You have a new website – yay! Congratulations; after what may be months of hard work your website has launched and you’re ready to sit back and reap the rewards!? Perhaps the website is set up to sell your products or advertise your holiday cottages, perhaps you want people to find it and then call you about your amazing services? Well, sitting back and waiting simply won’t work.
Let’s say for example you create beautiful personalised crafts to sell. You’ve got a new ecommerce website and you’re waiting for the orders. During the design, your web developer probably worked with you on some basic search engine optimisation, to make sure you’re registered on search engines and ranking for those all important key phrases. So you’re all set right? Not quite!
Imagine you have a shop on a quiet street in a busy tourist town – the shop gets some footfall, but if you place some adverts about the town and direct people to the shop, you get an increase. Let’s say you advertise in the local papers, or leave posters in other shops, your footfall increases again. It’s exactly the same principle online.
So what can you do to direct people to your website?
- Get social – by being visible on some social media platforms, you can direct people to your website and advertise your products/services. It’s also a great opportunity to show yourself off online with your great customer service! With a website, you don’t have the chance for an in-shop chat, so by being on social media you can impress that way.
- Work on your search engine optimisation – don’t just leave your SEO once the website is live. Make sure you register for Google Analytics and spend the time to look through the data that it collects for you. You can see which pages people visit, do they leave on a particular page (and if so, is that page not doing its job), how many people add items to the basket but don’t follow through etc. By tracking and using this data, you can tweak your SEO and website accordingly.
- Think about paying for adverts online – this could be either on search engines or social media, contact us today for a chat on how we can help.
- Don’t forget the traditional methods! Just because the world is very digital orientated, doesn’t mean that doing general marketing with stationery is out of the question! Get those fliers printed, make sure your business cards look great and get out there to spread the word.
We’re always surprised when customers to come us and say “my website doesn’t work for me” – and then you ask what marketing they do for it, and the answer is usually “nothing!”. You really must treat your website as if it is a physical shop – show it love and attention and people will soon come to visit.
Of course there are many more ways you can help increase website traffic, this is just the tip of the iceburg! Keep an eye on our blog for more in the coming months.