This article is for you if your business website traffic has taken a serious nosedive or if it’s never even taken flight and you want some actionable tips to help you dramatically increase traffic to your website quickly, without it costing you a dime!
You’ve likely spent thousands on your business website over the years, so why aren’t people lining up around the corner to visit it?
Look, I’m going to let in on some insider knowledge that’s probably going to shock you—are you sitting down?
Here’s the real deal: they don’t teach marketing to web developers when they’re chasing those degrees. It’s all tactical learning.
I know this because I graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Web Development and Design back in ‘07. In all of the courses that I was required to take, even including one that was on gender and society, not once did we cover the psychology behind what actually makes a person buy a product or service on a website.
So, it’s not entirely surprising to me that when people hire a web developer to redesign their website, they’re left frustrated when it doesn’t produce the traffic and results that they’re look for.
That part is the marketing side, the strategy part that your business website is missing.
That’s why when I graduated college and hit the pavement hustling to crank out beautiful websites, I was slammed with the hard realization that if I wanted to make a real difference and dent in the industry, I had to learn how to make those sites produce more than just good looks. I had to learn strategy.
That’s when I dove headfirst into the world of marketing and sales—Learning everything that I could about the buyer’s journey and the psychology of both the sale and a customer.
I read every book I could get my hands on from industry giants, attended group training from elites in the industry that focus on marketing, SEO, SEM, and business leadership. I was like a sponge, soaking up every ounce of knowledge that I could use to help the businesses that I’ve worked with over the years.
Since success always leaves clues, I started using my tech background to reverse engineer and dissect industry leaders to understand what works and why it’s working for those businesses.
In the industry, I’m often referred by my peers as what they like to call a “unicorn”. At first, I couldn’t understand why this approach was so unique until I realized: Most marketers don’t understand development, most developers don’t understand marketing, and neither are often good at graphic design.
I became an exception to the rule, because I forged a completely different path. I chose to use my marketing, design, sales & tech background to help small businesses unseat their largest competitors, increase market share, and ultimately increase revenue.
So, no, I am not really surprised your website isn’t working for you.
Let me share with you some expert insider knowledge from a tech turned marketer that’s likely holding your business back from getting the traffic your website deserves.
Hack #1: Claim your Google My Business Page to Increase Website Traffic
If you want a hack that will dramatically increase local traffic to your website almost overnight…go claim your GMB (Google My Business, formerly Google Places) page. Don’t worry, I’ll just wait right here… 😊
This tip alone is worth it’s weight in gold, especially if you are a local service provider. Let me explain:
According to Moz’s local search ranking factors, Google My Business page accounts for 25% of what Google looks for when ranking a website.
Okay, I’m going to say that one more time for the people in the back of the room.
Your Google My Business page is WORTH 25% of your local ranking factors.
So if don’t have this claimed yet, even if you’re doing everything else pristine, you’re a quarter behind your competition that already is.
But, don’t stop there… we’ve got some other hacks that’ll help you go even further!
Hack #2: Beef up your website’s On-page SEO
Take a good look at your website and the individual pages throughout your site. If those pages are not individually optimized with specific keywords that align with the content of that page, you’re not going to rank organically in search engines.
Let me back up a moment and explain the difference of organic versus paid traffic. Organic traffic is FREE visitor traffic! It’s means that you’re not having to whip out your wallet every time you hope to capture visitors that are searching for a specific keyword.
Paid traffic, however, is just what is sounds like. You big against competitors for an ad containing this keyword and pay every time someone clicks on the ad.
Neither one is right or wrong, as they both have their usefulness in the realm of marketing. However, for me, I look at organic as the long-term strategy for a business. You do the hard, necessary work up front and you reap the benefits over the long term. Instead of losing the traffic when you decide to no longer want to allocate a monthly budget to advertising like you would with paid traffic, you get to enjoy the free traffic as long as you keep your content relevant.
Optimization doesn’t mean “seeding” your content with keywords just to get it in there—in fact, Google will often penalize you if they think this is happening.
And, remember to increase website traffic, page optimization refers to both the content, as well optimizing the HTML code on each of those pages. Back in the early days of development, most businesses would keyword stuff the meta data.
That worked well for a while, until Google realized that this was happening and they changed their algorithm. Overnight, those same businesses that were showing up on the first page of Google dropped to the last. Why?
Google’s algorithm rewards websites that focus on delivering good quality content that answers their search visitors most pressing questions.
This also means that Google will penalize your website if you aren’t providing this and the likelihood of you making it on the first page of the search engines will always be out of your reach.
How to optimize your on-page SEO?
The first step is to take an audit of what keywords your business is currently ranking for. There are a ton of different ways you can go about this, but you can do this yourself by using tools like SEMRUSH or Moz. They both have a free trial that you can use to find out where your business is ranking, but they range anywhere from $99-$599 per month thereafter.
