Hopefully you’re not one of the 50% of US small businesses which don’t have a website. In case you are, head over to this article and get a website as soon as possible.
However, what do you do once your website is up and running? How do you get people to notice it and visit your web presence? After all, a website without visitors is like a company without customers – dead.
Your website visitors can come from four sources:
- Direct visitors
- Social media
- Search engines
- Referral traffic
Let’s look at each of them separately and try to understand how to gain more visitors in each category.
Direct visitors
Direct visitors are people who directly type your website address into their browser address bar. For example “www.businessload.com”.
Those kind of visitors must already know you. Maybe they’ve picked up one of your business cards or they’ve seen some of your offline advertisement.
So make sure to include your website address in any company materials you’ve got, including:
- business cards
- brochures
- letter heads
- email signatures
- invoices
Social media visitors
These are either your customers or people who have been interested in what you’re doing in the past. They therefore started following you on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
In order to get as many visitors as possible from social media you need to make sure to completely fill out your social media profiles, including your company description and your website address.
Once this basic task is done you will also need to make sure to regularly post interesting and engaging updates that make people click and go to your website to find out more.
This can include prize draws, questionnaires, viral posts, videos and industry reports.
Search engine visitors
The most well-known search engine in the world is probably Google. Other search engines are Yahoo, Bing and Duck Duck Go. All of them work pretty similar so the general task is to optimise for search engines.
Make sure to follow a few guidelines that are mentioned here and here. There are two kinds of optimisation you have to do to rank high in search engines:
- On-page optimisation
- Off-page optimisation
The on-page optimisation looks at everything you do directly on your website. This includes choosing good and unique titles and meta descriptions for each page.
The off-page optimisaton looks at everything you do on other websites to drive traffic and link juice to your website. This mainly means building backlinks from other websites to your website. It includes having your social media profiles filled out and linking back to your website as well as replying to Quora questions and adding your link to your answer.
You can also contact other website and blog owners and ask them to write guest blog posts for them in return for a link. If your pitch and blog post is good they will most likely accept the offer and add a link back to your website in the author bio of the blog post.
All of those backlinks will send signals to Google that your website is worthy a high ranking.
In summary you need to make sure to:
- choose good & unique titles for each of your website pages
- choose good & unique meta descriptions for each of your website pages
- completely fill our your social media profiles, including the “website” sections
- create backlinks to your website by writing guest posts and being active on Quora & co.
Referral traffic
The previous part of off-page optimisation to rank higher in search engines goes hand-in-hand with referral traffic.
Referral traffic are website visitors that come from another website to your website by clicking on a link on that website.
For example, if you write a guest post on another blog and someone who reads that post clicks on the link in your author bio and lands on your website it is counted as referral traffic.
You can also get a high amount of referral traffic by providing high-quality, unique content on your blog or website. If you have primary research statistics on your website that are worth linking to, then someone who writes a blog post about the topic covered in your research might want to link to it.
As you can see there are plenty of ways to get visitors to your website. The simplest and most natural way to do so is by providing high-quality, unique and shareable content on a frequent basis. Good luck!
