You can measure your website’s success by how many new visitors lay eyes on it every week. If your company’s website isn’t getting the kind of traffic you want, it means that your company isn’t getting the kind of online exposure it needs. Many business owners don’t realize that there are some very simple changes they can make to begin generating more regular traffic for their website. After all, all of that traffic is out there—you simply need to find a way to start attracting it. Before you begin redeveloping your site, however, it’s important to understand where all too many companies’ websites go wrong.
What’s Wrong with Your Website?
Just as all businesses are different from each other, no two business websites are exactly alike. The features that distinguish successful sites from less successful ones, however, are largely universal. If any of the following statements are true of your website, it means that you could benefit from making some changes.
- Your website never features fresh content. The best websites are constantly in flux, with regular updates and new pages. If your site hasn’t changed much over the last six months, it’s not going to be very appealing to search engines such as Google, which tend to give preference to sites with updated content. It also won’t inspire repeat visitors, who are an important part of any website’s traffic.
- Your website’s design isn’t user-friendly. Most successful websites have sleek, intuitive designs that are easy for internet users to navigate. If your site is filled with distracting images or intrusive ads, or if important elements like navigation menus are difficult to find, it will most likely not encourage your visitors to stick around for long.
- Your content isn’t satisfying your audience. The quality of your website’s content should be high on your list of priorities. The best design in the world won’t matter if your visitors are confronted by wordy, unclear, or difficult copy when they go from one page to another on your site. The same goes for your blog; if you’re consistently picking topics or news trends that aren’t sparking any interest in your readers, it’s going to have a negative effect on your traffic over time.
- Your website isn’t optimized for mobile. With more and more people accessing much of their internet content on their mobile devices, it’s important to make sure that your site looks great on any device. A mobile-optimized site isn’t just formatted to be seen clearly on a mobile device; it will also be slightly redesigned to look and feel as usable as possible. For example, the navigation menu on a mobile-optimized site is usually larger, simpler, and easier to use when it is read on a mobile device.
How Can You Improve Your Website’s Traffic?
Identifying the places where your website needs improvement is just the beginning of the process. Your next goal should be to find some concrete steps that you can take to make your website more engaging and interesting to your audience—and to make it more visible to search engines so new readers can find you. These are some of the most important changes you can make to your site:
- Update your website regularly. Making updates to your site at least two or three times a week is a sure way to get noticed by Google’s web crawling bot. You shouldn’t make changes simply for the sake of making changes, though—make sure that your updates are substantial. Adding a blog to your website is a good way to ensure that you have a reason to update your content regularly.
- Increase your calls to action. Every landing page on your site should include a call to action—an instruction intended to get a visitor on your site to do something, such as click on a link or download a document. Including a call to action on every page will keep your content focused on communicating directly with your readers, and it will also encourage your site’s visitors to engage with you.
- Analyze your site’s traffic. When it comes to finding the weak points on your site, data is your friend. Online analytics tools can tell you which landing pages on your site get the most traffic, and which have the highest bounce rate. Once you’ve found the pages that interest your visitors the least, you can start working on ways to make them more appealing.
- Streamline your site’s design. Don’t be afraid to fiddle with the overall design of your site until it feels as clean and easy to navigate as possible. Even if you’re satisfied with your site’s design, you should make sure that it is optimized and responsive on any devices that visitors are likely to view it from. Look at your website on several different devices, and study the way it comes across.
- Link to and from your social media accounts. There should be a steady flow of traffic between your website and your various social media accounts, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Ideally, visitors to one will have an easy-to-find way to visit the other. Add prominent links to all of your accounts to your main page. Share links to your blogs on your social accounts, and make it easy for readers to share them.
Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see overnight results even when you make all of these changes. Website traffic tends to build gradually, rather than exploding suddenly. What these changes can do is make your website more accessible and appealing, which will help you reestablish your connection with your current audience and begin extending your appeal to new potential clients and customers. If you need help creating fresh, relevant content for your website, Pennington Creative can provide the resources you need. We offer a variety of content marketing options, including business blogs, infographics, and social media posts.
