People keep asking me this question: “How do I drive traffic to my site?”
It’s one of the most common questions I get, and a very important topic. I wrote an article on this very subject last year, and I have decided to revisit this issue to address this question. Below is my November 2013 article on how to increase traffic to your website.
Last month alone, more than five billion searches were run on Google. The Yellow Pages are dead. My 75-year-old mother doesn’t even look in the Yellow Pages anymore. The issue now? How do you create and maintain a web presence that correctly markets your business? According to a recent Forrester study, if your website is over 36 months old, it is just as dead as the Yellow Pages. Just 36 short months.
In this article I am going to share with you two simple secrets you can do on your own to revitalize your website.
The first thing you need to do is update your home page. Create and add a headline that grabs the potential customer’s attention and holds them on your page long enough for them to stop surfing and read about what your business has to offer. The headline should be simple and near the top so the visitor sees it without having to scroll down. As an example, on our website, we use headline “Need Help Now?”
Also, you should update your homepage headline often, even if you think you have a good one. Why? So search engines know your website is alive. We will talk more about this later.
The second secret is to add testimonials to your site. Testimonials let visitors see that others value your product or service and, importantly, they add new content for web crawlers.
Here’s how you get a good testimonial in four quick steps:
- Contact your customer and ask them if it would be okay if you came to their office and took a video of them talking about your company.
- Grab your iPhone and find a well-lit quiet area at their office. Pay attention to the background.
- Ask the customer these three questions: Who are they? When did they start working with your business? How has your product or service made their lives better?
- Record them answering these three questions three times. Then, post the best of the three recordings on YouTube.
As mentioned earlier, testimonials also help search engines realize your site is “alive”. Here’s the issue: there are little robots that are constantly following every link on the web and if your site never changes, these little robots decide you went out of business, especially after two months of stagnant content. A blog is helpful, but it isn’t enough. You really need to update other pages and this is where testimonials come in. Put them up on every page to add some new content and give these little robots something to talk about!
Okay, that should get you moving.
Looking for more information on what you can do to improve your website’s contribution to your top line? Give us a call and we can schedule a 9 Point Website Health Checkup today!
~ Bruce
