There probably isn’t a company in the world who doesn’t understand the importance of having a website. Whether you’re selling a product or a service, it’s the most effective way of building brand awareness, keeping in touch with existing clients and reaching out to potential customers you would otherwise have no way of reaching.
It’s important to bear in mind that it’s one thing having a website and another thing having a good website. If you want to convert visitors into conversions, your site needs to be relevant, user friendly and helpful. The first step towards generating income through your website however is to get the traffic there in the first place.
Below are four great ways you can increase traffic to your website.
Keywords
The content on your website is crucial. It is effectively your sales pitch so it needs to be informative, engaging and relevant to your customers’ needs. What’s more, it’s also very important that your content contains the right keywords. Keywords is what Google uses to find your website in the first place. If you’re not using them, as far as search engines are concerned, you don’t exist. This means that you won’t show up in the results pages and are therefore unlikely to receive much, or even any traffic. If, however your website is optimised for the right keywords you are far more likely to rank highly in Google and your website traffic will increase.
Social Media
Social media is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website. The vast majority of people are already on the likes of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram and they’re often more than happy to follow companies who are posting fun and engaging content. If you’re a business that sells cakes for example, posting photos of your creations is a great way to allow people to see your products. Not only does this help to raise awareness, if people like what they see, there’s a high possibility that they will visit your website to find out more about you.
Email Campaigns
Emails are a fantastic way of reaching out to customers. The great news is that sites like MailChimp allow you to send out campaigns for free so it doesn’t even have to be expensive. Furthermore, emailing isn’t intrusive so you’re unlikely to annoy anyone, you can target high volumes of people and anyone who opens the email can click straight through to your site.
Advertising
Online advertising is another great way to get your website seen and there are a number of ways you can do this. Google Adwords (PPC ads) appear at the top of the page when you type in a search query to Google. With the right keywords and messaging, they can be a very effective way of driving traffic to your website. Most of us will check our social media pages at least once a day so this makes them a great platform for companies to reach out to new customers. You can even target your adverts to a specific audience to increase their effectiveness and set them up on a pay-per-click basis so if people don’t click, you don’t pay.
Perfecting your online advertising campaign can be tricky and if people are clicking but not converting, it can prove costly and ineffective. When done correctly however advertising can generate a huge amount of sales for businesses so it may be worth considering using a digital marketing agency to run your campaigns for you.