1. Monitor Conversion Rates with Google Analytics
If you do not have Google Analytics or have never heard of it, sign up immediately. It is the best free analytics program to track your website. It will give you statistics on everything you need to know about improving your website. You can get the demographics of your visitors, browsers they use, webpages that they are entering / exiting, search terms they used and lots more. A very helpful feature is goal setting which allows you to track the volume of visitors and how many of them convert into leads. Your website conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take or complete a desired action. For example, if one of the things you want your visitors to do on your website is to complete your contact form, they can set the thank you page generated by your contact form as the successful completion of a goal. That way, you can tweek your website and monitor it with Google Analytics to see its impact on conversion rates. A high conversion rate is better than having a lot of visitors who end up just leaving your website (bounce rate).
2. Relevant Consistent Blogging
Google loves consistent fresh content and blogs are the best way to achieve that. That being said, I think that everyone has a blog these days and the majority of them are filled with garbage. Blogs fail when they become a shameless advertisement billboard or ramble on and on about technical jargon that no one understands. Here are some ways to drive more high quality web traffic with your blog:
- Predict questions that your potential customers may be searching for and address them
- Ask your target market about their opinions
- Approach a well-known blogger in your industry and ask them to write a guest post
- Pick a fight with another blogger in your industry about a controversial topic
- Announce special offers at local industry events your company is attending
- Submit your blog posts (they have to be good of course) to Ezine Articles, a free online database of articles
3. Exchange Links with Complementary Products / Services
If you are a photographer, exchange links with a wedding coordinator. If you are a blogger, exchange links with a WordPress theme developer. If you are a web designer, exchange links with a web hosting company. You get the gist. This may seem difficult but sometimes all you have to do is ask.
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is about improving your organic rankings with Google. Here are some basic SEO tips that I always use to boost the search engine rankings of my websites:
- Identify your website's keywords and competition using the Google Keyword Tool
- Pick keyword search phrase to focus on for each page and sprinkle it through that page's content
- Use title tags to describe your links
- Use ALT tags to describe your images
- Avoid or minimize Flash or Javascript
- Write your page's keyword phrase into your heading and ensure that you use the H1 tag
- Do the same with your subheadings using the H2 tag
- Have a clear call-to-action statement on every page to drive web traffic
- If your site architecture is complicated, consider breadcrumbs and a sitemap
- Create clean and W3C compliant code
- If you are using Joomla, install the Tag Meta component and plugin
- If you are using WordPress, install the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin
5. PPC for Competitive Keyword Search Terms
Sometimes there is just so much competition that it is impossible to rank on a keyword search term. For those you can try an AdWords Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign. These can get expense so I would exhaust search engine optimization first because organic rankings are free. You can pay above $ 10 for some highly competitive keywords given the time of day, other bidders and the demographics of your target audience. We hear clients complain all the time about the cost of PPC but, you pay more to get more. Keywords cost more because they have higher conversion rates. If all you want is just a whole lot of traffic, social media will get you that without very much effort. Right now, Google is giving new customers $ 100 to try AdWords and they will even professional build your ads for you which is a service that was never offered before (given a minimum PPC budget of $ 11 per day).
6. Write Helpful Online Resources
If you have more marketing resources, whitepapers and case studies are great to feature on your website. You can back up your writing with research from Gartner or Forrester. You can gate these resources using a form for even more lead generation.
7. Create Video Tutorials or Online Demos
If you have video tutorials or online demos of your product or service, YouTube will get you the most viewership and give you the best chance to go viral with its community and related videos feature. There are plenty of other video sharing services out there but YouTube is the best so far.
8. Shamelessly Link your Press Releases
According to Wikipedia, "Press releases can announce a range of news items, such as scheduled events, personal promotions, awards, news products and services, sales and other financial data, accomplishes, etc." I am not talking about simply linking back to your company's homepage in your boilerplate. You should link all relevant keywords from your press releases to relevant pages of your corporate website or blog. What's more, you are already paying your PR agency to shop them around for you, so maybe as well take full advantage of it.
9. Beef up your Web Copy
Web copy is just as important as the design of your website. Here are some quick tips to improve your web copy:
- Avoid technical jargon
- Consider your target market first and what is relevant to them and then sprinkle in your keywords for search engines
- Snappy and informative titles
- Clear and concise introductions – get to the point about what you are talking about from the start
- Scannable content with bullets and subheadings
10. Hire an SEO Expert
Do not have the time to implement any of these suggestions?
Hire Jeanette Kwok web design
