So, you've got your shiny new website up. Congratulations! However the analytics show that almost nobody is visiting your website.

You are monitoring traffic to your website, aren't you? If not, add Google Analytics to your website. If you aren't sure how to do this, hire a professional web developer and make sure that "professional" not only sets you up with a system to monitor traffic on your website but also spends some one-on-one time to help you understand what the results mean.

There are two ways to approach the challenge of increasing traffic to your website: Tactical and Strategic.

A tactical approach will get you high volumes of people to your website in a relatively short amount of time however these are not necessarily likely to convert into sales of your services. A strategic approach on the other hand will take longer to attract visitors but will result in a more steady flow of visitors and more loyal customers. Bringing traffic to your website will cost you, either in your time/effort or in money.

While you can do both the initial and ongoing work, you might want to consider the services of virtual assistants which would leave you more time to spend with your customers.

There are basically three steps you will need to do to increase traffic to your site. In a nutshell…

  1. Prepare your website so that it's content is more attractive and relevant to your target market. Try to use the keywords that people are most likely to look for in your headings. Text closest to the top of the page is often more valuable to a search engine than text further down. Heading and linked text are especially valuable in this area.
  2. Create more opportunities for people to become aware of you and your website. Post articles on other websites, comment on other peoples blogs, but especially be present on Social Media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube. More and more, search engines are placing higher value on social media sites that have links to your website. You don't have to do them all. In fact, I don't recommend it. Focus on the ones where your target market is more likely to hang out. And of course, don't forget to list your web pages with the big 3 search engines: Google, Bing and Yahoo.
  3. Track the success of your efforts and make use of the results. There is no value in doing the same thing over and over again when you aren't getting the results you are looking for. Do something once and monitor the results. Improve it a little and do it again. If the results get worse, stop doing that! Notice what is working and what isn't. Keep the good and what's not. Get into a practice of constant and never ending improvements. Little changes can yield big results.

It takes time to build an awareness and a reputation. Give the process and your efforts the respect it requires and deserves.

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