Have you spent the time designing, building and creating content for your business website but you are not quite sure how to bring in new visitors? I have put together some tips below that will help you increase new traffic, generate leads, sales and your customer database. Starting off with one of the most important aspects of your website – SEO!
Search Engine Optimisation
SEO is the process of increasing visibility of your website in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing’s organic results by making sure your website pages are packed with keywords that someone is likely to search for. When you type a keyword phrase into google do you ever look on page 2 of google search results? My guess is that your answer is NO! Only 6% of people searching on a search engine look on page 2. After all the best place to hide a dead body is on page 2 of Google!
SEO is a very time-consuming process but it is vitally important to increase traffic and ranking top on search engines. You need to make sure your website is optimised for these platforms.
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
To use PPC Internet advertising you pay a fixed price for every click your advertisement gets in the search engine. For example, when searching on google the adverts that come up at t
he top of the search
or in the downward column to the right of the search results. As a business your main aim is to convert your click to a sale in order to see a return on investment. If you decide to use Google AdWords you can set a daily budget as little as £5 per day or a maximum cost of ten pence per click. In order to use Google AdWords you should think carefully about the phrases you use, as keywords and Google will help you get your ad to the forefront of your target market.
Facebook Adverts
Facebook Advertisements have come on leaps and bounds in recent months. If you know exactly who your target audience is it is very easy to target them by advert manager’s demographics. For example, if you are a business that can offer a newly engaged couple your service, you target those Facebook users who are newly engaged, newly engaged for 3 months, 6 months, 9 months or over a year or friends of newly engaged couples. How creepy is that? It just goes to show that even though you think your Facebook Profile has all the privacy settings set to the private “Friends Only” setting and not “Public”. Behind the scenes Facebook are still pulling information from your page for these purposes so much so recently for a client I could target parents with children aged between 7yrs – 11yrs old who are at the age of making their Comm & Confirmation. In a nutshell you want to utilise Facebook with 1.23 billion daily active users to direct traffic to your own website.
Blogging
My goal starting in January was to write blog posts for my website at least once a month to offer free, fresh, original content and in turn help my SEO. Blogging can help bring new traffic to my website and hopefully lead to business networking. I suggest to clients to guest blog in publications or websites that are there for the taking. For instance, you are an interior designer and you want to showcase your work on your website, writing for other prominent blogs in your niche market is very beneficial to you and to gaining traffic on your website. This gives you a chance to market yourself as an individual and as a business on a website that has much more traffic than yours by including links to your website at the end of your post.
Social Media
Social Media platforms help you communicate with your potential customers and entice them to buy your product or service. Like and share competitions are predominantly the way to grow your Facebook Audience organically without having to put a money on an advertisement. Facebook competitions, yes they are constant and yes we never win but they provide a compelling reason for people to “Like” and follow your business page. Social media is a fantastic word of mouth marketing tool, especially amongst the ladies, did you see X, Y & Z’s new stock in on Facebook? I know I am guilty of this, I at some stage then go look at their online store to see what clothing is available. It also helps you see what people are talking about, what they like and for improving your customer service.
Videos/YouTube
Most businesses have a desire to go ‘Viral’ with their video marketing, it does not take a video to go viral to drive traffic to your business. Always give your customers a call to action that tells your audience to go to your website to avail of your products or services. Creating videos and posting them to your website, YouTube and social media platforms can really help your content get found online. Google indexes your content for SEO purposes and if other people like your content they can embed on their blogs and share to their social media platforms also. I cannot recommend videos to my clients enough – remember it’s not all about the likes, it’s all about the VIEWS and the amount of people it reached!
Email Marketing
Email marketing seems to be taking a back seat, most businesses are using Facebook/Google Ads to target specific audiences. However, email marketing is a great tool, most people need to be engaged a number of times before they buy unless you’re an impulsive buyer like me. With your email marketing you need to have captivatin
g reasons to subscribe and not to unsubscribe encouraging your customers to return to your website to find out what they have missed since they last visited.
Public Relations
Having a Public Relation strategy in place allows you to brand yourself as an expert in your niche and build your reputation and in turn build your brand awareness. When your business is mentioned on trusted source such as a press outlet you have automatically gained trust in you and your brand. Press releases generate interest in your business and also help drive traffic to you.