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5 Easy Ways to Increase Your Business Website Traffic

Author: Maggie Bloom

If you’re a business owner, then you know that having a website is essential in today’s digital age. But what good is a website if no one can find it? There are things you can do to increase traffic to your site and get more eyes on your product or service. Here are five easy ways to do just that.

  1. Improve Your Website’s Design and User Experience

Your website’s design is the first thing potential customers will see, so it’s important to make a good impression. If your site is difficult to navigate or doesn’t look professional, people will likely click away and visit another site. On top of that, a well-designed website will be more likely to rank higher on search engine results pages, which will also help increase traffic.

One of the most important things that you can do to improve your site’s design is to focus on user experience. Make sure your site is easy to navigate and that all the information potential customers might be looking for is easy to find. You can do that by using clear and concise text, easy-to-use menus, and helpful visuals, like images and videos.

Another important aspect of the design is creating a mobile-friendly version of your site. With more and more people using smartphones and tablets to browse the web, it’s essential that your site can be viewed on these smaller devices. If it’s not, you could be missing out on a lot of potential traffic.

There are plenty of other ways to improve your website’s design, but these are just a few of the most important things to keep in mind.

  1. Integrate SMS, Email, and Instant Messenger Marketing

Email, SMS, and instant messenger are all great ways to stay in touch with your potential customers and keep them updated on what’s going on with your business. You can use these platforms to send out coupons, announcements, or even just friendly reminders about your product or service.

A programmable SMS API service provider, for instance, can be integrated into your website to automatically send text messages to customers who opt-in. This is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and keep them updated on your latest offers.

Email marketing can also be used to great effect. You can use an email service, like MailChimp, to create beautiful newsletters or promotional emails and send them out to your list of subscribers. This is a great way to keep people interested in what you’re doing and drive traffic back to your site.

And last but not least, don’t forget about instant messenger marketing. Platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are incredibly popular and can be used to reach a large number of people quickly and easily.

  1. Use Social Media

Social media is a great way to connect with potential customers and promote your business. Platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram allow you to reach a wide audience with little effort. And best of all, it’s free to use!

When using social media, it’s important to post interesting and engaging content that will get people talking. You should also make sure to post regularly and interact with your followers as much as possible.

Another great way to use social media is to run ads. Facebook, in particular, has a very effective advertising platform that allows you to target potential customers based on their interests and demographics.

  1. Write Guest Posts for Other Blogs

Guest posting is a great way to get your name out there and drive traffic back to your site. When you guest post on another blog, you’re essentially getting free advertising for your business.

And it’s not just about getting your name out there. Guest posting can also help improve your website’s search engine ranking. This is because when you guest post, you’re usually given a link back to your site. These links are called backlinks and they act as a vote of confidence for your site, telling search engines that it’s relevant and trustworthy.

  1. Use Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a great way to get your site in front of potential customers who are already interested in what you’re selling. With PPC, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This makes it a very effective and efficient way to advertise.

There are a number of different PPC platforms you can use, but the most popular is Google AdWords. With AdWords, you can create text, image, and video ads that will be shown to people who are searching for keywords related to your business.

In the end, increasing your website traffic is all about being creative and thinking outside the box. There are a number of different ways to do this, but these are just a few of the most effective. If you put in the time and effort, you’ll be sure to see a difference in your traffic numbers.

Web Design Tips to Lead Visitors Through the Buyer Journey

Author: Eleanor Hecks

The buyer’s journey isn’t always a straight path. Site visitors might start later in the process than you’d expect, jump around, skip steps and take a winding trek along the way. However, you can lead visitors through the sales funnel. Your online customer journey can be improved and turned into a positive force for conversions.

Forrester recently reported how drastically buying behavior changed during the height of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. The 2021 B2B Buying Study found a 59% increase in how many interactions buyers prefer now compared to two years ago. People expect you to anticipate their needs and plan for a positive customer experience (CX).

Users want more engagement and guidance in moving from point A to point B in the buying process. Consider these web design tips to lead your site visitors from browsers to leads to buyers without missing a beat.

