Posted on Jul 12, 2013

How to Drive Visitors to Your Website

You’ve built a website with purpose, and laid out your welcome mat. You’re ready for your customers to walk through your door. You want attention, and you want it now. But how do you drive visitors to your website to get this attention for your business?

Here are some tips:

Use keyword tools to improve SEO

Including the words that your customers type into Google is a great way to get visitors. But how do you know what they type?

Google Keyword Tool is free, and it’s a great way to understand what your customers are searching. Let’s say, for example, you’re a small, Italian restaurant. And you want to know what your customers are searching. You can enter “Italian food” into the keyword tool to learn that there are 1,000,000 global monthly searches of this phrase (this number changes often based on various factors). You can use the information you find to learn what words and phrases to use in your SEO (and content marketing) efforts. Google provides lots of helpful info to help you understand these tools on a deeper level.

Do content-based marketing

You’ll need a website first before you do content-based marketing. If you don’t have one yet, it’s easy to get set up.

Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, recommends in this video that businesses not only think about link building. But instead focus on creating compelling content and marketing. He encourages to market your website without only thinking about search engines.

Sure, it may be tempting to pay for cheap content creation through sites like fiverr or elance, but you get what you pay for. Cheap content is not the way to go for any business that wants to succeed in the long-term. It reflects poorly on your business, and it’s blatantly obvious that your business looks for shortcuts. Instead, look to create unique, high-quality content that provides value to your customers.

Get social

You’ll want to learn the demographics (and psychographics) of your customers, so that you can find out where they consume their media and the best times to post. Here’s a helpful infographic with some other interesting social media facts.

Not every platform will work for your business. Pick one or two that work best for your industry, and start there. Twitter has a high learning curve. And if you only have a small amount of resources as a small business owner, it may not be in your best interest to learn all of the Twitter ins and outs. Instead of jumping in (to a somewhat complicated platform) head first, you may want to take small steps by engaging with a company who can guide you through the Twitterverse while you focus on managing the easier platforms (like Facebook or Pinterest). If this is still overwhelming, it might be in your best interest to outsource all social media strategy.

Get Publicity

Find unique ways to get on your customer’s radar by getting coverage in your local online newspapers. Getting print coverage is ok. But strive for publicity on an online media platform that links directly to your business. You’ll get direct traffic, and it also adds credibility.

Guest Post

Collaborate with other people in your industry. Build relationships. And then learn if and how a guest post will add value to the community you’re building. If you’re a good writer, your ideas and insights will be much appreciated. If you’re scared to share your ideas, know that hoarding them won’t get you anywhere. Sharing brings good karma to your business. And the best part? Once you start sharing your ideas, and releasing them to the world, you’ll develop more and more of them. It’s funny how that works, eh?

 

photo credit: grendelkhan via flickr cc

 

What are some ways that you drive traffic to your website? Please comment below. 

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