Imagine you just paid someone over $5000 to develop an online shop for you so you could sell your awesome creations online. Four months on and you still haven’t made a single sale. Knots in your stomach form whenever you think about it and anxiety grips you every day. What are you supposed to do now?
This is a common situation that many business owners find themselves in. If you are in a similar situation – that is, if you are looking for ways on how to improve website traffic, increase web sales (improve conversion rates) – here are four fast, cheap and simple website optimization tips that you can implement right away:
1. Do Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making your website pages get found more easily by people who use search engines to find specific information.
SEO begins with keyword research, or the process of finding out which keyword phrases many of your prospects type in the search engines when they are looking for someone like you. For example, if you are a dog trainer in Dallas Texas, your prospects might be typing in Google the following :
“dog trainer in Dallas”
“Dallas puppy trainer”
“best Labrador trainer Dallas”
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Once you have found what keywords are highly-searched for, use those high-demand keywords as basis for your website content. Here are a few things you could do to accomplish this:
- Write your web site copy using the keywords. For example, you could create an ‘About Me’ page and write about why you are the “best Labrador trainer in Dallas” .
- Once you have written content based on the keyword phrase, you could also put the said keyword phrase on that webpage’s meta title tag, header tag, and the page description.
- If you have an image on that webpage, be sure to write the image title and ALT text for that image using the keyword phrase, too.
- When you create links to that web page, use the keyword phrase as the actual clickable text (a.k.a. ‘anchor text’) that links to the said page (avoid just using ‘click here’).
The above action points are just part of what’s known as “on-page SEO”. You can boost traffic to your business just by knowing how to build perfectly optimized web pages.
Get started now and use Market Samurai to do your keyword research.
2. Build a Squeeze Page.
It’s shocking how most business websites are mere brochure websites. What you want is a website that generates as much leads for you as possible – on autopilot!
So what’s a squeeze page? A Squeeze page is a lead-generation page, basically designed for the sole purpose of collecting names and email addresses of prospects. For example, here’s a page we use to generate leads for us:
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Once you’ve collected their contact details, you could seek to build further relationship with them via email marketing, or you could seek to engage them further via your lead nurturing process.
You can create your own squeeze page using Optimize Press, or you can just get us to build one for you. For a step-by-step lowdown on how to build your list of prospects on autopilot, read How to Make a High Converting Lead Generation Page.
3. Get Your Blog On!
One huge mistake many businesses still do is NOT including Blog Marketing as part of their marketing arsenal. I don’t exaggerate when I say you are practically killing your business by not blogging.
Another mistake many businesses make is actually blogging, but blogging about the wrong things. These are what I call the ME-ME-ME business bloggers. They just talk about their offers, promotions and their idea of a blog post is a sales pitch.
If you’re guilty of this, STOP. Instead, create content that delivers great value to your prospects:
Help them solve a specific problem.
Answer some of their burning questions.
Give free advice designed to truly contribute to their lives.
Communicate what you stand for, what you believe in, and why you are doing what you do.
Make some waves! Ask questions that provoke reactions and challenge commonly held beliefs or practices within your industry.
All of these things could increase your influence and get them to perceive you as a credible expert in your field. If you blog often enough about the things that truly matter to your prospects, your blog would start attracting traffic from the search engines and your readers could also forward your content to their networks, thus helping drive traffic to your website.
4. Get Social
The ROI you’ll reap from using Social Media marketing could increase even more if you have a blog that frequently publish awesome content. Leverage social media to connect with key people who could then help bring your message to bigger groups of your targeted prospects.
These key people may be owners of businesses whose products & services complement your offers and they are marketing to the same target market, influential people within your industry who you can partner with, etc.
Just find out where these key people hang out – whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other blogs – then join them there, join the conversations they are having, provide value and continually engage them.
Many people have made Social Media complicated but it’s really just a tool or a technology, although a very powerful one. At the end of the day, it’s still all about connection.
Conclusion
Don’t just expect traffic to come to your website once you have built it. Traffic generation is an ongoing, deliberate process that you will need to learn how to do if you really want to make sales or generate leads via your website. There are many traffic generation methods, and two of the best ones are Blog marketing and Social Media marketing.
Click the link above to learn more about how exactly you can use these two tools help your business get found online.
From there you will be able to download:
- Our special Social Media marketing strategy roadmap
- Learn why you’re killing your business by not blogging
- Business Blog Buyer’s checklist
- and much more!
The post Website Optimization Tips: Four Fast Fixes To Get Your Business Found appeared first on Business Unusual.