For your website to generate an ROI, you need to have people visit your website. You may have read and seen a lot about getting more traffic to your website, but how do you actually do that?
Unfortunately, it’s not necessarily a case of “If you build it, they will come.”
Even the biggest companies in the world have to continuously bring new people to their websites and keep their traffic numbers high.
Want to know what you can do, without a ton of technical SEO knowledge?
I’m covering my favorite 7 ways to bring new customers to your website.
You Want the Right Website Traffic
First things first – you don’t just want any website traffic. You want the right people visiting your website.
Having 1,000 visits per month means next to nothing if 999 of those are never going to buy from you or are the complete wrong type of potential customer.
Anything that you’re doing to drive traffic to your website should be focused on bringing your ideal customer to you. The people that will want to actually buy from you or at least will want to keep coming back to learn more about you and your business.
Get More Website Visitors
How do you go about actually attracting people to your website?
Let’s take a quick (ok, we all know I don’t write anything that quick…) look at my top 7 ways you can start getting more visitors to your website – starting today.
1. Set Up the Right SEO Foundation
Here’s the truth – you need to do the right things to ensure people can even find you in the first place. For a website, that means you need to have the right SEO foundation.
What that means is that you have to make it easy for Google to not only find you, but match your website up to the questions its searchers are looking for.
I’ve talked about this a lot in previous articles, including how to tell Google your website is even live (and keep it accurate), how to use the Yoast plugin to improve SEO on WordPress websites, and even my 5 best SEO tips for 2022.
The gist? You do need to do a few things to help Google out, but those are all things that are not overly technical and totally doable.
2. Write How Your Customer Speaks
One of the biggest mistakes I see especially service providers make when it comes to driving traffic to their websites? Using a bunch of technical jargon.
Your customer is not in your business every day. In fact, they may understand next to nothing about what you do.
What they do understand is how you help them.
Focus on talking about not only the benefits of your services and even the transformation that your customers go on because they hired you, but also make sure you’re saying all of it like your customer would.
After all, you’re only going to come up as a search result in Google if you’re matching the questions people are asking.
If you’re not quite sure how your ideal customer might be talking about your services (and it’s hard to get out of your own expertise, believe me), then there are a few things you can do to find that answer.
Ask Them
Ask your current customers to describe what you do and how you’ve helped them. You can do this in either a quick 15 minute call or send a feedback/testimonial request.
Hang Out in Facebook Groups
If you don’t have a Facebook group for your customers, go find one from one of your competitors or someone who has a lot of the same customers that you would. Then, pay attention to how they’re talking about their problems and issues.
Seriously, just type a few ideas into Google. Use the autocomplete as an indication of whether or not people are actually searching that phrase and then check out the results. Is it all super technical results? Try again.
3. Don’t Neglect Your Google Business Profile
Do you serve people all over the country or even the world?
You can still benefit from a Google Business Profile. This is what comes up as a Maps search or in the sidebar of a Google search results page. You don’t even have to add your address anymore, either!
Simply go create your free profile and set a range. Google will give you the option to hide your address to protect your home-based business’s privacy. Then, you’ll want to add information about your business, add some pictures, and fill out the instructions.
Optimize this by continuing to add posts like you would with social media, ask your customers for reviews, and more. Search Engine Journal has a great article to walk you through it all, too.
Not only can this help you locally, but Google loves when you use their stuff.
4. Add an FAQ Section or Page
Want to get found for a lot of those common questions your ideal customer is typing into Google?
Create an FAQ page or at least a section within your website. It can literally be the questions you get all of the time mixed in with the questions and problems you saw come up while you were researching how your customer speaks.
Write out answers for those questions and then pop that onto your website!
Simple, keyword-focused page that you can expand on over time, too.
5. Write Regular, Shareable Content
I swear, no one loves this answer, but the best way to get people to come to your website is to give them something new to look at.
While I prefer to make that a combination blog and podcast, you could make that just a blog, a vlog that you post on your website, new portfolio pieces, case studies, white papers, free guides, resources, and more.
Whenever you create content for your website, you want it to be something that’s inherently shareable. That means that it’s interesting enough for your current follower to literally hit that share button.
Make this even easier by giving them actual share buttons by this content, asking them to share it with a friend who could benefit from the message, and of course – always share it on your own social media.
Sharing should start with you, but make sure to give your followers a reason to click back and actually visit your website, too.
6. Guest on a Blog or Podcast
Want to reach an entirely new audience? Find someone who has a similar audience to your own and ask to do a guest blog for their website or appear on their podcast!
You don’t necessarily have to reach out to cold people either. Network through LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social media to find other business owners who might be targeting the same type of people you are without being a competitor.
Or, listen to some podcasts or read some blogs and find ones that resonate with you and share a similar audience. Many larger podcasts especially will have ways that you can apply to be a guest. You can even connect with them on social first to build up a real relationship.
This isn’t as fast to action, but it will be one of your best long-term strategies.
7. Create Videos for YouTube
Want to know what the second largest search engine is?
It’s YouTube.
Honestly, you’ve probably heard that for years, but it’s worth it to reiterate that.
Not only is YouTube a powerful search engine in and of itself, but it gets delivered as a search result directly in Google, PLUS YouTube is very link-friendly.
They may be one of the only platforms that actually is OK with you taking people off of their own site and onto yours.
While done is better than perfect, if you want to optimize your YouTube consistency is key. If you’re already creating a blog or podcast, you can easily turn that into a video so it’s far less overwhelming.
Need some good ideas for optimizing YouTube videos? Neil Patel has a great article to get you started.
Bring More People to Your Website
A website will only really thrive if you’re doing something to bring people to it.
It needs to be built to convert those visitors once they land there, but then you need to put your efforts into attracting them to your website.
Want to take the guesswork out of it? Learn how Captain Coder can help you drive traffic to your website.
