The most important factor in digital marketing is your website. More than ever, businesses large and small are using their sites paired with a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy to attract potential customers and grow their reach.
If you're asking yourself, how do I attract complete strangers to visit my site? How could you build trust with your potential buyers if there are hundreds of companies similar to yours? The answer is simple: make sure your website and its content are well-optimized and easily discoverable by search engines.
Website Must Haves
There are several elements every website needs in order to attract and convert visitors. Some of those elements include visual components such as having a site design that is user friendly and includes proper site structure that promotes content discovery. Find out the 5 different must haves for attracting and converting your visitors.
1. Keyword-Driven Content
Keywords are what they say they are –key. If you want to generate organic traffic, it is necessary to optimize keywords that are relevant to your business. People are actively looking for solutions and ways to reach their goals and if you are producing content that helps them solve their problems and use their searched keywords, these searchers will find and visit your website.
How do you find your most effective keywords? By understanding your audience –your buyer personas– you can utilize keywords that those individuals are searching for and adjust your strategy to fit those words.
After identifying those buyer personas, utilize tools such as the Keywords Tool in HubSpot to sort keywords by ranking, conversion and long tail opportunities.
2. Blog Regularly
Your blog is one of the most powerful tools that can help you attract traffic to your site. Every time you write a blog post, it is one more indexed page on your website, meaning it is one more opportunity to appear in someone’s search. Thus, it is important to blog on a regular basis to keep the consistency on search engines.
Utilize those valuable keywords to optimize your blog to answer your persona’s questions and problems that they are searching for online. If prospects find answers to their questions in your blog posts, they are much more likely to trust what you have to say even before they learn about your product. Not only should you write valuable, educational content, use each post to add a lead generating call-to-action such as free eBooks, free live webinars, or free trials.
In addition to blogging, recognize the opportunity of leveraging your existing content by repurposing them into several platforms and formats. Some of these include videos, podcasts, and email marketing. All of these actions will assist in the growth of your effective inbound marketing strategy.
As you begin to generate more organic traffic and start to become more aware of your ROI, make sure to find out how much website traffic is needed to reach your specific business goals.
3. Enticing Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
The key to attracting new visitors to your site is to know what they are searching for in the first place.
This means being hyper-aware of their intent as they browse the SERP (search engine results page) and presenting why your content is the most relevant to them.
To do this, make sure all of your title tags and meta descriptions are clear, enticing, and relevant to the user's needs. By creating content driven by the keywords related to your business, you are already providing the information they need. Now, all you need is the proper descriptions that communicate that fact to entice searchers to click.
4. Use Internal Links
Another tool that could increase organic traffic is making sure visitors continue discovering all of the useful content you have created for them. As they go from one page to another, they are learning more about your business and your ability to answer their questions.
Improve their user experience by providing internal links within your content. Doing so will present users with even more content that answers other questions they might have on other topics, increasing the likelihood that they will continue to explore your site.
This not only provides a better experience for your visitors but also helps rank your website higher on search engines, thus increasing the chance for more organic traffic.
5. Integrate With Social Media
Keywords and blog posts are not the only critical tools used to drive traffic. Social media can help your company build a community of avid followers who are eager to read your content and want to share your resources with others. Build a following by constantly engaging with your network and encouraging individuals to follow your website, blog, emails, and other content.
Not only should you share your content, seek out opportunities to comment and answer any questions prospects have about that are relevant to your services. Have a blog post that answers their question? Link that post to your answer and it becomes a win-win situation on both ends!
Since most of your audience uses a wide variety of social media sites, makes sure to reach all of your customers by publishing to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other relevant sites.
Attracting Organic Traffic
Each of these components is critical to driving traffic to your website. But can you only use two or three of these steps to really make a great difference in your goal? The answer is no. It is important to integrate each of these 5 steps with one another. If all of your tools are integrated with one another, you will have the chance to generate the right traffic to your website in many different forms. This strategy is only the beginning of the inbound methodology responsible for unlocking your website's potential.
Use each of your keywords to write remarkable, educational blog posts. Finished a blog? Share it on all of your social platforms. As organic traffic increases, guide them to a new landing page on your site. Make sure that every piece of content is driven by keywords that searchers are looking for.
Being aware of these 5 must-haves will guide you a roadmap to creating a website that not only increases organic traffic but nurtures visitors but into potential buyers.
