How To Increase Customer Visits To Your Business Website

Information on how to get more customers to your website

Websites and digital marketing can be incredibly frustrating for a business. You can have the best-looking website, that you know will convert visitors to paying customers, yet you cannot get the “traffic” to it. This helpful article is full of information on how to get more customers to your website.

Get An Accurate Number On Current Visitors

Measuring the number of current visitors to your website is imperative. Any changes, improvements or alterations you make to your website you will want to see how it impacted on visitor numbers and their behaviour. The first step is to install analytics to your website. Although alternative solutions are available, the standard analytical system used is the free system provided by Google. Simply search “Google Analytics” and follow the easy to understand instructions on adding it to your website.

The next step, or for websites that already have analytics is to ensure that data you are seeing is factual and accurate. There are many reasons why the data can be skewed. Adding “spam filters” to analytics blocks many of the websites that attempt to put false data in your results. Adding spam filters to Google Analytics blocks the robots and websites that would otherwise add their false data to yours. In blocking spam visits in Adwords you will have a base of accurate visitors in which to analyse and measure the impact of changes and improvements to your website.

Make Sure Google Can Read All of the Website

What good is that website page that you have perfected to drive traffic and convert visitors if Google cannot see it? Contrary to popular belief, Google does not see (or index) all pages of all websites. There are a number of tasks you can do to ensure that you give your website the best chance of being indexed.

The first one is a little technical, the others are not.

Now that you have created a Google Analytics account, create a Google Search Console account. In Analytics, link the search console (formerly Google Webmaster) to your analytics account. In “search console” ensure that your robot txt file can be read.

The next step is to add a sitemap to search console. This informs Google of the pages and images that are available on the website to be indexed.

If important pages, that you know will convert visitors, are not indexed you can “fetch as Google” – in search console add the page URL (website address) you wish to be indexed. Google will fetch this page and index it.

Secure Your Website

If you think that getting a website traffic is frustrating, even more frustrating is if you finally get visitors to your website and then your website goes down. Protect your website from security failures and breaches:

Keep plugins and software up-to-date – hackers use out of date plugins to access your website and take control of it. Logging in regularly and updating plugins (it only takes a minute) will protect you from such breaches.

Use a password that is difficult to crack – I know, that you already know, that your login details should be unique and difficult to break. The trouble is that most of us know this, then don’t actually apply it. We assume hacking will happen to someone else and stick with our old favourite password. If you want to protect yourself from hacking – DON’T!. Use 3 random words to create your password.

Keep a backup – If the worst happens you can easily restore your website if you have taken a copy, called a backup. The hosting account where you keep your website can automatically create backups of your website on a regular basis. Daily, weekly or monthly. Backups can soon fill your hosting account and so set the frequency on how often you genuinely update your website. Remember, and set dates in your diary, to review the number of backups in your hosting

Use the Correct Search Terms or Keywords

To get more customers to your business website you need to understand the search terms (called keywords) that potential customers will enter into Google. Researching the correct keywords is as simple as using the correct tool. The best SEO keyword research tool is free and easy to use. Enter the search terms that you think people will use and they will show you the actual keywords customers will use.

For each keyword, it offers an easy to understand matrix of the search volume, the CPC if using AdWords, the competition on Adwords etc. However, its best feature is the ability to see, by keyword and location who currently ranks for the search term and a breakdown of the SEO on their website, making it easy to find a way of jumping ahead of the competition.

Whichever keyword research tool you use, you need to consider the search terms that people would use to find the product or service. You need to think like a customer, not someone who works in the industry.

People will often search for a problem. Rather than searching for a “cheap plumber” they will likely search for “fix leaking tap”. In making the content of your website aimed at problems and solutions you will be providing the user (and Google) with the website content they are looking for.

Great content has three functions. Firstly, good content that addresses a problem for a potential customer and provides a solution, is likely to engage the website visitor and encourage them to continue reading. Secondly, once you have captured the attention of the reader you can provide a solution to their problem and start to convert then to a paying customer. Lastly, great content gives Google multiple opportunities to understand the message your website, or webpage, or blog post is trying to convey. Once Google understands the message, and if it deems it quality information, it will rank the content for searches based on the message.

