Many people ask me “how can I increase my number of website visitors?”. They are happy with the look of their website, but would like more ‘hits’.
My top 6 tips for improving the number of visitors to your website and also increasing your ranking in search engines
- Never miss an opportunity to include your website address on communications. Whether it’s a letter, brochure, invoice, business card or advert, make sure you always include your website address. If people don’t know it exists, they won’t go there.
- If you have a business site, list your business in free web directories. Many of them get a lot of traffic, so having a link on them will give your website more credibility. Don’t forget to include a link to your website though! Try FreeIndex – a basic listing is free. In my opinion, it’s not usually worth paying for an enhanced listing.
- Use social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest etc.), and make sure you are mentioning your site or business as much as possible. Any postings on social media sites will help to increase your ranking in Google, although Google+ is particularly effective. YouTube also works really well if you have video material to share.
- Make sure you regularly update your website – all our sites allow you to do this, so there’s no excuse not to! Posting new content will improve your Google ratings, and nothing turns a customer off faster than outdated information on a website. Maybe you could include a seasonal special offer?
- Think about the words and phrases potential website visitors might search for, and include these in your website content and keywords. Bear in mind that many sites would love to be top for ‘garden tools’, but it is much easier to be top for a more niche phrase such as ‘yellow long-handled loppers’.
- Rather than paying a search engine optimisation (SEO) specialist to work on your site, consider signing up for a training session on SEO so that you can learn about SEO yourself. In the long run, this will be a much more cost-effective way of improving your website’s clout with search engines.
Time well spent, but it takes time to increase website visitors
A couple of hours spent promoting your site and considering these actions could be time well-spent. Whilst taking these steps will not guarantee more visitors to your site, they should improve your chances considerably. Patience is essential. It takes time for the search engines to ‘crawl’ the web and find out about your site. But with regular updates to your site, your website visitors will increase.
