Do these 9 things to get more visitors to your website
When it comes to your website, can you see tumbleweed? One of the questions I’m often asked is: how do I get more visitors to my website? Lots of small business owners who have websites think their work is done once it’s live and can’t fathom why more people aren’t visiting.
There are things you can do to increase the number of visitors. And doing that is part of the process to find new customers for your business. First, though, they need to find your website and feel it’s worth the time to stop and visit for a while. So, what can you do to make this happen?
Review your website for keywords
You might have heard of a term called on-page SEO. This is how you make your website easily found by search engines. There are lots of things you can do to help your website be found. Start with understanding how your prospective customers might search for the product or service you sell. These are called search terms. Once you have a good idea of the types of keywords they use, you can update your website to reflect these. You can absolutely do this yourself. If you need more help, read this guest post from an expert.
Are you adding value to your website visitors?
Once people land on your website, do they have all the information they need? Take time to review the structure of your website and think about what else you could offer to add value to visitors. For example, my website has a resources page. This lists all the marketing tools I use and recommend. The value here is that visitors are able to find new ways to help them market their business. Of course, they will share this page with other people, bringing new people to my website.
Keep an eye on your competitors
Knowing what works well for your competitors gives you an idea of the types of content that you can develop for your website. Of course, I’m not advocating copying what they do! No, rather, think about how you can put your own spin on things that are working well for them. Using listening tools like BuzzSumo provides you with a good summary of the types of topics that are going down well with readers, and are popular on social media. This will give you plenty of food for thought for your website.
Monitoring what your competitors are doing can help you write great content for your website and increase visitors. Click To TweetWhat’s your content plan?
You knew some sort of planning would make it into this list, didn’t you? Without this, all your intentions of posting regularly to your website will fly out of the window. Once you’ve figured out what your readers want to read (as well as the step above, ask your customers for their feedback), you’ll know the types of topics you’ll want to write about. Your content plan should include the topics, when you’ll publish them, how often and where you’ll promote them. Mix up your content and write about longer topics, timely newsworthy subjects and don’t forget you can use videos too. Once you have your plan, set aside time to make sure it happens. Adding new content to your website lets Google (and other search engines) know it’s a living, breathing site and it should be included in search results.
Interview people
Interviewing people is a great way to get more visitors to your website. Especially if it’s someone who’s well known in your industry. When you create your content plan, brainstorm people you want to interview. Then, send emails to them asking for some of their time. You’ll be surprised how many people are willing to do this. And, if interviewing people seems a bit overwhelming, make a list of questions and send them to the person, asking them to fill in their answers. Once published on your blog, make sure you share a link with the interviewee (maybe send them some branded images they can use) so they can share with their networks.
Share your blog posts
This might seem obvious, but it never fails to surprise me how many people don’t share their blog posts once they’ve written them. Create some images with your branding (I use Canva) and share your posts on social media. Don’t forget to add relevant hashtags where appropriate. But that’s not all… your email list is a great place to share your blog posts too. We’re all busy and we need a nudge to do things. Your email subscribers won’t always remember to visit your blog, so give them a reminder. And don’t think that your post just needs to live on your blog. Repurpose it so you get more content out of it. Read this post for ideas on how you can do that.
When you publish a new blog post, your work is just beginning. Get more people to your website by sharing your post! Click To TweetUpdate your old blog posts
I have a post on my blog that I wrote in August 2016. It continually outperforms other posts on my blog, with the vast majority of traffic via organic search. Last year, I reviewed it and updated it. I added some content, gave it a new call to action and refreshed the image. Another thing I did was to add links to other, relevant blog posts I have written. Updating old blog posts gives them a new lease of life and tells search engines that a page has been updated on your website. Once you’ve updated your posts, remember the point above! Share on social media and with your email list. Then work out ways you can repurpose this content.
Be a guest blogger, invite a guest blogger
Guest blogging is a great way to get your expertise in front of an audience that doesn’t know you yet. Make a list of the business owners you know and think about whether your content would be relevant for their audience. Approach them with outlines of the types of post you can write for them. Guest blogging is a great way to increase traffic to your website. Another approach to take is to invite people to guest blog on your website. Not only does this take the pressure off you writing content, but you also get a fresh perspective in an area that you may not be expert. The pay off is that the guest blogger will want to share their work with their network, giving you access to a wider audience.
Track what’s working in getting you more visitors
If you don’t have Google Analytics on your website, get it today! Marketing is all about measuring what works and what doesn’t, tweaking and making improvements. You can’t do this if you’re not paying attention to your website analytics. There’s a mine of information that you can get from Google Analytics and it can seem overwhelming. But taking the time to review your metrics will help you understand what brings people to your website and plan to do more of it to increase visitors. Read about the five metrics I regularly look at to get started.
If your website is important to you growing your business, taking care of it is important. Follow the steps above and make sure you regularly give your website some TLC!