Once you’ve developed your website, you need to start planning your strategy of how can you attract visitors to your site. We are way past the Field of Dreams era of digital content. If you build it, it is not guaranteed visitors will come.
You need a strategy for getting traffic to your content. Take a look at these five tips that will get you started and on your way.
The first step is to identify the types of visitors you want to entice to your site. You must answer the question: Who is my ideal customer? When answering that question it can be helpful to build a buyer persona.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data and research and experience. They help you focus your time on qualified prospects and align your marketing and sales messages. You can use HubSpot's helpful buyer persona template builder to identify who your target audience is and narrow down what their questions and pain points are.
If you’re looking to attract married women with children between the ages of 4 and 12, then you should be creating a look and feel that would appeal to that demographic, and addressing the problems they have that you can help them with.
The goal is to convert visitors into customers, so in reality, your website is more about them than you. If you’re not creating pages that entice your target consumer, it will be harder for them to find you, and less likely that they'll engage even if they do!
Your content is the main draw to your website. While you should write with SEO in mind, remember that your readers are human, not robots. Imagine the style that you would want to read, and think about what topics your audience would be most interested in or find the most useful. Again, your site should be about solving problems your target audience may have. Think about how you search online for solutions to your own problems or questions, and use that as a guide.
Consider providing “give-away” pieces such as case studies or e-books about your area of expertise that would be helpful to your audience and establish you as an expert. That type of content could also be extremely useful for lead generation. And using a tool such as HubSpot makes the creation and tracking of such elements a breeze.
And remember to check for grammar!
A stagnant website won’t entice repeat visitors. Make sure to keep adding content on a regular basis to show that your company is active. Imagine a visitor found a particular article or blog post interesting and came back a month later for more, only to find that there was nothing new. They might not return and instead seek out a resource that that more up-to-date content.
Also, consistently adding content to your website shows Google that you are active and can help you rank higher in Google searches. The life of one piece of content can be short, consider planning out a quarterly or yearly content calendar that helps you stay on track and consistently produce content that speaks to your ideal buyers.
When you first write content or launch your website, you might not know what style or subject matter would be most attractive to your customers. Get acquainted with Google Analytics to run reports on what pages your visitors were most drawn to. Once you get a better understanding of what your target customer wants to read, you can continue producing that type of content and expand upon it.
More importantly, monitor your website analytics to make sure your website is working for you. Data is a powerful tool. With regular monitoring, you can better understand what you need to prioritize in your marketing strategy. Websites are like plants, they need attention and care. You may find through your data monitoring that some slight tweaks to your webpage content or user experience can untimely impact the number of visitors to your website.
Posting on social media is vital because it is a fantastic way to distribute your content and entice the public to visit your site. You can use relevant hashtags to be found in searches. If your social media followers find the content interesting, they might share it with others, and you’ll get their traffic as well.
You can also consider paid social media. This means that you can boost a post for a particular audience that might find your company interesting. These boosted posts can be inexpensive and produce fantastic results in terms of increasing your visibility.
Do you think your website and marketing strategy is optimized to attract the right visitors to your website? Utilize some of our other resources to learn how to get more out of your website and marketing efforts.
Read our article called How To Design Your Website As An Effective Marketing Tool.
Use our Free Website Grader to get an idea of how your website is performing right now.
Or contact Brady, our UJM expert, to chat about how our team can help get you and your digital presence on the right path.