You’ve just launched your own website and you’re excited to get going and see what people think! But hang on a minute no one is visiting it? You’ve been through that whole project of deciding on the right developers, understand what the design will look like and the right user journeys and if you say so yourself the website looks great! So why is no one visiting it?
When you build a website this is just the start of the journey, it takes time and effort to then really market your website and get it in front of people. I’m not going to give you some quick wins here or hacks to getting traffic. Digital marketing is a long-term game and you need to be consistent with your effort and optimisation of the website for it to continue being a success.
Here are some ideas on where to start and how to drive traffic to your website.
Business listings
Once your website is launched and you have the URL start looking at the listings for your business and where you can add the website address. Go through your social media accounts and add the URL into your profiles. Either update or create a Google My Business account and add the website. Google your business name and see what other listings are available and claim them, you’ll be surprised how many there are and where your business can appear.
Social media
If you already have social accounts and a following then reward them and celebrate with your audience. Consider running competitions or discount for people to use or share your website. For example, you might run a 10% discount in the first month of your website launching or 20% discount for the first 50 sales. This is all content that will get people talking, sharing and ultimately visiting your website.
Paid traffic
OK, so I understand not everyone will have the budget however paid advertising is one way that will generate more traffic to your website. This could be through Google / Bing advertising, search or display or social media. Consider the products or services you want to advertise, what will attract people, determine your budget and audience and away you go.
SEO - content
Content is king these days so its important to understand the right keywords to rank for and optimise your website for SEO. Set a baseline of how your website is currently ranking and then look for opportunities to improve this and tweak or add additional content. Having a blog on your website is a great way to help SEO. A blog provides fresh content and additional content your website can be ranked for. For services or product pages make sure you understand the keyword for that page and optimise the title, description, images and meta description for each page.
SEO – user experience
Now your website is live take a walk through the site with the customer in mind. Can you see the clear journeys they will take and could these be optimised? Some aspects you might be able to do yourself (for free) is looking at internal linking and image optimisation. Internal linking not only helps with SEO but can help a user find content on your website, drive traffic in a certain direct and improve the overall experience on your website.
Images are a great way to visually demonstrate a topic or product and can break up content on a page and make it more digestible. However, if these images are too big they could be impacting the speed of your website and your SEO. You can run free tools such as Screaming Frog over your site and see a list of images and file sizes. From here you can upload the images to sites such as TinyPNG that will compress them and enable you to reupload in a smaller size.
Influencers and partnerships
Influencers will already have a good audience base that trust their opinion and be interested in similar topics. If you can find influencers in your market this is an opportunity for them to share your service or product to their audience and generate you traffic. This might involve you sending them a free product for them to test and write about on their blog or social media which will then link back to your website.
You might even have companies you work with or suppliers that can help create a joint campaign or promote the fact you have a new website. This will show the partnership you have and help you reach an additional audience. You might run a competition to gather feedback or leave a review on your website to be in with the chance of winning a free gift your supplier has provided.
Summary
As you can see you have multiple options to help drive awareness of the site and increase traffic. The goal here is to plan how you can achieve these steps, make regular time to work on the website and measure your changes to see growth. With consistency in your marketing effort results can be achieved.
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