Adopt a content strategy that showcases your brand and truly helps your audience.
Website traffic is just as important for online retailers today as footfall traffic is to retailers in the bricks-and-mortar world. The number of visitors to your website is an important gauge on whether your overall digital marketing strategies are working. It can also tell you how many people are viewing and buying your products, and the number of customers returning to the website after making a single purchase.
One of the most important things you can do to make sure that more people will come across your website is to improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). If your content is better optimized, your posts will rank higher on multiple search engines’ result pages.
Your aim should be to develop content using the keywords that are closely related to what your customers are searching for in the first place. By improving your website’s SEO with optimized keywords, your website should rank higher on the results pages of the various search engines, and thereby drive more traffic to your website.
Now that you know the importance of SEO optimization and keywords, let’s dive into some content development practices that are highly successful at getting more people to visit your website.
1. Define your Audience Personas
Your website should speak to the visitors most likely to be interested in your products or services. These visitors are your target audience. The best way to understand them and discover what they are looking for is to create audience personas, or snapshots of your ideal audience members. You can start by answering the given questions:
- What are some characteristics of the ideal buyer of your products or services? This could include demographic details like age range, where they work, their job titles, education levels and even their key interests.
- What problems are they facing and how can your product help them overcome these?
- What type of content are they looking for?
- How do they prefer to find the content they are looking for?
After you answer the above questions, you will have a clear image, or set of personas, that describe your target audience, what content they are looking for and where they usually spend their research time. These personas will help you find your online audience and more easily engage with them.
2. Publish a Blog Targeting Personas
A blog is a frequently updated collection of different types of content aimed at informing and educating your fully fleshed-out audience personas. And blogging is also a great way to get traffic to your website for free. Writing blog posts around the keywords you’ve identified as part of your SEO efforts, and also on topics that are related to your business can drive organic traffic to your website. This would be visitors who don’t cost you anything, since they are landing on your website through unpaid search results, making their traffic completely organic. These are also visitors with a greater level of intent, since they are attracted to the content you are publishing. If you are giving them insight into your products or services in your content, chances are they are potentially high-quality leads.
If you start to have trouble keeping your blog posts regular, guest bloggers can help. These are writers who would like to write for your website for free in return for online exposure. You can ensure that their writing is professional and on topic by assigning them subjects to write about, which can also be an excellent way to cover important topics on your website without having to spend a lot of time doing the research required. Keep in mind, you should always edit and proofread the content you receive from guest bloggers.
3. Engage Consistently
Starting a regular blog is an important step to engaging with your audience, but only if it is done consistently. Publishing regular posts will keep your site updated and will have a positive impact on your Google and other search engine rankings. Consistency will also keep your site top-of-mind with your audience, and they will think of your site when they have a question or when they are researching a product or a service. Consistent engagement also helps you stay relevant online where information changes at the blink of an eye.
Another way to consistently engage is to blog through your social media accounts. Social media platforms give you the opportunities to post regular updates through stories, announcements, images, videos and help you quickly reply to any comments you receive with just a few clicks. Your followers can also quickly reach out to you on social media platforms, and you can reply to them instantly and make the engagement between you all that more personal. This is great opportunity to provide exceptional customer service for your current and prospective customers and promote customer retention and brand loyalty. Companies that deliver excellent customer service are recognized and appreciated by customers, both in-person and online.
Social media engagement helps your brand build trust and will give your online audience a good reason to continue supporting your website, not only by visiting it themselves, but also by promoting your website on their own social media platforms.
4. Create Valuable Content
A content calendar is a schedule for marketers and blog editors to plan out the content they will publish in their blogs, and while you are building your content calendar, make sure to create high-quality content that informs and educates your audience on the topics that are most important to them, and also focuses on addressing their challenges. Try to publish comprehensive blog posts centered around a strong keyword and including as much valuable information as possible. How-to articles, lists, reviews and tutorials are the kinds of blog posts that will drive the most amount of organic traffic to your website. The content should be evergreen, not time-dependent, and your writers should update them from time to time with any new information.
You can also recycle older content that was previously popular on your website. Start by reposting the same articles on your social media pages. However, be transparent that the article is a repost by creating a hashtag that shows your readers that the content had previously been published and is making a comeback because it is so useful to your audience.
5. Keep Content Brief and Focused
Long-form content is very search-engine-friendly, but visitors to your website don’t have long attention spans, so don’t make your website content difficult to read. Every page on your website should use bite-size sentences people can read quickly, and that approach will work well with your blog articles, too.
Here are a few additional content tips:
- Stay on point and keep sentences short
- 2-3 sentences in each paragraph is a good target, but not more than 5
- Use a clear and readable font with larger size
- Check the reading score of your content and make adjustments to the editorial calendar accordingly
- Use images and video to break up your text
- Use bullets, lists and headings to keep things scannable
Conclusion
Give your website content the attention it deserves, and it will certainly pay dividends. Whether your website is focused on eCommerce sales or is an informational site about your brand, products or services—follow these content optimization tips to increase traffic and visitor numbers to your website.
