It’s exciting to finally unveil a brand-new site you’ve spent months working on. However, you can work tirelessly creating the perfect site for your business and still be disappointed with the results. After all, it’s impossible to create a meaningful amount of positive first impressions with your new site if people aren’t even visiting it. If your website isn’t receiving the level of traffic you think it deserves, that doesn’t necessarily mean the launch was a failure. It simply means you could likely benefit from exploring various methods to boost your organic traffic. Here are seven methods to help you do just that!
Optimize Your Page (for Humans!)
These days, many businesses place a lot of emphasis on optimizing their sites for search engines in order to boost their SEO score. While you should be making efforts to do so as well, you should not lose sight of the fact that your search engine ranking is heavily based on crowdsourced user information as well. Make sure your site is optimized for your audience and create content for humans above all else – not for search engines!
Start a Blog
Does your business have an active blog? If not, now is the perfect time to get one started. A blog is one of the best ways to connect to your audience and keep them coming back for more content. As you plan out your first few blog posts, remember that this is not the place to try to make sales. Instead, focus on demonstrating value and establishing your brand as a team of subject matter experts. Informative blogs and tutorials are great examples of relevant blog topics you should favor as your blog gets its footing. To overcome writer’s block, you can also check out the topics other industry leaders are covering.
Share Pages to Your Social Media Page
Social media marketing is a great way to drive more visitors to your site. If you post a steady stream of blog posts to your site, make sure you are sharing those posts to your social media profiles as well. Doing this semi routinely (roughly twice a month at minimum) should cause a spike in organic activity on your site. If your audience happens to interact with or share your post, those numbers will only increase.
Focus on Earning Backlinks
Backlinks are links from external sites to your own, and they are among the most effective ways to boost organic traffic. Essentially, when another credible site links to your site, your credibility will rise, and your level of traffic will rise as a result. Blogging is one of our favorite ways to earn backlinks because they can come in so many ways:
- Content reposted to social media
- Sharable in newsletters
- Potentially useful to other content creators
If you have a blog post you are particularly proud of, you could even recommend it to industry authorities in hopes of receiving backlinks in the future. To take that idea one step further, try a browser extension like Check My Links. Once activated, you can visit authoritative sources within your industry and let the app determine whether any dead links are present. From there, you can attempt to find dead links that originally linked visitors to a topic that your site also covers. Finally, you can bring the dead link to the business’ attention and offer your own content as the perfect replacement.
Engage Your Audience with Clever Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
When a user stumbles upon your site in a massive list of search results, they will be seeing a meta description and title tag. If you don’t create custom meta descriptions and title tags, your site’s traffic is surely suffering as a result. These features are designed to draw people to your site, so make sure you’re taking advantage of them! Your title tag should be around 60-70 characters, and your meta description should share a little more about the topic without exceeding 160 characters. Sticking within those limits and incorporating a key word into each of them will likely result in more users visiting your site instead of the competition’s.
Strive for Featured Snippets
Have you ever Googled a question, only to have the answer sitting there as the first result, without even having to visit any links? That first result is referred to as a featured snippet, and earning that position comes with the reward of earning clicks of those seeking more details on the subject. So, how do you earn the featured snippet spot? There isn’t an algorithm you can follow for guaranteed results, but here are a few strategies that may increase your odds:
- Answering common questions in bulleted or numbered lists.
- Incorporating bold print to highlight key points.
- Keeping answers concise and direct.
Revisit Your Old Content
It’s important to remember that a website launch isn’t a one-time thing that you can celebrate, and then never revisit again. Our sites need to be refreshed from time to time to stay relevant and accurate. If old or expired dates, incorrect statistics, or dead links are present on your site, you can probably assume your content isn’t performing is well as it feasibly could. Every so often, be sure to audit your site and make sure it is easy to skim and up to date with accurate information.
Boost Your Site’s Organic Traffic with Gauge Digital Media
Working with a professional digital marketing company is the best way to make the most of your website and make sure that you are checking all of the boxes that search engines look for when ranking websites. We know how to create great content that attracts your target audience and makes your business look great online, all backed by our streamlined web design process. To learn more about the best digital marketing strategies for your company and reach a bigger audience than ever before, work with Gauge Digital Media. For a quote or to schedule a call, contact us at (443) 201-7709.
