The purpose of your website is to provide visitors with the information and impetus they need to become your customers. Many businesses, however, tend to neglect their websites once they’re up and running. While you may not update your website as frequently as your social media accounts, it’s still important to keep it fresh, engaging, and optimized for traffic to encourage conversions. This is why you should be sure to set aside some time to analyze your site on a routine basis and decide whether it’s playing the role you want it to play.
Encouraging More Traffic
The more traffic your website gets, the more customers you’re likely to have. That means that it’s important to take a look at your site from time to time to ensure that it’s designed to draw in as many visitors as possible. These are some of the chief strategies you can employ to encourage website traffic:
- Accessible content. Your site’s content should be clean, engaging, and targeted to your most likely readers. For your blog, make sure that you pick a wide variety of subjects and formats to keep it interesting and diverse.
- Eye-catching headlines. If your blog posts’ headlines don’t give readers a reason to stop and click, they probably won’t help with your traffic and your bounce rate. Succinct and punchy headlines that use numbers, action words, and attention-grabbing adjectives are likely to get the most traction.
- Social media promotion. One of the most effective ways to drive more viewers to your site is to promote it on social media. There should be an interactive relationship between your website and your various social media platforms, with each serving to encourage traffic toward the other.
- Smart advertising. Well-chosen advertisements can help to boost your site traffic. Banner ads, YouTube advertisements, and social media ads are just a few of the techniques you can use to make your website more visible.
- Guest blogging. Writing guest posts for other high-quality sites can help to drum up more activity for your own website. You may even want to consider adding well-chosen guest posts to your own site’s blog from time to time.
- SEO optimization. No business can afford to avoid optimizing site content—it’s essential if you want to boost your search rankings. You can keep your site optimized by using well-chosen keywords, adding alt text where appropriate, and continuing to update your blog regularly with high-quality content.
Turning Traffic into Business
Of course, getting more traffic for your site is only the first step toward success—you also need to make sure that you’re encouraging those new visitors to become your customers. If you want to raise the likelihood that your increased traffic will translate into more sales, make sure that you’ve crossed all of these items off your checklist:
- An up-to-date site design. You want your visitors’ first impression to be a positive one, so it’s important that your site looks smart and engaging. Steer clear of designs that look too rudimentary, overly complicated designs that may confuse your visitors, and designs that look dated.
- Calls to action in every post. Blog posts and onsite pages offer great opportunities to educate your site’s visitors, but make sure that you conclude each one by reminding readers to contact you. The call to action, or CTA, is one of the most effective methods of encouraging potential customers to convert.
- Helpful product descriptions. One of the primary reasons your customers will visit your site is to find descriptions of your products or services. These descriptions should be clearly written and accessible, and they should be informative without being overwhelmingly detailed.
Keeping Your Site as Easy to Use as Possible
It can be valuable to try to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Imagine that you’re visiting your own website for the first time. What would you notice first on the homepage? How long would it take you to find the product or service you’re interested in? How easy is it to send a direct message to your company? Here is a look at some of the common traits of effective business websites:
- They’re easy to navigate. Make sure that your site is as accessible to visitors as possible. Include a prominent navigation menu, put a clear title on every page of your site, and include alt text with any images.
- They’re informative and thorough. Your site should include information about all of your company’s primary products and services, with a different page for each category. You should also make sure that your company’s contact information has its own easy-to-find page that includes an online contact form.
- They’re clearly designed. If your site looks cluttered and messy, it will be difficult for visitors to find what they’re looking for. To avoid making your site visually overwhelming and hard to scan, make sure that it is balanced between graphics, text, and white space.
- They’re easy to view on mobile devices. Many of your site’s visitors will be looking at your website from their mobile devices, so it’s important to make sure that your site is optimized for mobile. The site should be easy to read, and the navigation menu should be redesigned for mobile viewing.
At Pennington Creative, we offer high-quality online content to businesses that are looking to improve their online presence and build a following. We also offer content services for marketing agencies looking to improve their clients’ websites. From optimized onsite copy to unique blog posts, our team can provide the resources you need to make your website effective.
