Below are some basic principles & steps to increase traffic and attract clients and customers to your website.
Write Good Content
Always be adding and editing content for the better – to be increasingly helpful and clear.
What is “good content”? Essentially it is answers to questions that your customers are asking, using specific industry terminology and showing that you are an authority in your field.
Use Good, Specific Keywords (can be a Keyphrase)
Summarise what each page is about, and what main keyword (decide on one main keyword and 2 secondary keywords, if any) describes what you’re offering on the page, and for which you hope to be found in search engines. These should be keywords for which you know people search, preferably in large quantities (but quality is still better than quantity). The more specific you can be with your selection the better.
Each time you add a word to a keyphrase it tends to get easier (and more worthwhile) to rank. Consider:
- Restaurant
- Restaurant Sydney
- Restaurant North Sydney
- Pizza Restaurant North Sydney
- Gluten free pizza Restaurant North Sydney
Describe your niche (what, where, who) at that 5th layer down, and build up your content from there. You’ll get better rankings and better leads if you write for the kinds of niche clients you want to serve.
Another example:
- Printer
- Printer Hornsby
- Business Card Printer Hornsby
- Environmentally-friendly Business Card Printer Hornsby
Use keywords in headings. For example, rather than write a heading that says “How does it work?”, write a keyword rich heading, like, “How does website content help my traffic?”.
Connect
Encourage other websites and social media profiles to link to your site content by:
- having valuable content that others will want to share (interesting and helpful blog articles can be great for this) and
- making yourself known by:
- like/follow people and pages that would appreciate your content, and whose content you appreciate,
- be generous by sharing other people’s great content,
- share your own good content on social media so your followers can easily find and share it, etc.
How to implement:
a) Page Titles and Descriptions that you hope to show in Google Search:
For our MakeWeb clients, there is a plugin on your site called “Yoast SEO” that allows you to customise what clickable title and description displays for your page, if it comes up in a google search.
For each page, write a custom title and description that utilises the chosen keyword, your best summary of what’s important about that page, and some marketing finesse that encourages your ideal client to click.
(For anyone else reading this, you can install this same plugin for free on your WordPress site, or use a different method for whichever platform you’re using. However you do it, it’s the WHAT, not the HOW, that’s important.)
> DIY instructions for adding or editing custom title and description
b) On-page content:
Add to and improve on your site’s content regularly.
For some sites, this may mean changing or improving page content where possible. For other sites with fairly static page content, articles are a great way to be regularly adding good content to your site that will boost your site’s overall visibility, without interfering with your pages.
A ‘blog’ doesn’t have to be about personal musings! It’s a great way for businesses to share helpful information on which they are an expert…much like detailed FAQs. As well as attracting visitors to your site, it is also a quick way to send (potential) customers/clients to a page and save you time from answering the same questions over and over for each new customer/client.
Images are content too! Make sure all the images on your site have good alt text. These should be written to describe the image to someone who can’t see it. But it can also include keywords when these are relevant to the description of the image.