#125: 13 Incredibly Easy Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Business Website!

Show Notes

As an entrepreneur, you understand the importance of a good, user-friendly business website. It’s the reason you spent so much time, effort, and money to create it, and why you continuously tweak and update it. Now you wonder where all the traffic is and what you should be doing to get more eyes on your products and services. After all, generating more traffic to your online site is a crucial part of growing your business.

​In this episode, co-hosts Nola Boea and Lori Vajda, share 13 super easy tips for driving traffic to your business website!

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In This Episode You’ll Learn 

• How to properly optimized your website in 2023.
• What getting an increase in web traffic could mean for your customers and your bottomline.
• Thirteen high-impact tactics for driving more traffic to your business website.
• How to determine which tactics are best for your business.

Key points Lori and Nola are sharing in this episode:

(03:55:92) There are three major venues you, as a solopreneur or small business owner, can use for capturing prospective customers' attention and driving traffic to your website.

(05:46:51) When it comes to creating content for your website, be the big truck or the sleek car that gets the attention. This is how you get past that clutter and rise above the noise

(8:35:25) Let's say you still don't want to have a lot of time to write blog posts for your website. These tips can help you strategically refresh your website content.

(11:23:90) Organic SEO (search engine optimization), when used strategically, can help drive website traffic, and with these tips, you can do it yourself.

(19:05:60) