Boost traffic to your website with these 13 tactics

Goodness gracious!

Increasing traffic to websites can cause a bit of hand-wringing. What-ever is to be done! How will people know about my products/services if they don’t know about my products/services?

If it’s a silver bullet you want, you won’t find one here. The strategy for sending traffic to your website is to point to your website from lots of different places. Some of those locations might social media, email, from your bricks-and-mortar, SEO, message boards and more.

1. Share your articles or posts on social media to boost traffic

No surprises here. But just as a little bonus tidbit, don’t forget to post reguarly. Try posting the same article once a week for 2-3 weeks at different times of the day to capture different audiences.

2. Create a Facebook page for your business

Not terribly surprising here, either. Your own business page on Facebook contitutes an opt-in for your customer’s to receive more information from you. Now they’ll see your posts in their feed and they’ll have a space to interact with you and you can wow them with your great customer service skills.

3. Use a non-generic URL in your social media profiles

Instead of using your generic business URL eg: www.yourbusiness.com, why not substitute for a another page on your site? Try a blog post that gets to the crux of what you do as a business eg: www.yourbusiness.com/howwecanhelpyougetwhatyouwant

4. Join in a conversation on an online group

Try some Facebook and Linked In groups you’re already in, or find some that might be relevant to what you do and join. There are often rules about being spammy in these groups, so post carefully. But there’s no reason why you couldn’t offer advice to another user who wants information about an area where you have expertise.

5. Comment on forums and blogs relevant to your industry

The don’t-be-spammy rule applies here too. Be helpful, be interesting and where appropriate you can give your details. It may only be appropriate to make your bio link to your site and not actually place your URL in a comment at all. People will be drawn to find out more if you’re helpful.

6. Stick it in your email signature

The largely unsung hero of your marketing mix. Sure, include your name, company, telephone number and all the normal stuff. But how about a call-to-action that’s just asking to be clicked? Think creatively, it might be a PS after your signature tauting the new offer on your website, a new post or product. You could even prepare a great small image ad, just keep in mind this won’t show up in plain text emails.

Get your colleagues to do it too, and if you email invoices, make sure it’s part of your accounts signature.

7. Don’t miss out just because you’re out of the office

Add a similar call-to-action and link to your site to your out of office responder.

8. Email it

Include half your latest article in your next emailout/newsletter with a ‘Read more’ link that takes the reader to your site. (You do have an email list that you are regularly contacting, don’t you?)

9. Incentivise it

Give people a reason to hit up your website: 10% off all first time orders, a promotion that’s only available for orders placed online, a codeword to be used, etc.

10. Bricks-and-mortar signage

Make your web address prominent on your bricks-and-mortar presence: on the front of your building, the window or door, at reception and at your point-of-sale.

11. Don’t forget internal links on your blog posts

Link to your own posts as much as possible and try to be creative with how to use the links. Entice people to click the links and explore another aspect of your site, thereby improving the user’s trust in the expertise you’re showing in your field. It keeps people on your site for longer and improves your SEO rankings too!

12. Advertising (yep, it’s still necessary)

Think of it as the ad in the local paper for the twenty-first century. It can seem big and scary for the uninitiated, but it’s definely worthwhile. You can target your audience much more than was ever possible with the local paper and you can fully control how much you spend. Do it yourself or Technology Matters offer full management of online advertising too.

13. Retargeting ads

Retargeting is extremely powerful – to break down the jargon a bit, retargeting is when ads are targeted at recent visitors to your site, IE: it retargets them. Say you’re a wedding photographer and you had someone visit your site yesterday looking at your packages. If you have Facebook retargeting set up, that visitor will see your ads popping up on Facebook to dangle the carrot again.

This list is by no means exhaustive. Get into it! Think shameless-self-promotion-but-not-spammy and make all roads lead to your website.