You’ve just launched your startup website, but you’re getting nowhere near the traffic that your competitors are seeing. How do they get so much more than you? Don’t worry! The process has begun – people are visiting your site and deciding whether or not to keep engaging with it…
Here are ten ways to make sure they decide in your favor!
1. Make Your Site Search-Engine Optimized
When Google crawls the web for search results, it looks for keywords in three places: in links pointing to another site; in the text of the page itself; and in the HTML code that powers your site. You need to make sure that you’re including these keywords where they will do the most good for you, and excluding them where they won’t help at all – like your Meta tags!
2. Use Social Media Sites (But Don’t Spam!)
Paul Haarman observed that more than 80% of adults online use social media networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, and 50% of those users check their feeds several times a day. If you’re not marketing yourself on social media sites… well, just don’t bother saying we didn’t warn you! It’s free advertising, and it works reasonably well if you know what you’re doing. Just don’t become one of those people who post every single update as an ad, and you’ll be fine.
3. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
62% of internet users are frustrated when sites don’t work properly on their mobile devices. If your site only looks right in the Chrome browser or doesn’t look right at all, you’re missing out on a huge section of your potential audience! Google is pushing for better mobile friendliness, so get to it while there’s still time!
4. Don’t Forget Blogging
Blogging helps with your SEO, it brings people onto your site who then share your content with their own social media followers… and if you ever want to make money by blogging (it’s possible!), it’s an essential part of the process because search engines like new, fresh content.
5. Measure Your Traffic and Results
You can’t improve what you don’t measure! You should be tracking every bit of traffic to your site, as well as the results those visitors achieve (sales, downloads, etc.). And once you’ve tracked it all down, look for the metrics that matter most – conversions, bounce rate, time spent on page… and then use that data to keep improving your site and your marketing strategies over time.
6. Make Content People Will Care About
People don’t want to read a boring article about how great your new product is – they just won’t stick around! That’s why we’re suggesting ways to get more traffic: because interesting content is still king. If you can make ‘boring’ aspects of your business story interesting – like the creation process or the team behind it all – you’ll be able to hook people in and keep them around.
7. Get on LinkedIn
The biggest social media site that’s focused more on professionals rather than friends is an awesome place for word-of-mouth advertising. Almost 70% of Fortune 500 companies are using LinkedIn as a career development tool, including job postings! If yours isn’t yet… well, what are you waiting for?
8. Get Social with Your Customer Service
Twitter is one of the best ways to interact with customers – so much so that most startups use it exclusively. It’s free, fast and easy to set up (here’s our tutorial on how) and it’s a great way to answer questions or resolve complaints.
9. Don’t Forget Your Email List!
Email marketing is one of the best, most cost-effective ways to increase your traffic. It allows you to send out messages at odd hours (unlike social media!) and reach an extremely targeted audience. And there’s no faster way of building up trust than emails that consistently offer free tips and advice on improving their business.
10. Master Mobile Marketing
If you want more leads, keep the mobile ball rolling by making sure that all your advertising and marketing is as easy as pie to access from a smartphone or tablet – this includes not only your ads but also any articles or blog posts too!
Conclusion:
The main purpose of a home page or landing page is to get visitors to do what you want them to do, whether its sign up for a newsletter, make a purchase, or leave their email address.
Paul Haarman suggested that if you follow the above steps and work on improving your traffic generation now rather than later, there’s no reason why your website shouldn’t start getting more leads very soon! Just be sure to track your results using Google Analytics so that everything is measurable. This way you can tell which methods are working well for you and focus more on those with low numbers.
