How can you drive traffic to your website?

You’ve spent months building your website. Agonising over the words, images. Each section painstakingly checked and re-checked. Now it’s launched. It’s live to the world. Your mum loves it. But now what? How can you drive traffic – the right traffic to your website?

 

This is the million-dollar question and our resident marketing expert Emma Nickson has 5 top tips to help:

 

1. Clarity and accessibility. Ensure that it’s clear from your website what your business does and who its audience are – e.g. business or consumers. The clearer you are, the better rankings you will achieve in searches. Think about your domain name, the information on your website such as phone numbers and contact channels and the copy. Is it all a clear reflection of who you are and what you do? From a design perspective, it needs to be accessible and meet the requirements as set out by the Government. See attached https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/helping-people-to-use-your-service/making-your-service-accessible-an-introduction

 

2. Keeping things fresh. Google loves well-built websites which are kept up to date. Regular blog posts or articles, a refresh of the homepage copy, any promotional or date sensitive copy kept up to date and the addition of new images from time to time all help.

 

3. Use your social media channels. Pushing out links to the blogs or articles which live on your website, through your social media channels is a really good way to showcase what you are all about through your own words as well as helping your SEO. If you sponsor and target your posts (you can do this through all social media channels including LinkedIn), you will ensure that your posts are reaching new and targeted audiences and that they meet a specific objective. Sponsoring doesn’t need to cost a lot and there is very little wastage if you choose your target and objective correctly. If you don’t have the money to invest in sponsored posts, hashtags can help a little to drive temporary traction, but are not a solid approach to long term, strategic traffic driving activity.

 

4. Investigate promotion through Google. If you are in a competitive market, it’s worth investigating the tools that Google offer. You can set up an ad campaign with a specific budget through Google Ads. This means that an ad for your business will appear when someone searches for certain keywords. Using this approach will give your website better visibility in searches and you’ll see a quick rise in traffic. You can also invest in key words, choosing the words and search terms which people use to find your business (there’s a key word planner tool to help you). You can pause and adjust your activity at any time and Google will report on the effectiveness of your campaigns so that you can tweak accordingly. Find out more www.ads.google.com

 

5. Analyse your traffic. It’s important to understand where your web traffic is coming from and the effect (both negative and positive) of any activity you undertake to drive traffic to your site. Doing this at the end of each month will ensure a constant stream of learnings and allow you to evolve and grow your activity over time. Analytical tools such as Google Analytics can give you a wealth of information for free and help you to understand the channels your visitors are using to reach your website. If you are using social media as a way to push people to your website, it’s important to look at the whole picture, so make sure that you use the analytical and insight reports that Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn all offer too - there are valuable gems to be gleaned. They will enable you to see how each of your posts have performed in terms of reach and impressions and help you to understand if sponsored posts are meeting the objectives you set. Marrying these insights with website analytics will give you a powerful understanding of what your activity has achieved in a month and can be fed into the forward plan for achieving the best outcomes in the coming months. https://support.google.com/analytics

 

Are you looking for technical expertise?

We are Olamalu, Drupal experts and experienced web developers. We’re a friendly and down to earth team based in West Oxfordshire, who work together to achieve brilliant outcomes. We’ve been building websites and designing tailormade tech solutions for a huge range of different challenges for over 10 years. We work alongside clients and really get under the skin of the business, understanding not just what is needed now, but also how to plan ahead and consider the business needs in the future. If you want to get in touch with us, visit our website www.olamalu.com

September 2021