Increasing Traffic to your Website
1. Thoroughly examine the features of your website.
Ask yourself if some things are totally necessary and if there is anything that might be missing. More importantly, is your website user-friendly? Imagine yourself a user visiting the website for the first time. Is navigation easy? Can you find what you are looking for quickly? It’s understandable that you might be proud of your website and object to making any changes, but at the same time, ego should never stand in the way of progress.
2. Build a community.
Whether you utilize the advantages of social networking or pass out business cards at a tradeshow, or even if you start a conversation with someone in passing on the street, there is potential to build your community. Consider everyone you meet, speak to, email or connect with a potential visitor to your site. Remain active in your community. Engage, interact, ask and answer questions, send out newsletters, start a blog, leave comments on other blogs (with a signature linking back to your site), etc. There are endless possibilities enabling you to build and expand your community.
3. Analyze the best and the worst of your site, and make any necessary changes.
Utilize your in-house website technician or an outside source if necessary to analyze your site for things like broken links, pages that display incorrectly, pages that load slowly because they might contain too many pictures, movies, music, etc., and other factors that may annoy and frustrate visitors.
Additionally, analyze what areas of your site appear to be the most popular: which pages are users visiting the most, which pages do they spend most of their time on, and perhaps most important, how are they discovering and arriving at your site. Knowing these things can give you greater insight into what paths to take to ensure your website traffic remains consistent, and what steps you might take to keep it growing.
4. Keep information fresh, concise, and interesting.
Visitors to your site don’t want to wade through several paragraphs of information to find the one key element they might be searching for. Cut out the fluff and give them exactly what they want.
Additionally, maintain an area of your site to provide interesting, industry-related news, expanded product information, or articles and press releases. This type of rich, informative content is what keeps users coming back, and also serves to increase brand awareness. It also reinforces your image as an authority in your relative industry.
5. Repeat steps 1-4.
Regardless of how successful your efforts might be to increase traffic and improve your website, there is likely still always room for improvement. Set dedicated intervals to refocus your efforts on the above steps. The Internet is constantly changing, and competition is always active, possibly engaged in the same thorough examination, analysis, and community building as you. You must remain ever vigilant to ensure that your website traffic does not decline as you lose visitors to the competition or as a result of other factors, such as outdated information or lack of contact with the community.
