How do I get more visitors to my website? I must have been asked this question hundreds of times and it is closely up there with the most common question I get asked; How do I improve my rankings? The answer I give is always the same.
Why do you want more traffic? Because you see, traffic is not necessarily the answer. The question you need to ask yourself first is: What would I like to achieve with my website?
In most cases the answer to this question is, make more sales and generate more leads. If this is your goal then the questions you should be asking yourself and any inbound marketing company you hire are:
How do I get more sales? or How do I get more leads?
If your goal is to generate more traffic, then in my experience your marketing is going to fail.
Let’s take your website for instance, if your website is not currently converting very well, then no amount of traffic will help to make it convert more. You may sell slighty more products or services but that is a big waste of money. What you really want to do is make you website convert better.
Call to actions
Give your website visitors something to do, don’t leave them guessing what to do next. This could be in the form of a free guide or video tutorial on using your product. Most people won’t be ready to buy when they first visit your website. You have to gain their trust and a great way to do this is by helping them.
Make it easy for them to acquire and buy
The two things people hate when using a website are making them think and wasting their time. If you can make your website easy to use and people can find the information they need quickly, then more people are likely to buy from you.
Always be testing
You should always be testing every aspect of your website to try and improve conversions over time. This can be a lot more cost effective than building more traffic. Some things you should be testing on your website are:
- Titles and headlines
- Website copy
- Forms
- Shopping carts processes
- Call to action colours and placement
- Sentiment
- Images
Now add visitors
Before you think of adding traffic you must make sure your website is optimised for conversions because once you start to build traffic, more of it will convert and the ROI of your marketing will be higher. Now that your website is optimised for conversions we can get back to the original question: How do I get more visitors to my website? I have listed some ways that inbound marketing can help grow the traffic to your website.
Business Blogging
Businesses who blog on a regular basis see more leads and sales compared to businesses that do not. Blogging gives your business more opportunities to show up in Google, the more pages you have, the more opportunities people have to find your content. Business blogging is a great way to generate more relevant traffic that converts.
Before you go out there and start blogging make sure the content that you are creating is of a high quality and amaze your target audience, don’t just create content for the sake of it. Try answering customer’s questions like I have done in this post.
Social media
First and foremost, social media is used for communicating with people so always try and do that first. Do not just push your content onto people as this will quickly annoy them. Speak to your customers on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Listen to their problems and concerns and help them whenever you can.
You can also use social to help promote the great content you have created for your blog as this will encourage people to share, like and link to your content.
Search Engine Traffic
By doing a combination of the two above ideas you will start to show up for more and more relevant search terms on Google and Bing. This will bring you more traffic, leads and sales. Another way to get people visiting your website from a search engine is by PPC or pay per click advertising. This form of advertising can be an instant stream of relevant visitors to your website.
Be warned though, you can quickly spend a lot of money here so you should make sure you get some help setting this up. Also, if your website is not optimised for conversions you will soon run out of money and have nothing to show for it.
Now it’s your turn
What are the biggest challenges you face when it comes to getting more visitors to your website? Let us know in the comments box below.