How Do I Get More Traffic to My Website?

How do I get more traffic to my site?

This is the question every business owner, blogger, and site owner asks themselves. I wish I could tell you the answer was simple, quick, and easy.

I really wish I could tell you it is something you only have to think about once and then never again.

But despite a lot of ads and “gurus” you may have seen talking about different ways to get visitors to your website, the real answer is that it takes time, planning, and work to grow your website traffic.

Is it worth the work? It depends on your business and your overall goals (and that’s a conversation we can have together, but any answer I would give is going to be too general for a blog post). When it comes to how to time and effort you need to invest in getting more traffic to your webiste think in terms of three to six months (or longer) instead of something you do in a weekend.

How does SEO benefit your business?

When someone thinks about getting more traffic to their website, they often jump to SEO (search engine optimization).

Why?

When blog posts and pages on your website are properly optimized, they can attract traffic for years after they are published - which means eventual new customers and leads (who aren’t even looking for what you offer yet) can potentially find you.

And while search engine optimization can help new customers find you, but that is just half of the equation. Once a visitor is on your website, you have to make sure they are finding what they need in clear organized ways so they will feel confident taking the next steps to buy from you or work with you.

If you’re interesting in learning the basics of how to do your own SEO, check out my DIY SEO for Small Businesses masterclass here.

Why making your site user friendly matters

When it comes to making your website both user friendly and search engine friendly, I like to think of it like baking a cake.

Baking a cake creates something we want to eat, but it is also about chemistry and balance.

When baking a cake we need eggs, sugar, flour, milk, butter, and a few other things depending on the type of cake you are baking. Too many eggs or not enough flour and you might get something resembling a cake, but it might not be something you want to eat.

And just like baking a cake and measuring ingredients, when it comes to SEO and optimizing your website, you have get the ingredients right so the chemistry can happen.

The end goal is to find the balance where things work together to create a tasty end result.

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t give us the exact recipe to make your site irresistible to search engines but there indicators and ripples that point us in the right direction.

What makes a website user friendly?

The best way to think about how to make your own website user friendly is to think about what makes other websites feel user friendly to you!

• Easy navigation - can you find what you are looking for? If you make a guess about where something should be on a site is it there?
  

• Pages that load quickly - no one has time to wait two whole seconds for a page to load. I know that sounds a little silly, but two seconds can feel like a long time when you are waiting for a page to load (and Google agrees!)
  

• Easy to scan text - when we read online, we’re more likely to scan a page for interesting tidbits than read every word (I bet you are even scanning this blog post more than reading it word for word!) Bullet points are helpful for this.
  

• Pleasing to look at - this one is more subjective, but think about the last time you visited a website that looked so out of date or off you didn’t really trust it. You don’t want that emotion anywhere near your own site.

Other ways besides SEO to send traffic to your website

Talk about Yourself

You need to get comfortable with marketing yourself - this includes utilizing social media effectively. You don’t have to be on every social media platform, but you should probably pick one or two to use consistently.

If you feel weird about using social media because it feels like noise, remember that it is more than talking about yourself or shilling your product.

Social media is designed to be social. If you want to stand out above the noise, the answer isn’t to shout louder. The answer is having information and insight that makes people pay attention.

You can (and should) use social media to direct someone back to your website for more information, to make a purchase, to read a blog post, etc.

You can (and should) do the same thing with your email list.


Putting Your Name Out There

If you are a local business, have you claimed all of your local citations? These are things like the yellow pages, Yelp, and other online directories. These should all be free and it is an easy way to help Google understand your business and your location.

Have you reached out to other businesses to share information and resources? You can do this through writing a guest blog post or being a guest on someone else’s podcast.

There is never just ONE method of marketing that works for every business. One of the best things you can do is start to track where your traffic is already coming from and build on that existing audience. This lets you start with something that is already working instead of starting from scratch.

If we go back to the baking a cake analogy - we’re balancing the ingredients list to make something our guests can’t wait to gobble up!