Review your keywords and determine if you’re targeting the right keywords that you intend to rank for or if your keywords are completely irrelevant to the product or services you provide online.
Next, it’s time to research what keywords that you’d either like to rank for or should be ranking for. You can research these with tools like ahref’s Keywords Explorer or Google’s Search Console. Begin mapping out your keyword strategy by choosing keywords that are relatively low in SEO difficulty, but high in search volume and/or CPC (Cost Per Click), the price that advertisers are paying per click.
If you don’t have time or don’t want recurring monthly investment in those keyword analysis tools, one of the services that I provide for businesses is doing a comprehensive SEO audit—which includes a complete analysis on your website, your top three largest competitors, your desired keywords that you’d like to rank for, as well as keyword recommendations for you to target to unseat your competitors’ organic traffic sources. You’ll receive a complete easy-to-read keyword road map that outlines exactly which keywords you should begin focusing on first to get ahead of your competition, increase website traffic, and rank organically for keywords faster than your competitors. If you’re interested, book a free strategy call with me—mention this article and you’ll get a 50% discount off this package!
The last step is to review each of the pages throughout your website and begin using these keywords strategically throughout your content. I highly recommend that you track these keywords over time to see how well your website is performing. You can use a tool like href’s Keyword Rank Checker, which makes simple work of this.
Hack #3: Audit your NAP Citations
If you’re a local service provider, you need to have a NAP Citation audit performed for your business. In marketing, NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number.
You may be thinking, Okay, what the heck does that have to do with my website ranking.
A whole lot of everything, actually.
Let’s just say, for the sake of an example, that you are an Accountant whose business is growing and you’ve recently moved to a larger office across town. You updated your website and Facebook page with your new address, but didn’t think about updating your Google My Business page or the various other websites out there online that show the old address—including directories, like Yelp or Yellow Pages.
Well, now you’ve got some conflicting information about your business floating around. And Google doesn’t like conflicting information.
In fact, Google is going to penalize you because it values accurate information so much that it’s allocated 10% of your ranking to its importance.
This means, even one discrepancy floating around is costing you valuable ranking.
These NAP audits are so important that I offer them completely free to businesses. You deserve to know exactly where your business is listed online and if there’s any conflicting details that are going to hurt your chance of ranking! So if you haven’t had one performed for your business, drop me a message or schedule a free strategy call with me—I’ll pull one together for you absolutely free.
Hack #4: Boost your Domain Authority to Increase Website Traffic for FREE
Domain Authority (DA) is a ranking metric, ranging from 1 to 100, that predicts how well a site will rank. It’s one of the industry standards we use when we talk about SEO and ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs).
The closer you are to hitting a DA of 100, the more traffic you’ll receive and the better overall ranking you’ll have.
The problem is, boosting domain authority can be a time consuming and often difficult process.
Usually, if a website has been around for several years and has a decent number of backlinks from other high authority websites, you can expect a DA score between 40 to 50.
Typically, having a DA of 40 or more is an indication that this site is high quality.
A quick hack to help boost your domain authority is to take a close look at what websites are linking to YOUR website.
Do this with Moz’s Link Explorer tool, which check’s a websites DA score, as well as the backlinks.
Take a closer look at the websites that are linking to your site. If any have below a 40 DA score, review them closely. Keep your eye out for any questionable links, such as adult themed websites, spammy sites, or other suspicious sites.
Be sure to disavow those links from your website.
You can do this using the Google Webmaster Disavow Link tool.
Doing this simple hack will help boost your Domain Authority and improve your overall Google ranking.
Hack #5: Increase Your Page Speed to Increase Website Traffic for FREE
Believe it or not, the time it takes for your page to load is a signal that Google uses to help determine your ranking on SERPs.
You can evaluate how quickly your page load is using Google’s PageSpeed Insights or even using one of my favorites, Pingdom.
If your website is serving up pages slowly, not only can Google not quickly crawl your website, but it’s also a terrible experience for the end user.
There are some easy things that you can do, like install a browser caching plugin on your WordPress website, to help speed things up for your visitors.
There’s also some technical actions that you can take to help improve load time, such as making sure your web server has compression enabled, like Gzip, to reduce the size of your HTML, CSS, and Javascript files that are over 150 bytes.
I also recommend ensuring that optimize your images for web use. Generally speaking, PNGs are typically better for graphics with fewer than 16 colors while JPEGs are generally better for photographs. Make sure your images are compressed and are the smallest size possible for the use that they’re intended for.
Increasing traffic to your website doesn’t have to be complicated or time consuming.
I hope this guide helps your business understand how increasing traffic to your website is well within your reach if you’re willing to back up a tactical approach with strategy.
If you’d like to take the guess work out of where you’re falling short with your website’s SEO, request a complimentary Website SEO Analysis.
All of our reports are custom tailored to your business and we’ll analyze your entire website, identify all the issues, and provide you a step-by-step instructional roadmap on how to resolve these issues yourself.
