If you are trying to get more people to visit your website, one of the best things you can do is create great content. Writing great content can take time though. It may also take time for the search engines to index your great content.
Sometimes you need to find other ways to get people to visit your site. “If you build it they will come” doesn’t always work and sometimes you can give people a little help along the way.
Here are some great ways to help people find your content. Once you start generating traffic, things should start to grow and as long as you are feeding people the information they want your site should continue to grow.
How to Get More People to Visit Your Website
1. Digital Advertising
While this may sound like an obvious solution, you can increase your traffic by participating in digital advertising. You will need to target high-commercial intent keywords if advertising is your strategy. It can get expensive, but the payoff of doing this may be worth it for you.
According to Wordstream, you can attract visitors, build your brand, and get your website or blog in front of people by just using paid search advertising, display advertising, and social media advertising.
For example, you can pay for ads on Facebook if that is where your audience hangs out the most. It’s important to understand your audience and what their search results are. Google Analytics can help with this.
2. Social Media Marketing
It’s important to not only submit social media posts on your channels but also to be very active and social on these networks. You can’t expect people to follow what you post if you don’t pay attention to anything they have to say. You should consider interacting with social media influencers, the MVPs of the social networking game.
Be proactive in your posting on your social media channels, as well. If you want to promote your content, you need to talk about it before it comes out. Determine which social channels your target audience goes to for their content, and establish an online presence there. Social media marketing can be very effective if done right.
Consider using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn, depending on where your audience hangs out at. Where have you found the leaders for your industry? If your industry is very focused on visuals and imagery, you may find the best results with Pinterest and Instagram.
3. Video Marketing
People like to consume information in different ways. Some readers have short attention spans; they just don’t have the patience to read through a long blog post. Instead, they want to watch or listen to someone telling them all about it.
Most people retain the content they hear or see a visual for, more than what they just read. This means that video marketing is a great way to capture the attention of the right audience. You can start a YouTube channel for free! This is another great platform to link back to your website, too!
4. Email Marketing
According to Wordstream, many businesses focus so much on content marketing that they forget about the importance of email marketing. This is a powerful tool in reaching people who really want to read your content!
In fact, email marketing is one of the best ways to communicate the message you are trying to convey to your audience. You can link directly to blog posts or other pages on your website with a great email newsletter! This is an excellent strategy in reaching the right audience, those who are excited to listen to what you have to say!
5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Keywords are an important part of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. You need to include pertinent keywords (the “key” words that people are searching for) by doing proper keyword research, planning your keywords accordingly, and finally placing them strategically throughout the body of your blog post and website content.
If you do adequate keyword research and planning, you should be off to a good start. On-page SEO is also a valuable practice. This means including content for your image alt text, creating working internal links for your new content, making the most of meta descriptions, and doing other simple but necessary tasks.
6. Guest Blogging
One way you can increase the traffic to your website is to guest post on other people’s blogs. You may want to make sure you add content to someone’s blog who is aligned with your message or mission, someone who speaks on a similar topic.
Adding your content online elsewhere helps establish you as an expert or authority figure on your subject matter. This will lead more people to want to check out more of your quality content, so they will head over to your blog!
Often when you guest post the owner of the site will allow you to have at least one “do-follow” link to your own site. There is often an area for some type of bio or at least a byline. Make sure you understand what the terms of their guest posting policy are.
Conversely, you can make a lot of headway with content by having others post on your blog. Other people may ask to write content for your blog and to have it published on your website. Make sure you establish guest blogging policies regarding the content and read through it thoroughly to ensure it’s not spammy or low-quality information.
7. Linking
Getting people to link to your content is a great way to get more people to visit your website or blog. It creates a direct line from another source to your content.
The first thing you should do is to take stock of all the properties you currently have access to.
- social media sites
- email Signatures
- other websites you might own
- free or paid listing sites
Then you can start reaching out to other websites and ask them to link to your content. You will need to have valuable content to get someone to link to it.
Often a good blog post will already be linking to other articles. If you find some that are similar, you can ask the author if they will link to your instead ( assuming that it is as good or better).
To entice an author to change a link to point to your content, you could let them know that you will create a social media post sharing their article. This is a win-win for each party.
8. Networking
Networking is still one of the best ways to promote your business and meet people. After meeting someone and having an engaging conversation, they will naturally want to visit your website to find out more about you or your business.
In an initial conversation, you could mention that you just wrote an article about a certain topic. Of course, this should be organic and natural to the conversation. You don’t want to come off like you are selling the person you are meeting.
There are many networking opportunities from live events to virtual meetings. Most of them give you an opportunity to meet many different people and tell just as many people about what you do.
9. Freebies
Consider offering freebies on your website to attract new readers and bring back old ones. You can offer free online courses, webinars, or even printables. It may not take a lot of effort on your end, but you can really make an impact on your target audience! Give them a taste of the business products or services you offer, so they will want to purchase the whole deal!
10. High-Quality Content
None of the other suggestions really matter unless you have good content on your site that people actually want to read.
Make sure you use juicy headlines because that’s where people decide if they want to read what you have to say.
You’ll want to write excellent copy or content for your blog posts, engaging your audience as you go along, or hire a writer with exceptional skills. Aim for long-form content with photos, videos and infographics if relevant to your content.
As you write, you will want to use your keywords strategically. You don’t want to make the mistake of keyword stuffing, which happens when you use the same keyword too often. For example, if you were writing about “cute cats,” you wouldn’t want to say something like:
“Our cute cats are the best cute cats in the world because they enjoy showing off what cute cats they are in videos!”
You have used your main keyword too much, and it turns off Google and your reader! Instead, use synonyms of the keyword. So, in this example, you might say something like this instead:
“Our cute cates are the best felines in the world because they enjoy showing off what adorable kittens they are in videos!”
Now, you have used the synonyms properly, and it does not sound off to the reader! You can also aim for several long-tail keywords when you write. For example, you might go for the long-term keyphrase, “adorable lost kittens” instead of just “kittens.” This will give you more than one word to use as part of your keyphrase.
You should also consider adding images, bulleted lists, quotes, numbered lists, and other visually inviting items in your content to break up the text. You want to keep the reader engaged when you write, so they will want to read more of what you’ve written in the past or plan to write in the future.
Hopefully, you are now equipped with some suggestions that will help you determine how to get more people to visit your website. Remember that there’s always search engine optimization that can be done and content creation that should be evaluated from time to time to ensure your content doesn’t become outdated or unhelpful to your audience.
