Your website should be connecting your business with your customers as well as your potential customers. If you site isn't getting traffic, it's not going to help your business grow. Just like a restaurant. You can have the best food in the world, but if you don't have customers, you won't be open for long. So how do you get traffic?
- Have a nice looking, easy to navigate site that's built from the ground up with search engines in mind. (With the Professional Level of Easysite these are already done for you.)
- Have original content on the specific subjects that you want to show up for on search engines. Do the hard work of creating quality content that's interesting and you will be rewarded by the search engines.
- Don't steal content from other sites or cheat by copying and pasting text from other sites. Search engines are pretty smart these days. They know when you're trying to pull a fast one and the will penalize you for doing so.
- Keep your site going! Just like it matters to people, search engines also care about how long you've been around.
- Use a domain name with your site. Domain names carry more weight than a sub-domain or forward-slash site.
- Keep your site up to date. This gives people a reason to come back to your site. Don't let your site get stale and old. Keep it up to date with new and interesting posts.
- Get other related sites to link to your site. Search engines notice when you site is popular enough that other sites link to it. Search engines are also smart enough to know when you're artificially creating back-links to your site. If your site is good and useful then other websites will refer to it.
- Use social media sites to let your friends, family and co-workers know about your site as well as new items posted to your site.
- Don't forget about traditional marketing. Make sure your website URL is prominent on everything that represents your business: flyers, business cards, brochures, coupons, receipts, t-shirts, bumper stickers, email signatures, advertisements, TV, radio and so on.
- Tell people about your site and ask them to visit it.
- Have realistic expectations and patience. Google isn't going to give you top placement within a week of launching no matter how great your website is. It takes time.
Your new website is a great tool to keep connected with customers, generate new business and establish trust with potential customers. Done the right way, your website can be the most valuable tool you have to grow your business.