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7 Tips to Help Your New Website Bring in Traffic
For people who have just built a new website, one of the first questions is “how do I get traffic to it?” On the face of it, this seems like a difficult conundrum, but when you dig into it, there are lots of different ways you can get your site off the ground with its first visitors.
Once you get things rolling, then the sky’s the limit, and you can find your site is popular with tens of thousands of people. However, the most difficult part is the beginning, so follow these seven tips to start getting your first traffic.
1. Commit to Quality
No matter how obscure your niche is, the chances are there are lots of other websites out there that are talking about the same thing. The internet is a competitive place, and if you’re going to attract lots of visitors, then you’ve got to be able to stand out from the crowd.
One of the best ways you can do this is by investing in quality content. Find what your competitors have written, and then find ways you can better it and make it more complete.
The search engines love quality content and so do your readers, and it really gives people a reason to keep coming back to your site time and again.
2. Make it Fast
People will not wait for slow websites in the world we live in. We expect everything to be instantaneous, and every second your website keeps people waiting, the more people will click away without consuming the content.
When you work so hard to bring people to your website this is a huge problem. It’s no use people clicking your links if they’re not going to read your information and take action, so it’s something you need to address.
Make sure you’re not overcomplicating your website, only using the plugins that are necessary and optimizing images to ensure they load quickly.
3. Focus on User Experience
It’s not just speed that people are looking for from your website; it’s also got to function well. Websites with links that don’t work, buttons that don’t load, and generally take you in circles drive people crazy.
No matter how good your information is, people won’t stick around to read it because you’re putting up too many barriers. It’s hard to spot user experience errors, but you need to be going through your website as if you were a visitor and eliminating any user experience errors.
You don’t have to do anything too complicated, just keep things simple and efficient, and avoid the basic UX errors that put your visitors off.
4. Utilize Social Media
When you’re starting a brand new website, it can take time for the search engines to pick up on it and start ranking your pages. With social media though you have no such problems, and you can immediately start getting your work in front of a large audience.
Platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and others are great ways of showcasing your work in the early days, so make sure you’re making the most of them. There are lots of different ways you can reach your target audience, so leverage your own personal contacts, get involved in groups, and start to build your business’s profile.
The best social media campaigns can bring in a huge amount of traffic, and there’s no reason yours can’t do the same.
5. Incorporate SEO
The search engines are there to showcase the best web pages on the internet for a given search term. So, when you produce the best content out there, then you give yourself a great chance of ranking and getting lots of visitors to your site.
However, the search engines are only so smart, and in order to show them that you’ve got some amazing content you’ve got to give them certain signals. This means taking care of the basics of search engine optimization and making sure you’ve got everything laid out in the best possible way.
It might seem complicated, but SEO is something everyone can do, and if you’re consistent with it, then it can bring in a lot of traffic. SEO is something you will constantly be working on, but it can be well worth the effort.
6. Calls to Action
As much as it’s great to have people on your website consuming your content, for your website to be successful you really need people to take action. What that action is will depend on your goals, but you do have a path that you want people to follow.
Whether that action is filling out a contact form, commenting on a post, or buying a product, it’s not easy to get people to take the action you want them to take. You’ve got to help guide people towards that action, and the way you can do this is by using good calls to action.
When you’ve got great content, and you’re guiding people through your site with calls to action, then you’ll find you will get more people’s contact details, and you can use them to bring people back to your site.
If you can use your email marketing to get people returning to your site on a consistent basis, then you will find it makes a big difference to your traffic.
7. Be Consistent
For most websites, traffic doesn’t come overnight – you’ve got to work at it, and sometimes it will take months before you see the fruits of your work.
The important thing is that you don’t lose faith, and you keep doing the good things that you’re doing. So often people give up on their websites just when they’re about to turn the corner, so don’t lose hope, and keep on doing your good work.
A website generally isn’t a short-term investment, it’s something that takes time to build, but it’s something that can bring benefits long into the future, so it’s worth waiting on.
Keep creating new pages, writing high-quality blogs, posting on social media, and following the right steps, and the traffic will come.