There are approximately 1.5 billion websites on-line in the world today, of which over 200 million are actively maintained. And every second, 2.5 new websites appear. In such a crowded environment, ensuring that your own website stands out and gets attention from the right people, is a daunting task.
The simplest way to promote a website is by using SEM which is an effective approach to buying key-words and promoting the site in search returns. The problem with SEM is that, as paid for search, it quickly becomes prohibitively expensive to maintain. A better approach is organic search based on SEO. This can be highly effective over time and builds a sustainable presence that attracts quality links and views. The downside of SEO is that it takes time and a sustained quality effort to build traction. It also costs money as quality, original content requires investment. However, once developed and regularly maintained, organic content is a significantly more effective at attracting quality visits.
So if SEM is expensive and SEO takes time to establish, what can be done on a tight budget to pump-up your website’s online presence and visits in the short term?
Here are a few inexpensive ways that will to create a lift in relevant visits;
Claim & optimise your Google My Business Listing
Having an optimized Google My Business listing gives you 7x more visits. This is why it’s essential to have the correct and complete information on the listing. Remember that this particular listing appears on the knowledge graph and whatever users can see in it is crucial to recognition and their impression of your brand. Through this step, you are able to direct users to the site if they’ve have any interest in learning more about your products or services. This is why it’s important to pay special attention to optimizing Google My Business listing. Additionally, it provides a great proof of your company’s credibility and reliability.
Create a plan for managed on-line activity and postings on social media
Done well, social media is one of the most powerful approaches in digital marketing. Aside from its wide span of reach, people can use it for free. It’s also an effective channel to help your site as well as brand to gain more followers. The use of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and other platforms can help convert your social media audience into website visitors. Having shareable and interactive content can draw traffic from these networks. It’s important to be relevant and original in your postings to encourage revisits and retweets.
However, with the exception of large marketing brands, many companies fail to create relevant content and instead post speeches, news, staff news and so on. needless to say, that sort of content won’t hold a site visitor and certainly won’t generate any retweets or revisits. A content plan should be focused around the company’s area of professional expertise and business ambitions. It begins by knowing what your brand is and how it stands out from the competitors. This awareness enables you to position your own brand and bring authority to your ‘thought leadership’. In order to do this you need to know your target audience well enough to produce consistent and relatable posts. You should also have a firm idea of what your brand value is and what it stands for in terms of your value proposition.
Once you get to grips with implementing a content plan, it will become the ‘honey that attracts the bees’ to your postings, and from there to your website. The key to success is to ensure that the content is professionally presented, relevant to your brand’s area of expertise, original, inherently interesting and sustained / refreshed regularly over time.
Upload & share relevant videos on your website
Another increasingly popular cost-effective method you can do is to utilise the popularity of video streaming. Far from the text-heavy content before, more and more people prefer to consume content in the form of video. This is not surprising considering the amount of visual and interactivity it provides. As compared to reading off everything, it seems like videos are making things more interesting. It engages people to react and do something whenever they are seeing clips.
As download speeds have dramatically increased with 4G (soon to be 5G) it has become popular to upload, share or create videos for use in on-line content plans. You may choose to embed video content from your brand’s YouTube channel, so it won’t affect that usability and navigability of your website. Many companies are doing this and this approach doesn’t cost an arm & a leg. If you have an in-house team, you could ask them to produce at least one to two videos a month against a rolling editorial calendar. As always, the video must be about relevant content and add value to the viewing experience. Simply posting irrelevant videos or reposting others content, is counter-productive.
Improve the loading speed of your website
Increasing your site’s loading time is another great step to improve website’s traffic. If your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, visitors may likely leave your site right away. Instead of visits, you will increasing the bounce-rate of your website, which is never a good sign. A poor loading performance reduces not only the traffic, but also the potential conversion and revenue of your site.
Aside from that, Google has a habit of penalising sites that with slow loading time. It also discourages potential visitors from checking out your business. As a result, you will never rank highly and this directly impacts your brand’s visibility online. This must be your top priority when it comes to optimisation. Since it will influence the overall standing of your website on search results page (SERP), you need to have an initiative focused on improving your site’s pagespeed.
So, what are you waiting for?
Increasing website traffic doesn’t happen overnight. It requires some effort to get the result you want and a plan to make it all happen. Whether you choose to do it for free or not, it’s important that you’re willing to invest some of your time to focus on this priority objective. These are just some of the many ways you can utilise to help you on achieving that goal. You may think that you’re running out of ideas, but there are many further ways you can boost your on-line presence and visits. You just need enough basic knowledge to know what areas you need to focus on.