We talked a while back about converting more of the visitors on your website in to customers; in this article, we’ll look at what you can do to capture and drive more visitors to your website.
The next 5 tips provide some ideas on how you can increase visitors to your website, and – hopefully – increase your sales!
1. Make it really easy to contact you (again)
There’s not much point to having a website to drive people to your business if they can’t contact you. Try experimenting with including your phone number or other contact details if the key service/product pages on your website to attract sales directly from the search engine results pages in Google and Bing:
2. Make sure your website is really fast!
In the Internet age, people are impatient: we’ve come to expect everything at our finger tips immediately. So, a slower website than your competitors could be costing you business. Whilst broadband connections are commonplace now, remember that some visitors to your website may still be on slower 3G connections, or surfing at home with a much slower connection speed. Key considerations are:
- The website your server lives on: is this suitable for the number of visitors you have?
- Large images in the page can really slow the loading times down
- A well-built website can hugely increase loading times by loading things in a more efficient order
- Consider compressing the website (you’ll probably need your web designer’s help with this)
- If your website is on WordPress, there are some plugins available to help you cache and compress your website to help loading times. Similar tools exist for Drupal and Magento, too.
We recommend using a tool such as Pingdom’s Full Page Test which can analyse your website’s loading times and compare it against many other websites, giving up an idea of how other websites are performing compared to you.
3. Consider niche focuses in search engines
Competing online with larger competitors can be daunting, especially if you’re a small business with little budget. Consider focusing your efforts on more niche search terms: so, instead of optimising your website for people searching for “biscuits”, try “biscuits in Newcastle upon Tyne” or “ginger snap biscuits”.
4. Identify and fill your website’s content gaps
If you’re using a tool such as Google Analytics to monitor your website’s visitors and where they’re coming from, you may find you can identify phrases they’re searching for which you don’t have ideal content for yet. For example, if customers are searching for “how much does a biscuit cost?” and are finding your website, but there isn’t a page which answers their question on the website, creating a unique, well-written page of content around that phrase can help drive more visitors to your website in the long term.
5. Think local!
Lots of people search for products or services in their local area, so getting your business information listed correctly in Google (and Bing’s) local listings can be a huge help! Sign up to Google Business and Google Plus for listings.
That’s it: 5 tips to help you increase the number of visitors your website receives. If you’d like help improving your website, please do get in touch on 0191 375 5713 and we’ll be happy to advise you.