Having a website is great, but it doesn’t mean much if you don’t get any traffic. It’s like having a grocery store on the moon. You could be the best grocery store in the universe, but it wouldn’t matter, because no one would be visiting.
You don’t want to spend money on a website that doesn’t get you business.
So if you’re hiring a web designer, make sure that your website will include basic SEO (search engine optimization). SEO is the process of getting traffic to a website. It involves researching your keywords (the words people search on when looking for a business like yours), and putting those keywords into your website text, links, and background code. That will give your site a much better chance of ranking highly in search results, but there’s something else you can do that will help even more.
How To Make Your Website Rank #1
The best way to increase your website traffic is to start a blog on your site. If you write a few articles that teach others about your product or service, you are giving customers something for free and gaining their trust (and Google’s), and you will rank higher in search results.
That is the best, most ethical way of doing SEO.
You see, Google doesn’t reveal the exact algorithms that will make a website rank number one, precisely because they don’t want business owners to be able to rank themselves number one. They want to show people searching on a subject the website they’re looking for, and making yourself an authority on a subject means you’ll be one of those sites.
The Ingenious Ways a Girlboss Used Social Media
Someone who used this technique very effectively is Sophia Amoruso, the founder of a young women’s clothing company called Nasty Gal. She started her business in her twenties and grew it to be worth millions.
Her book, Girlboss, is a fascinating account of the techniques she used to become successful, and I think the lessons are relevant to all business owners, so I’ll share them here.
Sophia started out by going to thrift stores around San Francisco and buying vintage band t-shirts and designer leather jackets, etc. She would buy them for next to nothing and then sell them for hundreds of dollars on her Ebay shop, Nasty Gal.
Ebay forbid sellers like her from collecting their customer’s emails or redirecting them to their own websites, but she ignored these policies and did it anyway. Eventually, she was kicked off of Ebay, but by that time, she had amassed a huge customer base.
She was extremely savvy in her use of social media. She spent time on MySpace (the old Facebook) each week friending the “it” girls in fashion, in order to get them to follow her back. She also became a master of photographing a clothing item so that the thumbnail size image was flattering and made people want to click on it.
But one of the main ways that she kept customers coming back to her website was by starting a blog on which she talked about all of the cool things she liked: bands, makeup, music festivals, etc. This blog created the vision of a lifestyle that young women wanted to imitate. She had customers coming to her website multiple times a day just to read her blog.
Eventually, she started selling her own clothing line in addition to her vintage items, and her company became worth millions.
The Lesson
So if you want to get more website traffic, start a blog on your site and write posts that teach potential customers something about your product/service, or that showcase your lifestyle/brand. This will keep people coming back to learn something new or to envision how cool their life could be (with your product)!
And when they’re already on your site, making a sale becomes much easier.
Good luck!