So you’ve hired a website designer or web developer to create a website for your company – and now it’s already live and accessible online? Perhaps you have managed to build your own business website using your own knowledge and skills to save money from hiring a web developer. But whoever made your company website, your effort to build an online presence should not stop there. No matter how beautiful or interesting your web design is, if only few people are visiting it, your business and marketing goals may still be far to achieve.
We build a website for our business to drive traffic and eventually convert them into customers. Without traffic, the business and marketing information we place in our website would not be noticed. That is why we have to find solutions on how to attract visitors to our business websites. If you want more online visitors, here are 30 quick tips to increase traffic to your company website:
Search engine optimization (SEO)
1. Improve your site titles, description, tags, and other meta data that search engines use to display on SERPs (search engine result pages).
2. Create a sitemap in an accepted format and submit it to Google using Google Webmaster Tool.
3. Make your website light and fast to load on Internet browsers. Optimize the size of images on your site and minimize heavy web scripts as possible.
4. Make your site’s architectural and navigational structure friendly for human users and for search engines. Improve internal linking on your site.
5. Make your site’s URLs or permalinks search engine friendly. Short and clear URLs will also become friendly for human users.
6. SEO your website by building quality backlinks through guest posting with authority sites, blog commenting with relevant blogs, and creating viral content for link-baiting.
7. Build a blog within your website and publish quality blog posts. The more blog posts you will publish, the more pages search engines will index from your site.
8. Submit your website and company to Google Places and Google Map. This will make your business’ map location, address, contact number, and other information appear on Google searches.
9. Target your traffic or audience using long tail keywords and geotargeting. For example, if your target traffic is only coming from US, you could set a geographic target to US only using Google Webmaster Tools.
10. Use Google Analytics to analyze your website traffic (e.g., location, referrers, search terms, and other visitors’ behaviors) and find more solutions on how to get more traffic to your company website from the search engines.
Social media marketing
11. Create a Facebook Page for your business. To encourage Facebook users to like and subscribe to your Facebook feeds, share only important and interesting updates, statuses, photos, links, and videos. Also, always interact with your Facebook subscribers by personally talking with them or replying to their inquiries.
12. Create a Twitter Account for your business. Just like Facebook, share your important company updates by posting tweets. You can also place Facebook and Twitter plugin on your company website to invite your visitors to follow you. Don’t forget to use hashtags on your tweets to make them more searchable and discoverable on Twitter.
13. Create a YouTube Channel. Using your Google account, you can create a YouTube account and channel where you can upload interesting and viral videos about your product just like making commercials for your brand. You can also promote these videos to Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites.
14. Create a Google+ Page for your company. Increase your brand’s visibility on the Internet by creating a Google+ business page. You can also share your website content on this social network that is created by Google, Inc.
15. Promote your business on LinkedIn. You can add your company to the world’s largest social networking site for professionals to increase your business connections.
16. Promote your business on Pinterest. Create interesting photos and product catalogues, and share them on Pinterest.
17. Promote your business on particular social networking site for your niche or industry. For example, if your company is offering website design services, you can search for social networking site or online community for web designers or business owners who need your services.
18. Create more viral and engaging content, such as viral articles, photos, and videos and publish them on your website and social media network.
19. Place social media sharing buttons on your company website, such a Facebook share button and Twitter retweet button, to encourage your visitors to share your content to social media.
20. Analyze your social media insights, like your Facebook and Twitter insights, to learn your followers’ demographics and come up with more solutions on how to increase your social media presence.
Paid Internet marketing
21. Invest on paid search engine marketing or PPC advertising like Google AdWords and Bing Ads.
22. Invest money on Facebook and Twitter paid advertising.
23. Consider buying banner or display advertising from websites and blogs that are related to your business and receiving traffic which can be your potential customers.
24. Consider paid or sponsored posts that conform to Google’s terms to receive more traffic. Choose websites or blogs that have high authority and traffic which are related to your target market.
25. Conduct online contests and give prizes to attract more visitors to your website and grow your social media followers.
Other online marketing tactics
26. Be a resource speaker and inspire people to establish your business. You can use your company website as a reference.
27. List your business on Foursquare. Develop mobile (Android or Apple) apps to promote your business to mobile phone users.
28. Create educational presentations and documents with a link to your website, and share them on SlideShare.net, Google Docs, Scribd.com and other file sharing websites to drive more traffic and followers.
29. Invite bloggers on your product launch.
30. Finally, make sure to maintain quality and excellence on your products and services to consistently wow your customers and encourage word of mouth marketing.
There are still many other strategies and tactics you can try to boost your website traffic. You just need to continue on learning and experimenting to discover the right strategies for you, whether it’s SEO, social media marketing or other types of Internet marketing. And lastly, don’t forget to make a plan and execute your plan to achieve your online marketing objectives.
Victorino Q. Abrugar is a marketing strategist and business consultant from Tacloban City, Philippines. Vic has been in the online marketing industry for more than 7 years, practicing problogging, web development, content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and consulting.
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SEO and social media marketing as well as blog commenting are three things I am focusing right now to grow my business.
Creating a Facebook page of your website is one of the easiest ways to increase the traffic of your site or blog. Another one is through blog commenting like this one.
You could also write articles with a link going back to your site and submit it to Ezine Articles, Squidoo or Hubpages.