Tips and trends to grow your business

The latest digital marketing trends to grow your business

Here’s one of life’s conundrums: If you have a sleek-looking website but nobody ever visits it, does it even really exist?

If your website hasn’t been seeing much love lately, we’re here to help. While forming a long-term digital strategy does take time and effort, there are some easy steps you can take to increase traffic to your website quickly. Try these tips.

Creating unique and valuable blog posts and other content is the secret sauce to driving website traffic. In fact, a HubSpot study showed that companies that blogged more than 11 times a month received seven times as many leads as those that blogged zero – one times a month.

Blogging doesn’t have to be time consuming, either. Start by using tools like Answer the Public or Quora to find out what questions people are asking relating to your business. Then set aside an hour once or twice a week to write up a short post (around 300 words) on a relevant topic.

Chances are you have some old pages on your site with outdated meta data, or worse still, no meta data at all. Do a quick audit to make sure you have a keyword-rich meta description (160 characters or less including spaces), page title (60 characters or less including spaces) and H1 heading on every page. If you use Wordpress for your website, the free Yoast plugin makes it easy to add in essential meta data on every page. You can also use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to get suggestions for keywords, and see which keywords relating to your business are most popular.

Once you’re in the habit of creating useful and compelling content, be sure to share links to those blog articles and other content pieces on all your social media platforms. If you have some marketing budget to spare, you can also set up a Facebook campaign to increase your visibility to your target audience and help drive even more traffic to your site.

Internal linking simply means adding a link from one page on your website to another page on your website. A couple of relevant links to other pages on your site from a blog article will help improve the search ranking of the pages you link to, and improve the overall architecture of your site. When including internal links, make sure to use keywords in your anchor text (the text that links to other pages) to improve your search engine ranking for those terms, and encourage users to click on links.

You’re a business owner and an expert in your field – so why not share that expertise with the world? Reach out to other bloggers or online publications to see if they’d be interested in you writing a guest blog for them. The benefits are mutual: You’ll get a valuable backlink to your site and put yourself in front of a new audience, and they’ll have fresh and engaging content on their site (for free, no less).

If you’re really pressed for time, Google AdWords can help drive traffic to your site in a matter of hours or days. It will require outlaying some budget, but can be especially effective during promotional or product launch periods when site traffic and brand visibility are most important. Find out more about how to set up a Google AdWords campaign.