In light of recent months, having a website has never been more important as you may not be getting as many customers as usual if you have a physical business premises, so an online presence is vital to still be able to bring in new customers. Making the actual website is probably the most straight forward thing when it comes to setting up an online presence. The hardest thing can actually be getting visitors to your website. If you think that you can just make a website and people will start flocking to it, you’d be very wrong. With over 1.74 billion websites currently out there and around 540,000 new sites published every day, getting yours to stand out among the crowd and to get people to actually click on it is quite a complex task and unfortunately there isn’t one sure-fire method. Each website is individual and different approaches to online marketing can work in order to generate traffic. Here’s our guide on some of the basic steps you can take to get as many people as possible to visit your shiny new website.
Google Search Console
The first thing you will want to do after your website goes live is to submit it to Google Search Console. You’ll need to set up an account for your website and after verifying it you can add sitemaps to the account which tell Google where all of the pages are located (URL) throughout your website. That way Google knows where to look when crawling your site and therefore it’s much more likely to start ranking your pages quickly. It will also help identify any issues with page loading times, scripts blocking a page from being indexed and lots more.
Google My Business
This point doesn’t apply to all, but depending on your business type, local shops and local services like electricians and plumbers can set up a Google ‘My Business’ listing. This is a business listing which shows on Google maps and on most localised Google searches. It shows a summary of information including your opening hours, a link to your website, a summary of your business activity, reviews and images of your business. For example, check out a screenshot of our business listing just right/below of this paragraph. It’s a good idea to set one of these up, especially if you do provide local services, as your listing is more likely to show for someone local to you who is making a Google search. It also stands out so there is more chance of someone clicking the link to your website or giving you a call.
SEO
SEO is important to help your pages rank on Google for specific keywords, like “Plumber in Essex”. Making sure that your web pages are optimised and SEO friendly will help your page rank highly in Google search results and increase the amount of visitors to your site. For more information about SEO and what you can do yourself, check out this article.
Blog posts
Post interesting and relevant content to your website to increase the amount of possibilities of someone seeing your website content, clicking it and reading it. You want to add new content to your website regularly as well to keep it up to date. Also see this article for further details on updating your website content.
Pay per click (PPC) advertising
Another solution if you want instant traffic to your website without necessarily having to put too much effort in with SEO optimisation, consider using pay per click (PPC) advertising services. Lots of different companies offer PPC ads including Google Ads, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more. This is fairly simple to set up, you create the account, enter the pages you want to advertise, set up the advert (title, description, URL) and set a budget of how much you want to spend on advertising per day. Google also offer free support so you will get your very own account manager to help you get the most out of your ads and they also suggest changes that you can make to help increase the amount of traffic you get to your site through the ads.
Social media
Social media is a brilliant tool to get more visitors to your site. Post regular, engaging content and make sure that the aim of your posts are to get people to click the link your website. Even asking your friends to share a link to your website on their social media can be a great tool. Even ‘word of mouth’ is good.
Google Analytics
Finally, make sure you install Google Analytics. Although this doesn’t help increase the amount of traffic to your site, it does monitor and tell you how much traffic you are getting, and what type of traffic you are getting. So, if you see that a certain page or blog post is particularly popular, you know you did something right and can therefore make any future content using similar methods and techniques.
Overall, driving traffic to your website is not as hard or daunting as you might have first thought. But one thing we will say is it’s generally on on-going task for the lifetime of your business. Even if your efforts do increase traffic to your website, don’t stop. Keep it going to ensure you have a constant flow of new visitors coming to your website. If you’d like any advice about your current or future website do not hesitate to contact us and we will be happy to help.