1. Know the Stages

The first step to improving the buyer’s journey is understanding the stages a customer goes through. The first stage is awareness, where they’re learning about your brand. They then research, consider, decide and hopefully return.

One buyer may have heard about your product from a friend and even seen it in action and might skip right past the awareness section of your site. People come to your website at different stages, and some may need more time in research while others go right to the decision stage.

Offering separate landing pages is the No. 1 way to ensure your site visitors get what they need no matter where they are in the journey.

Source: https://www.creditcanada.com

Credit Canada taps into the online customer journey and gives people the option to jump right to a free debt assessment or learn more and watch a video. Someone landing on the page in the awareness stage will choose to gather more details. On the other hand, if they’ve already decided to try the service, they can hop right to sharing their information.

2. Understand Your Clients

Knowing your buyers’ preferences lets you use the language and triggers they need to move forward regardless of the phase of the journey they’re in. For example, a young single male won’t have the same concerns as a father of three children.

If you’re selling an alarm system, the father will care about his family’s safety. The single man may be concerned about his pets or belongings. The focus is a tiny bit different, depending on the demographics of your target audience.

Take the time to create buyer personas to ensure you’re using the right tone and emotional signals.

3. Choose Power Words

Some words trigger users to take action. Start with strong action verbs that explain the next step you want the site visitor to take. However, you can also focus on words with additional pull, such as “free” or “trial offer.”

People often want to try things before buying them or gather information without feeling obligated to sign up. The language you use to push the buyer through their journey signals the benefits of choosing your brand over a competitor.

Source: https://www.rollguard.eu

Rollguard features some language to help move users through the process. Action verbs such as “Learn,” “Start” and “Configure” all pull the user into the journey. It also uses the verb “Order” combined with “Free Samples.”

4. Tap Into Keywords

Speaking of words, tap into the power of using certain keywords and phrases your buyers are likely to search for. The page they land on should be geared toward those specific keywords. If you sell those alarms mentioned previously, you might use a keyword phrase such as “the best alarm system to protect my family.” You would then share content that explains how to do so.

Make sure any content you add to your page offers value to the user. If someone seeks solutions to keep their family safe from burglary, fire or other events, they want some answers and not just a big sales pitch.

5. Cut Clutter

You want to hold the user’s attention from the minute they land on your site. One of the best ways of doing so is getting rid of anything you don’t need. Each page on your website should have a specific purpose, and every element needs to point the user toward a goal for the page.

The homepage should move the user to the next stage of the buyer’s journey. Someone may already be aware of your brand and simply want to find the CTA button and move on to the next step. You don’t want to waste their time with a lot of bells and whistles. Make it simple and keep the traffic moving along.

People are busy. They don’t have much time to waste and will want to move on without missing a beat.

Source: https://www.depop.com

Depop serves either buyers or sellers. Its goal is to get people to sign up to do either or both. The site offers some clear CTAs pointing the way to download the app or sign up in the moment. Users can browse via their search bar, but Depop prefers to get them on the platform fast and get things moving.

Use Good Design Practices

The best way to get people on your page and keep them there is to use solid design practices in the first place. You can then tweak things to make sense for where your site visitors are in the buyer’s journey and move them along with CTAs and words.

4 Examples of Web Designs That Just Make Sense

Author: Eleanor Hecks

Have you landed on a website and just felt it perfectly embraced the purpose and personality of a brand? Finding just the right combination of emotional points and features isn’t easy. You must first figure out who you are as a brand. At the same time, learn who your audience is.

According to Internet Live Stats, there are approximately 3.5 billion Google searches every day. The number varies, but you’ll find ample opportunities to reach your target audience with your website.

Does Your Website Design Matter?

Once you get the traffic to your page, does your design resonate with users? You have just a few milliseconds to make a first impression, so making sure you hit every point is vital.

Many people begin their searches for a business, even a local one, via search engines. When they land on your page, do they fully understand the purpose? Is the design aesthetically pleasing? Does the layout guide the user to the next stage of the buyer’s journey?