The format of your content should be:

1. Introduction to the issue/problem.
2. Why this is usually an issue and the effects this issue can have for the reader.
3. Name and explain a number of solutions for the customer and how they will resolve the issue.
4. Why you are the company to provide these solutions.
5. A call to action

Place the Search Terms in the Correct Place

The structure and layout of your website should be such that search engines, like Google, can easily understand what products or services you are offering and in which geographical locations.  This involves adding “behind the scenes” data that Google can read to fully understand the messages your website is trying to convey and which geographical locations you would like the custom from. This information should be unique and relevant on EVERY page and image on your website.

Adding your relevant search terms to the page/meta title, the main headline on the page, in the 1st paragraph of copy and in the call to action at the bottom are some of the areas of the website that Google will look for important phrases.

Use Trusted Websites to Promote Your Website

Using the power of other local websites you can borrow their authority and add it to your website. A good example of this are local business directories.

You can also add data to your own website to make it easier for Google to understand the location(s) to prioritise your business in the search results.

Because of the huge volume of content all wanting to be ranked on the multitude of search engines, it makes it impossible for something of that scale to be manually checked and ranked by search engines. This is why software and algorithms are put in place, as it’s a sheer impossible task to manually rank these amounts of sites with a fair approach. Whilst software is advancing at a relatively fast rate, there isn’t something on the market that can actually read the validity of content outright, there are things that can check the keywords count etc. and this is an element we try to focus on when creating our content. Aspects that we know are going to be picked up on by the software search engines use are always going to be a priority to use as these are the largest steps we can take into advancing the ranking of a website. If the software were to remain the same, it wouldn’t take a few months before people would manage to completely overhaul and understand every facet that the algorithms look at to rank, making the rankings void as the system would have been exploited by everyone wanting to rank their sites.

Because of this never-ending chase, we are always going to be searching for the new element search engines are going to use once the old ones have been removed or updated. It’s this process that is important to our process as the fundamentals of search engines ranking systems are always wanting to find the most supported and linked page to place on page 1. The algorithms are always going to change, which is inevitable for search engines to remain a valid platform for sites, which makes it tricky for local businesses to rank their website. We thankfully are one step ahead as we have managed to find a new facet, which Google’s algorithms use to rank websites.

Local SEO – Schema Data

This new element is called Schema data, which is the new component that Google especially likes to pick up on, through the coding in all web pages. What it is basically doing is thoroughly checking through a new source of code, which we are able to input a complete list of directory listings that gives sites we rank a huge advantage as search engines greatly favour sites with this Schema data. A simple breakdown of Schema is that it is a semantic vocabulary that search engines like Google can use to read your website. What we are effectively doing is manually inputting data that we know is effective, in a source of code,

In simple terms – schema data adds to your website a number of important pieces of information.

• Your Status – It marks your website as a local business
• Your Name – Business name
• Description – What services and products your business sells
• Address – The address of your local business
• Profiles – linking together all of your social profiles such as Facebook and Twitter
• Longitude & Latitude – of your business address

This means that on every page of your website there is hidden code that informs search engines exactly who you are, what you do and where you are – very powerful information for search engines and one that has accelerated the rankings of local businesses to the first page of Google and into the Google Maps.

Ranking Local Businesses – Directory Listings

Listings on directory websites is an important SEO factor for local businesses. Google has a number of directories they trust to provide to them with data on local businesses. As part of our standard SEO services, we list our local business in over 500 directory websites. Most of these are free, and as a local business owner, you could do this yourself. However, each directory takes about 10 minutes to create (10 minutes x 500 directories = 83 hours of work). They also should be checked and updated on a monthly basis.

When combined with Schema the power of directories for local listings is multiplied 100’s of times.

Use a Local SEO Expert

Regardless if you are a one-town business or a national (or international) company with numerous branches – Local SEO can be a huge factor in gaining leads and customers to your business.

 

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