Drive Traffic to Your Website

Last week’s post was about the importance of adding fresh content to improve your website’s SEO. To review, even if all you do is add short, frequent blog posts to your website, or at least update your page content, your SEO will improve because it will trigger the web crawlers/bots to re-crawl your content and re-index your website accordingly. Google will see it as a live and active website, not dead. However, if you really want to take your visibility to the next level, use that fresh content you’ve created to DRIVE traffic to your website.

People sometimes think they’re already adequately driving traffic to their website if they print their web address on their letterhead and business cards, add it to the “About” section on their social profile pages, provide a link to it through the Chamber of Commerce, and so on. These visibility tactics are important, but they do not drive traffic.

Do more than just direct traffic. Drive it!

If you clicked, I drove you here.

The difference between directing people to your website and driving them is giving them something to click on and a reason to do it.

Case in point: You are here on my website reading this right now because you saw my post on Facebook and clicked. I drove you here.

Would you have eventually visited the site even if I didn’t drive you? Maybe, but here’s a non-technical analogy to illustrate the difference:

Think about all those websites out there as if they were a bunch of eager political candidates, each prepared to make an impact and vying for your attention. Now think about what it takes to get people to actually vote. If the candidates are roughly equal in popularity, let’s say one party actively promotes the date of the vote, the polling location and the hours. The other party does all of that too, but also picks up people and drives them to the polls. Which candidate will get more votes? (The one who does the driving!)

Share your content.

I’m going to assume that you have, at the very least, a Facebook page for your business or organization.

After you publish a post on your blog, just copy the whole url for that post and paste it as a status update to your business or organization’s Facebook page. If you have configured it correctly, Facebook will recognize this as a link and will automatically pull in an image from your content to add to it. (If it doesn’t, you can — and should — add an image manually.) Once that image populates, before you click “post”, you can — and should — erase the link and type your own message there to entice people to click on it.

For example, last week I shared the url for my first post on this blog: http://www.wintersetwebsites.info/seo/new-year-new-blog/. Facebook pulled in the image of the library that was included in that post, and I erased the link and added the text: “Getting a jump on one of my new year’s resolutions for 2018: a new blog on Winterset Websites with hopefully/somewhat useful information for anyone who is interested. Cheers!”

Note that it wasn’t a terribly strong call to action. I stopped short of asking people to click. But still, you can see in the chart below from my Google Analytics that I successfully drove about 50 people to the blog on my website on December 28 and 29, when it was posted, and my numbers have continued to be a little higher on average ever since. Also notice that it’s not just the “Social” traffic number that improved; the Direct and Organic search numbers are also better, due to the activity created by fresh content. Not bad results for just one post on a brand new blog. Imagine what will happen if I keep doing that!

Next week I’ll share more information about how you can drive traffic to your website even if you’re not a blogger. Thanks for reading!

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