You have a brand new website. You worked hard to make it perfect, and you even paid for a high-quality domain name that perfectly describes your business. You probably spent a lot of time planning and preparing for the launch, and you hope that your efforts will pay off and that people will visit your site and even make some sales.
But what if your site doesn’t get any traffic? What if nobody visits it? Your efforts could have all been in vain.
To save you from disappointment, we’ve compiled a list of tips on how to make your website more visible in an inbox. Hopefully, these tips will help you improve your odds of getting traffic and making sales.
Find The Right Niche
In the beginning, when you’re just starting a business, it’s easy to become fixated on broad themes like marketing, sales, and growth. But as you grow and gain experience, you’ll need to narrow your scope.
Look for markets, channels, and demographics that are untapped and ready to jump on board with your product or service. Otherwise, you could end up wasting a lot of time and energy promoting a niche that isn’t interested in your product.
Content Is King
Depending on how competitive your industry is, you may need to put the promotion muscle behind your content to get noticed. People love content that is well written, highly informative, and entertaining. Moreover, you can’t simply rely on keywords or pretty graphics to get your content found. You need to incorporate both into your strategy.
So what does that mean for you? You need to produce and distribute content that is both informative and entertaining. Whether you’re telling a story, explaining a concept, or simply writing something to inspire or encourage others, you need to make sure that your content offers something new and interesting to read or watch.
Build Your Brand
Building your brand is an essential step towards gaining credibility with customers. When someone discovers your product or service through a search engine, they’ll often click on a link to learn more about you and decide if you’re a trustworthy company that they want to do business with. But, if they find your website and visit it, but don’t yet know who you are or what you do, you lose out on the opportunity to build credibility and trust.
Your brand is more than just your logo or the colors you choose for your products. It is everything from your written materials, through to your social media accounts. You can use your logo as a starting point, but you should strive to create a complete identity for your brand that will make customers feel confident in doing business with you.
Make Sure Your Website Is Fully Accessible
Not all customers are created equal. You may have a few customers that are perfectly happy with your product, but you’ll also likely have a lot more that have quality issues. For example, some customers may experience difficulty using your product or service because of usability points or errors on your website.
Make sure that all of your pages are fully accessible. This means that you’re taking into consideration things like whether text is readable on a screen, how large the text is, and whether there are any usability errors (such as missing words or images).
There are several tools online that can scan your website and give you an idea of its accessibility. You can use these tools to find out whether or not your site is mobile-friendly, and if it doesn’t meet the standards, you can work to fix it. Alternatively, you can hire a professional web design company to build a custom platform for your website.
Make Sure That Your Website Is Virus-Free
When someone decides to do business with you, they’re often already enticed by your website. But, if you want to retain customers and increase your odds of converting website traffic into paying customers, you need to prevent malware and viruses from infecting your website. Users hate getting computer viruses on their phones, so ensure that your site is free from these infections.
You can use a tool like Google Analytics to track the sources of your website traffic and eliminate those that come from illegitimate or virus-infected websites.
Pay Attention To Detail
When you put effort into something, you get results. But you can’t simply expect that you’ll get results right off the bat. You need to put in the time to see tangible results.
For example, if you want to see more people visiting your website, you need to put in the time to build a following. You can’t just ‘set it and forget it’ because you’ll eventually fall flat on your face.
Similarly, if you want to see increased leads or sales, you need to put in the time to educate and convince prospective customers that you’re the go-to source for the products or services that they’re looking for. It won’t happen overnight, but you can’t expect quick fixes either.
SEO Is About Gaining Visibility, Not Winning
Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about gaining visibility, not winning. Once you establish yourself as a competent provider of the products that your site is promoting, you can use your site’s content to gain more visitors and gain more customers.
Including keywords in your copy and throughout your site’s content won’t get you far. Nor will using keywords to try and game the system and rank for ridiculous terms with zero meaning or use.
Instead, you need to create content that is both relevant and useful to your target audience. Moreover, you need to do this consistently and with enough material that Google, Bing, and other search engines index and rank your content.
Create Unique Content That Is Informative
If you’re just starting out, it’s easy to write blog posts, fill them with keywords, and hit ‘publish.’ But as you grow and establish yourself as an expert in your field, you need to find a way to stand out from the crowd.
There are several tactics that you can use to create unique content that is both informative and entertaining. You can create videos to explain complex or difficult subjects in an easy-to-digest manner. You can also write an eBook and put it on iTunes or other digital stores. Or, you can establish yourself as a thought-leader in your industry and give presentations at professional conferences. All of these tactics will help you establish yourself as an expert in your field and give you the opportunity to write unique content that is both informative and entertaining.
Blogs aren’t dead, but they are definitely not the best choice when it comes to SEO. In this day and age, Google and other search engines favor websites that are fully functional and engaging over simple blogs with no content. So, if your blog is just a collection of very basic entries, then it’s easy for Google to decide that it’s not a useful resource.
Use Keywords In Your Linking
If you’ve ever shopped online, then you’re probably familiar with the multitude of options that can paralyze even the most experienced online shopper. That’s because online shoppers can find whatever they want, and with so many competitors and similar products, it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd.
Even if you’re using the same exact product, keywords still matter. When someone is searching for a product like yours, they’ll often type in a few words or phrases and click on the first few links that appear. So, if you want to increase your odds of being found when someone searches for your product, include keywords in your linking.
Build A Following
Creating unique content that is both informative and entertaining is a great way to gain credibility. But to really make your content stand out, you need to build a following. You can do this through affiliate marketing, which earns you a commission when someone clicks a link or buys a product that you promote on your blog. Or, you can use platforms like Twitter to follow and connect with people that have a similar interest to yours.
Once you’ve established yourself as an expert in your field, the sky is the limit as to what you can accomplish. You can teach others how to be successful in your field, build a brand, or simply inspire others.