“How do I get more website visitors” is a question most people with a website have probably asked themselves. In our experience, it’s one of the most common pain points for many of the people we talk to. You can have a brilliant site, well optimised, SEO-ed to the nines and filled with good quality content that gets updated regularly, but still not seem to get any visitors.
But why? Well, we’re going to assume that you’ve got all the basics sorted. E.g. you’ve got well structured and optimised content, you have a good number of images with appropriate alt tags, meta descriptions, key words and key phrases for all of your pages and posts etc..
You can check your site with tools like:
https://www.seobility.net/en/seocheck/
https://web.dev/measure/
If you’re not sure if you’ve got your foundations right (or if everything we just wrote seems like gibberish), drop an email to hello@soxdigital.co.uk and we’d be happy to help.
Measure & Analyse
The first step to answering the question of “How do I get more website visitors” is to start measuring and recording some metrics. How many visitors come to your site each month? How many impressions are you getting (impressions are how many times your website has been displayed in search results)? Are you getting the right kind of impressions? Try and collect as much data as you can across a month or two. Google Analytics is usually the best tool for this, and we’ve written about interpreting analytics here.
You may notice, just by doing this, that there is a problem. Let’s say, for example, that your business sells cakes for all occasions. Looking at your impressions, you can see that you’re appearing in searches for “baking recipes”, “birthday party supplies”, and “Betty Crocker cake mix”. It’s great that you’re getting impressions, but chances are that the people who are seeing your site pop up aren’t going to be interested in your cakes; they are looking for something different. This would suggest that you need to revise your keywords and keyphrases to better target the kind of people you actually want to see you.
But what if you are getting all the right impressions, but notice no one is staying on the site very long? Or that they all drop off after a couple of seconds on your homepage? This means that your homepage isn’t catching people well enough. Is your content engaging, would people really want to take time out of their day and read the first few paragraphs of your homepage? Do you have delicious looking cakes to grab the attention of eyes that didn’t know they were hungry? Are you giving visitors a reason to hang around and explore? Remember that you have a fraction of a second to grab the site visitor’s attention, so make sure your homepage immediately communicates what you do and who you do it for.
New Content
Perhaps you’re getting the right impressions, people are staying on your site, but there just aren’t the numbers you’d like. We harp on about this all the time, but, are you producing regular content for your site such as blogs, videos, articles etc.? Think of your website like a fishing boat. You have a basic site with 3 pages, each of which is like a fishing line. Each new post you make is a new fishing line, the more fishing lines you have with good quality bait (content), the better your chances of landing a fish (visitor). The more SEO optimised content you have, the more searches you will appear in, and the more likely it is you will attract more visitors.
Tip: Share your new content on social media with links to your site. You’ll capture a percentage of social media users and direct that traffic to your site.
Network & Advertise
Now we hear you say: “But I’m doing all this, my site is really good and I write regular content that is received well by everyone who reads it.”
At this point you’ve nailed all the basics, you’re writing great content and sharing it with lots of people. The next stage is to build relationships with other websites to feature your content and link to your site. Expand your network, do guest blogs, agree to post about other businesses in exchange for those businesses posting about you. This will build backlinks to your site and expand the audience you can reach. The best part about this is that it’s more or less free, though it might be time intensive.
The other avenue you can consider going down is paid advertising. Think about print, radio, flyers, and billboards. Or you could reach the masses by exploring Facebook Ads, Facebook’s ad reach is almost unparalleled especially when your Facebook ads will also reach Instagram users too.
We’ve written at length about Facebook ads. Click here to check out these articles if you want to learn more.
This is all general advice, and we realise that everyone’s position is somewhat unique. If you want some tailored advice specifically for your site and business, then get in touch with us. We love helping small business owners and we give our advice away for free!