5 ways to get more website traffic

How can merchants make their websites work harder?

More and more merchants are joining the digital transformation revolution and going online. As many of you will already know, having a website these days seems to be a business essential, and particularly for merchants with ambitious growth plans, having a robust digital strategy is becoming an imperative.

But once you have your website, what next? The stats show that successful websites can increase footfall in-branch, drive loyalty, improve customer communication, reduce customer service calls and increase brand awareness. Well designed and supported eCommerce platforms can increase profitability, trade account volume and in-branch purchasing, reaching wider audiences and making repeat purchase more likely.

So how do you get people to find your website in the first place?

There’s loads of advice out there (for example, check out this article from Hubspot for a more in-depth look, if you’re interested). But as a quick introduction, here are 5 things you can do to make sure more people are finding your website.

1. Good quality content

Your website is the shop window of your business, so good quality content is always needed for credibility and to make the best impression. However, great content is also one of the most important ways to drive traffic to your website in the first place.

You might choose to produce helpful blog posts or videos to help customers achieve particular goals in their DIY or trade projects; to help them learn more about a new product range; to educate them about the sustainability credentials of particular materials or processes. Creating good quality, genuinely useful content can attract people to your website really effectively. For example, someone Googling “how do I repoint my patio” will not only be grateful for the trustworthy advice; if you also talk them through the products they’ll need, there’s a good chance they’ll buy them from you too.

Good quality content also boosts SEO (search engine optimisation) to help you get found more easily by more people. It’s really worth the time and effort, and can help establish your brand as trustworthy, knowledgeable and reliable.

Remember, these days video is really important too, so if you can incorporate great video content, so much the better (see also social media below!)

2. Use analytics

Thanks to the way most websites are set up these days, it’s easy to monitor how people are interacting with your site. When it comes to optimising the customer experience on site that’s really helpful, but it’s also vital for working out how to get more people coming to your site in the first place.

First up, you can see where people are coming to your site from, what day or time they’re visiting and what they’re looking at. This information can help you decide on where to advertise to get more traffic, where you might be able to form a third party partnership, or determine the type of content that is attracting the most traffic, so you can create more like that.

Importantly, you can also find out the key words and phrases that people are using to find your (and your competitors’) website. That lets you design content to ensure you rank high on the organic search results (which is what SEO is all about). Search engine results rankings are unbelievably important – the higher Google ranks you for a given search, the more people will visit your site, so it’s really worth investing some time and effort to get to grips with it.

When it comes to digital marketing, data is everything, so use the tools at your disposal to deeply understand how people are currently finding and using your site to help you determine your ongoing approach. You can easily see what’s working and what’s not, which will help you focus your efforts on the most effective activities and content.

3. Use social media

Depending on your age and digital habits, you may be rolling your eyes either in horror at the idea, or because it’s so obvious. But whatever your thoughts on it, social media is an enormously powerful marketing tool when done right. It can let you communicate with your customers, build awareness, establish expertise and credibility, grow (and better understand) your customer base, conduct research, observe competitors and, yes, drive sales.

Knowing where your target audience spends its time and interacting with them in a way that adds value in some way (think back to the helpful content we discussed earlier) is a much more successful approach ordinarily than simply plastering sales messages everywhere. But when you know the hot topics of your industry, social media can be a great place to connect.

4. Tell people!

It may sound too obvious to bother mentioning, but literally telling people your website exists can really help! Make sure the web address is on your adverts or other marketing materials, let people in-store know that they can use the website to check product information, order a specific product or research different methods for use and so on.

Once you’ve got people using your website it’s easy to keep in touch with them and get them to sign up to loyalty schemes, discount notifications or newsletters – but to get them there, they need to know about it

5. Help them spread the word

Word of mouth recommendation is arguably the most powerful form of marketing in the world. When someone you know and trust recommends a particular brand, aren’t you more likely to give it a go?

You can’t force people to spread the word but you CAN make it really easy for them to do so. For example, running a competition where you get more entries for every friend you recommend who then enters; creating easily sharable, useful content that people can pass along to contacts; introducing a loyalty or discount scheme for recommendations and so on. Include social media links to make content easier to share and to encourage customers to interact with you, and encourage customers to leave reviews – reviews are incredibly valuable so make them easy to leave!

Remember, the most important thing you need to get good word of mouth is brilliant customer service – but even with the best service in the world, if you make it hard for people to spread the word, they just won’t.

What are your top traffic tips? We’d love to know what’s worked for you!