After 36 hours of nonstop working with no sleep, you’ve finally finished your business website. You excitedly hit the publish button.
However, instead of seeing an influx of orders and visitors, your website stats stay zero. You wait for another week—still, no visitors.
Most entrepreneurs’ problem isn’t about how to set up a website but how they can drive traffic to their digital storefront. If there are no visitors, there are no customers.
So today, we’re going to look at five ways to boost your site traffic. They focus on driving organic traffic and can benefit your website over the long-term!
Write Stellar Content
Content marketing is an effective and easy-to-begin tactic. 70% of marketers actively invest in content marketing. No matter what kind of business you run, creating relevant and high-quality content can attract leads to your website.
But what should you write? A starting point is to provide detailed answers to general questions your customers always ask.
Let’s say you run an accounting firm. New customers always ask, ‘how should I record transactions?’ Then it would help if you wrote a how-to article outlining the key steps.
And your leads would probably have the same questions. So when they Google it, they see your article and find out your firm.
Another way to start is to look at the content your competitors create. So you can get an idea for similar blog posts to write.
Do SEO for Your Website
It’s not enough to create great content – you want your website to rank higher on search results to drive organic traffic.
For starter, pay attention to on-page SEO, such as:
- Using proper heading tag
- Utilizing image alt text
- Creating internal links
- Writing meta descriptions
Properly managing your on-page SEO can help the search engine understands your content, therefore pushing it to the right audience.
Off-page SEO aims at improving the search engine’s perception of your site’s quality. Essentially, a search engine inspects how ‘trustworthy’ your site is by checking links to your site (how many links and what are the sites), mentions of your brand, social signals, etc.
SEO techniques can get complicated and advanced. But ultimately, it’s about building relationships and trust. Building real relationships can benefit you over the long term.
Share on Social Media
One of the best ways to promote your content is to use social media channels. Merely sharing your business website may not be able to arouse interests, but content can. This is why creating stellar content is the first step.
Besides sharing on your personal accounts, create business accounts on different social media channels to build your business’s online presence.
Specifically, if you target business professionals, be active on LinkedIn. If your business has a visual content focus, Instagram and Pinterest are your best friends.
Utilize Email Marketing
Email marketing is an excellent strategy to develop relationships with prospects and customers. An effective email marketing campaign can convert prospects into customers and turn new clients into repeat customers.
The biggest advantage of this strategy is that you can automate everything with the right email marketing tools. However, it’s best not to sell them all the time in your emails. You have to provide values to cultivate relationships and trust.
Here are a few ideas of what to include in your emails:
- New content updates on your website blog
- Special offers
- Exclusive content and insights only to email subscribers
Post on Quora
Quora is a question and answer website that allows users to ask questions on any theme or topic and respond to others’ questions. It has over 300 million monthly active users – a huge audience base that you can tap into.
To drive traffic to your website, actively participate in topics relevant to your business. When appropriate, you can include links for your website in your response or questions.
Over time, you can build your authority on Quora and collaborate with influencers on the platform to promote your content and business.
Over to You!
Driving organic traffic to your site takes time and effort. The above strategies won’t get you a spike in traffic overnight. But they are good starting points for you to try and test. If you persist and do it right, you will gradually see an increase in traffic.
Gloria Chow is an adventure and new business venture addict. She founded her first business when she was 14 years old and created a ten-people start-up at 19. She now runs Venturer to empower people to start a profitable and location independent business and career. You can connect with her on Twitter or Facebook.
Website traffic stock photo by nelzajamal/Shutterstock
