Step 1 of 5: Attract Visitors to your Website
You already know the value of having a well-designed, user and mobile friendly web site. You’ve invested precious time and energy into uploading content and pictures that best showcase your business, products and offerings.
And while all of those are essential to a successful web presence, the tough reality is no matter how great your web site is, odds are slim that a customer will randomly discover your site. In today’s competitive market place, it’s critical that you use a variety of inbound marketing strategies to get your website noticed by potential customers and leads.
For starters, it’s important to understand that driving customer traffic to your website becomes a matter of creative and consistent inbound marketing. This may sound like a lot of effort, but the good news is that many of the steps are easy to do and will help bring more traffic your way quickly.
8 Key Inbound Marketing Steps To Attract New Visitors:
- Always put your business website URL, and a reason to visit your website on all printed matter, including your business cards. You would be amazed at how many people only have their email address on their business cards. Don’t assume someone will always contact YOU for more information. Customers want to check you out BEFORE reaching out to you.
- An email signature is an especially powerful and cost-free inbound marketing tool. Create a signature with a link to your website in it and make sure it automatically attaches to every outgoing email. It simple, takes only a few minutes to create your unique email signature, and it may drive visitors to your site every day for years to come.
- Offer prospects something as an incentive to visit your site. It may be a newsletter or a list of “Top 10 Tips” or some type of helpful content. For example, Design 4 Dot Com offers a FREE Website Audit Report. This substantially increases visitors and over time visitors become customers.
- Make sure your business location is accurately listed on Google Maps and has a Google+ local business page. This is a definite step to take since Google is the most widely used search engine by consumers.
- Speaking of your location, make sure that your business address is clearly visible on main pages of your site and in text format (not in an image or picture of your address). Search engines like Google ‘read’ text, not images. Having your address written out will alert Google that your business is in a certain city or neighborhood. This helps drive more inbound traffic via local search by customers or prospects near your location.
- Similar advice is true for social media networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Create a profile or Fan Page for your business, get active in those social platforms and start to connect with your web audience, customers and prospects. Again, add your business website URL, address and phone number to the ‘About Us’ section and keep your profiles updated when any changes occur.
- For enhanced local search results, there are fee-based online tool services, like Yext and Moz Local, that will track and measure your online presence. These services go out and scan the web and other directories to see if your business is listed and if you are, how optimized your listing is, checking for a link back to your website, your hours of operation, etc. But be aware, most of these online tools are not free, or one-time deal services – the expense can be significant and they will contact you, persistently, to upgrade to premium, costly services.
- The last one only works if you are providing value to your website visitors. Give them someone for free. Maybe free information or other valuable tools they can use. But in return, you ask them for their email address. There are so many ways to accomplish this, such as any of the following:
- A newsletter for industry news
- Specials for future purchases
- Tips in your area of specialty
- Downloadable information from your website.
For many businesses gathering visitor information is the 1st step to PART 2 of Inbound Marketing. (Convert Visitors to Leads)
Put Inbound Marketing To Work For You
It’s a combination of key steps, consistently put into action, that will increase web traffic to your business site. It’s simply not enough to design and develop a website and wait for search engines and customers to come find you.
Instead, it’s necessary to make the most of inbound marketing strategies, combined with SEO and social media sharing. In the end, you want to create a diverse approach that will help your website stand head and shoulders above the competition.
If you’re not taking advantage of these inbound marketing techniques, you’re probably missing out on additional traffic to your website, as well as telling the world exactly what you have to offer.
Request an inbound marketing report to find out what steps you need to take to drive more customer traffic to your website.
