So you have a new website built and running for your business and now you just need people to find it and learn more about your business.
This article aims to explore the first things you should be doing to get traffic to your website, some of this is considered SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and some is basic marketing techniques. Everything here will be a great start to getting visitors to your website. You may want to do a bit more research in these items before you start.
Anyone can do what I am outlining here as long as you have access to your website or the WordPress admin section of your website.
Site Speed
The overall site speed is the first thing you should be looking at for a new website. There are two websites you can use for this, one is Page Insights by Google – and the other is GTMetrix.
Once you enter your website address in they will calculate the speed in which the site loads and provide explanations to why it is slow, if that is the case. Most of the time reducing image sizes and having a caching plugin will fix a lot of the issues.
If you are able to resolve the issues both of those sites suggest, you will increase the website speed substantially.
You might be asking why it is important to have a fast website? The obvious first answer it to keep the user on your website, if it is too slow to access and navigate pages, they will move on to another website. The other important reason is google uses site speed for SEO rankings on their search results, faster website equals higher rankings which means more potential visitors to your website.
Google My Business
The next step is to get your business listed on Google My Business, this is a bit of a longer process than making a quick change on your website but it is definitely worth it in the long run.
Once you add your business, Google will look to verify it and when that is completed you can update your profile and ask customers to leave 5 star reviews which will help you get more customers searching for your services.
You can also post images and content that link back to your website to help boost traffic.
Local SEO
Local SEO refers to setting up your site, or the content to be reachable to those who are locally near you. If you run a business where your customers are in the local area, then you definitely want to utilize this.
The first step, which should be obvious is to set up your Google Business page as already mentioned. This will help to direct those searching for your business that are close to them and will definitely help drive traffic to your website.
One quick thing you need to do as well is include your local phone number and address to every page of your website. You can easily do this by adding it to the footer of your website in wordpress. There are too many themes available so you should either reach out to the support team who made the theme you are using or google how to change or add to your footer. This is something that anyone should be able to do.
You will also want to look for local keywords that you can add to your website content when creating it. For example if you are a plumber in Detroit and good keyword to look at could be “Detroit plumber”. We will discuss keywords more later in this article and where you can find them.
Articles And Content
One of the best ways to get organic traffic to your website is creating content. The content you create needs to be relevant to your business or the topic of your website.
One way to find ideas for content posts is to find out what others are asking questions for, with your expertise you can create a detailed post on your website blog that answers the question. This will get ranked naturally on google and you will get visitors to your website and potential customers.
You can find where people are asking questions at web forums, Facebook groups, reddit or Answer The Public. These are all great places to find out what people are trying to solve for and you can create content that actually answers the question.
You need to create quality content that provides enough detail to be useful for readers and not just quick answers. Take your time creating these and this will bring in traffic in an ongoing basis.
On Site SEO
On site SEO refers to technical settings for your website and pages that help search engines like google to determine how to show them in search results.
Similar to what we discussed earlier in this article, you need to add certain keywords that are relevant to your website and content that help it to rank better with search engines.
You will want to use keywords in the title of your article and in the content of the article as well. Make sure you use it in a way that makes sense and you are not just putting them randomly throughout the post. The key is to make quality content that will benefit the readers to your website.
Meta tags are also important for the pages and content of your website, one of the easiest way to get these on your website is to use a plugin like All In One SEO. This plugin will allow you to set the meta descriptions for the website and all the content pages so you don’t have to worry about editing the code of your site.
You can also hire someone to help with this as it can feel overwhelming to start. If your business or website will depend on getting traffic and you are not comfortable with these steps, then it is probably worth finding someone who can help you.