How to drive traffic to your website

Originally published by Postmedia Solutions.

Driving the right traffic to your website is essential to growing your business. Creating a well-designed, easy-to-navigate and shareable website is step one in competing in today’s digital world.

Rising above the noise, establishing a trusted presence and figuring out how to get the right people to your site is critical in today’s digital marketplace. A well-designed, easy-to-navigate, informative website is an important starting point, but it means nothing unless you can attract your ideal buyers to visit and then move them through your sales funnel and convert them into paying customers.

We have curated a list of top solutions and strategies to help drive your ideal buyers to your website.

Put Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to work

Optimizing your content for search engines is a powerful way to boost organic traffic. Start by digging into Google Analytics to learn the search terms people are currently using to land on your website. Are they using specific terms or broader characteristics that relate to you? Use these keywords and phrases throughout your website to make it easier for more people to find you. Use Google Search Console to find out how often your website appears in search results and determine the search terms that are most effective in driving visitors to your site.

Here are a few more SEO best practices:

• Create detailed descriptions of your products and their benefits.
• Craft a strong page title, a.k.a. a SEO title, that will make people want to click on your website when they’re looking at search results.
• Add blog posts, articles, customer reviews, videos and other content to your site to boost your search rankings and attract more viewers.
• In addition to high-intent and popular keywords, target long-tail keywords, which account for the majority of web searches.
• Keep track of analytics data, such as who your visitors are, how they’ve found you, and the posts and pages that garner the most interest. Use this information to develop your marketing strategies. Tip: Establish yourself as a trusted authority. Answer questions on Quora and link back to your site using keywords.

Create strong content and share it

Understand who your customers are, their interests, challenges, and how your products and services can help them. Use this knowledge to develop a wide range of relevant, engaging content that will help them in some way.

This can include regular articles, blogs, surveys, photos, video tutorials, webinars and infographics. Remember: the better your content is, the more interested visitors will be in your brand and the more likely they are to share it with people in their networks.

Tip: Keep your content fresh and up to date to stay visible on search engines.

Share your web content on your social channels and create content specific for social. In both cases, link back to your website. Posting useful video tutorials or demonstrations to YouTube will help drive organic traffic to your website.

Instagram is another great place to post visual content that will build interest and engagement. Develop high-quality photography that tells your brand’s story.

Add social media buttons, such as “Click to tweet,” to your website content to make it easy to share. If you’re a B2B company, then your buyers and decision makers are on LinkedIn. It’s the top social platform for lead generation, which is why 94 per cent of marketers distribute content on LinkedIn. Use the primary content you’ve created for your website to develop unique, high-quality, value-added posts for LinkedIn’s publishing platform. Link these posts to the corresponding content on your website.

To further amplify your brand and drive people to your website, be an active community member on these social platforms. Answer questions about your LinkedIn posts, participate in discussions, create surveys and polls, and interact with your followers in other ways. Tip: Use Google’s Page Insights Tool to ensure your website is ready for mobile.

In today’s always-on digital environment, an engaging, mobile-ready website is a must-have — but that will only get you so far. Driving the right traffic to it is essential to growing your business.

Learn more about SEO and other marketing strategies.