One of the best ways to learn how to design a site that speaks volumes is studying what others have done. Here are four websites we think just make sense and match the purpose of the business or personality of the brand.

1. Use Brand Color Palette

Is your brand already well-established? If people are familiar with your logo or company colors, it’s smart to use the same look in your web design. While it might be tempting to throw in some unique looks to show you’re up on the latest trends, try to stay away from anything too trend.

It’s best to stick with what your audience recognizes. You can, of course, add in a pop of color for a CTA or slightly adjust the hues to better contrast on electronic screens.

Century 21 uses a large hero image of a modern room to grab interest. They use a semi-transparent bar to share facts such as how many homes, agents and offices are available in your area. Note how the shades are brown and gold with a bit of neutral mixed in.

The company is well known and their logo and color palette recognizable offline. Using similar shades taps into the comfort and familiarity most people already feel with this company. The design works perfectly to get across their message.

2. Highlight Your Tagline

What is your brand’s tagline? You may be able to utilize it in some of the imagery and design of your page. The more you can make all the elements work together to elicit emotion in the user, the more likely they’ll convert into a lead.

For example, if you’re known as a fun brand, you would use happy colors and images. Think about the emotions you’d like to evoke in your customers and center your design around them. Even the shades you choose tap into feelings. Understand buyer reactions to different colors, even if you have to survey them to find out.

MRCOOL uses the heading “Never Stop Dreaming” just above their name logo. To tap into this idea, they show a little girl in a superhero cape, looking across to the city skyline as though she’s ready to rescue the world.

The soft sunset colors make one think of dreaming and something a bit surreal. At the same time, if you click on the video, you get testimonials from those who love the product and want others to know how well it works. It’s the perfect mix of dream and reality to grab user attention in an unexpected way.

3. Have Fun

Don’t be afraid to show off your personality and what’s unique about your business. It might not be obvious to you at first what makes your brand unique. Spend time studying the competition so you can see what unique value proposition (UVP) each touts.

Once you understand the competition’s UVPs, come up with your own. You want something different than your competitors but also true. What do you thrive at? What makes you stand out? It’s okay to hone in on something others may not pay attention to as long as you stack up in other areas.

The Ugly Company sells dried fruit and healthy snacks. Their name is “ugly” and their goal is to reduce their carbon footprint while upcycling snacks. So, they choose colors that are a bit garish. When you first glance at the page, you note how ugly the yellow is there. It isn’t a color you see often in web design.

However, on second look it matches the overall tone and look of the brand. The fact that some of the elements fall into the category many consider unattractive coincides with the brand’s name and persona. The product packaging would also stand out on store shelves as these aren’t colors typically used on dried fruit bags.

4. Highlight Your Benefits

Leave room in your design to show off the benefits of doing business with your brand. Highlight what makes you special on your home page. Limit the number of options so users see clearly where to go next, whether to a shopping section, additional information or to a form that converts them into a lead.

Eliminate any clutter and focus only on what customers most want to know about your brand. You can ascertain the information they want by looking at questions they’ve asked your sales team or surveying them for input. You can also check heatmaps for your site to see where people head once landing there.

Case goes with a very simple layout to bring the products you most want to know about within a click or two after landing on their page. They start by showcasing one of their popular products in the image. They then share the benefits of choosing their furniture, such as great reviews, 14-day returns and delivery or pickup.

How to Meet User Expectations

Your number one goal for your website should be to meet user expectations. Why do people seek a site such as yours in the first place? Are they looking for information? Do they need to buy something? Make the overall process as easy and possible. Creating an excellent customer experience is the most significant thing you can do to keep your users happy and create a design that makes sense.

Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.

8 SEO Marketing Trends in 2020 That Entrepreneurs Should Know About

Author: Emma Williams

Every entrepreneur should already be familiar with the concept of SEO. Optimizing websites for search crawlers has become a crucial part of marketing for businesses both online and offline. It’s especially important if much of your business is done through online channels. Marketing trends are constantly evolving and it can be difficult for entrepreneurs to keep up with all the different SEO strategies being applied to modern business websites. To get a good idea of what you need to check out to prepare for next year, here are a couple of the most important trends coming up.

