Building a website takes time, energy, and money. But unfortunately, very few businesses ever extract enough value from their website to justify the investment made. And at the end of the day, it typically comes down to a lack of traffic and visibility. If you can overcome this issue and carve out channels that deliver a steady flow of traffic to your website, you’ll dramatically improve your chances of success. 

4 Traffic Generation Tips

Most business owners adopt an “if you build it, they will come” mentality to creating a website. They assume that if they hire the right web designer, create the best copy, and choose clever visuals and branding, people will automatically flock to their page and hang on their every word. But this simply isn’t true.

The internet is a crowded place. It’s noisy, messy, and hard to stand out. Simply going live with your website isn’t enough. You actually need a strategy for generating traffic. This strategy should be versatile, comprehensive, and targeted to your specific goals and audience profiles.

Not sure where to start? Here are a few tactful suggestions:

• Implement a Marketing Solution

The first step is to build out a strong marketing infrastructure with a reliable team such as a digital marketing agency at Christchurch that will support your efforts once you start to scale up traffic and (hopefully) generate customers. SAP has a variety of marketing automation solutions that make it easy to personalize omnichannel consumer engagement across a variety of platforms (including your website). By already establishing this groundwork, you’ll be certain that you’re capable of handling traffic.

• Develop High-Value Content

While clean design and compelling videos might grab attention, the truth is that content is still king. And if you’re going to have a website that keeps both people and search engines happy, you need to develop high-quality written copy that converts.

Content quality is always going to be somewhat subjective. However, your goal should be to make your website content comprehensive, useful, educational, and accurate. If you can do that, while integrating long-tail search terms and queries that you know your target customers are searching for online, you’ll get results.

For best results, develop a content strategy. One of the most effective approaches is to create three or four “pillar” pieces of content that your strategy centers around. These are long, meaty posts with tons of value. Then you create smaller complimentary posts that address related topics. Each of these smaller posts links back to the bigger post. This creates a web of content that makes it more likely to generate traffic.

• Get Serious About SEO

It’s impossible to generate organic traffic to your website without some sort of investment in search engine optimization (SEO). Unfortunately, most newbie business owners and marketers skip this step because they assume it’s too technical and complicated.

While SEO can be highly technical, it’s really just a matter of following the rules and best practices that are out there. This means investing in high-quality backlinks on relevant and authoritative websites. As long as you have the technical aspects of your website SEO squared away, a sound link building strategy is all you need to start moving up the search rankings. It’ll take time, but the results are worth it.

• Leverage Partnerships

When you’re first building out your website, you’re going to need a little help. This is where the power of partnerships can really come into play. Look for opportunities to leverage OPA (other people’s audiences).

Good sources of OPA include guest blogging opportunities and influencer marketing. You can also try “swap agreements,” where you swap things like links, content, and email blasts with another company that’s in a similar stage as you. This gives you twice the firepower than if you were doing it completely on your own.

Adding it All Up

You can’t build a website and just hope that people visit. Launching a website and expecting traffic is like playing the lottery and expecting to win the $500 million jackpot drawing. Could it happen? Sure. Is it likely? Not at all.

In order to drive a consistent and steady flow of traffic to your website, you must architect and implement a comprehensive strategy that accounts for all aspects of marketing, branding, SEO, and website development. Only then can you anticipate visitors.