate on the ones that you hear about most as you will, no doubt, know a little bit about them.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
This is one that everybody talks about, but most know little about. They will tell you about the meta tags on your website and how they are used to index your website on Google. Whilst this is not wrong it does not really get to the heart of the problem.
Google is a search engine, and so are Bing and DuckDuckGo, and they rely on the visitor entering a search term known as a keyword. When the visitor enters a search term and hits “search” the search engine goes off to find the most suitable web pages that fit that term.
The search engine has mathematical algorithms that determine which pages to serve up on its results page. These algorithms are very sophisticated and necessarily secret. However, you can work these algorithms to your advantage by using the tools available to you.
Your web pages have the possibility to have meta tags that tell search engines what the page is about. This makes it easy for the search engine to classify your web page.
Your web page has text content that the search engine can look at to determine if your meta tag information is correct. That same content is used as the primary source for your web page to be classified. Your meta tags and text content must be consistent if your page is to show up on the first page of search results. You must not have any hidden text on your web page – you will be penalised for that.
Good SEO will get your web pages found by search engines but that alone will not drive traffic to your website.
Advertising on search engines
Another way to get your web pages found on search engines is to advertise them on search engines. This will give you quicker results with search engines and the preparatory work is the same as that for SEO, keyword and audience research. Advertising works by you paying the search engine to have your pages show up in prominent places on the search engine results pages for specific keywords. Done properly, search engine advertising works very well.
Content marketing
Content marketing, or publishing your stories on other websites, is probably the best way to drive traffic to your website. People react to your posts, articles, updates, press releases and so on. It greatly increases the number of sources of traffic and so increases your potential audience base.
It also increases your SEO profile for the pages on your website as you will be linking from credible, popular source websites. Search engines will judge the popularity of your links by the number of clicks that you get on them and so increase your chances of being on first page of the search results.
Of course, this depends entirely on the quality of your content. You must publish relevant and interesting content for people to react to it. If people just read some of it and then move on without clicking on the link then your content has failed.
We help all types of businesses and individuals to improve their search profiles on Google and Bing and if you wish to know more about our services for this then do get in contact with us.