Quality over quantity

Ask any SEO expert and they’ll tell you that content is the single most important thing for your marketing strategy. When it comes to what that content should look like, opinions are divided. Some will advocate for spreading your content far and wide across many different websites and blogs. This strategy isn’t without its benefits. You’re able to reach a large number of websites and create a ton of useful links for your own.

On the other hand, this strategy also dilutes the quality of your content. Search engines are adapting to an increased amount of content and they’re curating it by quality. You need to show users that your content is top tier so that they’ll keep coming back to it. Search engines will recognize this and rank your page higher.

Website speed and UX

User experience is one of the most important metrics for SEO. It has a direct impact on the traffic of your website and how users perceive it. It’s also something that search engines account for when scouring websites.

Website speed is a big part of UX optimization and it’s something that every website should focus on improving. Google’s crawlers value website speed highly, which is why so many pages are optimizing for fast loading times this year.

Voice searches

While once a pretty niche part of SEO, voice searches have become an integral part of any SEO strategy. With the rise of smartphones, voice searches have stopped being considered a novelty. Now they’re considered just as important as any other form of search.

Optimizing for voice searches is a little bit harder than regular keywords. Searches aren’t treated the same way by search engines. They don’t lead to search pages, but rather the search engine prioritizes the top answer and displays it immediately.

Keywords tend to be shorter and more colloquial, to better match the way people talk, as it’s pretty different compared to the way they type into their phones.

Structured data

Data takes many forms on your website. When search engine crawlers scour your website for relevant information, they take every little bit of readable data into consideration.

To make it easier for search engine crawlers, your website features structured data in various different forms. Information that’s located alongside the metadata is a good example. It’s there to make crawling quicker and more efficient. Including more of it in your metadata and meta descriptions is a good way to get more attention from search crawlers.

Video content

Videos are becoming an increasingly popular form of content. Unlike written content and sponsored blog posts, users are much more likely to sit through an entire video and watch it all the way to the end. This gives digital marketers more opportunities to make use of clever strategies and product mentions.

Search engines are being adapted to work on finding videos through metadata and meta descriptions. They are quickly placing more value on high-traffic videos and properly optimized websites that can host them. You should strive to increase the number of videos you utilize in your marketing strategy and work on making your website more attractive for crawlers in this area.

Content length

While it’s true that content quality is more important than quantity, the individual length of a piece of marketing content is crucial as well. You can look at the length of a blog post and see it as a kind of quality. People want to be invested in the content that they’re consuming.

Longer pieces of quality content get far more views than their shorter counterparts. However, the difficulty comes from creating adequate content which will stimulate users long enough and keep them occupied and engaged. This is not easily accomplished by the average website owner. Instead, they often employ writing experts from digital marketing strategists like GWM to achieve better rankings. Creating ideal content that attracts search crawlers requires quite a bit of experience and knowledge.

Search engine snippets

Getting to the top of the search pages is a priority for websites. But what if you could get your page featured above the first result? This is Google’s “featured snippet” in a nutshell. It lets websites with exact answers get to the very top of search results.

Optimizing for featured snippets is going to be a crucial part of digital marketing strategies going forward. Have your content provide concise and direct answers to user’s queries and you’ll find that your pages will be getting a lot more traffic.

Influencers

The impact of influencer marketing is an often-underestimated part of digital marketing. Influencers have an enormous amount of power when it comes to brand creation. They’re able to exert their influence over countless fans of your brand and encourage their viewers to try out new products and services.

By reaching out to influencers and having them link to your website and its products, you can very quickly reach a much wider audience and signal that your brand is even more attractive to consumers.

Conclusion

If the past couple of years are any indicator of things to come, digital marketing is going to continue to flourish more than ever before. SEO strategies are constantly evolving to meet this expansive demand as businesses scramble to get their websites to the top of search results. Because of this, it’s important that you and your businesses remain on top of the latest and most effective tactics that will help your website stay relevant.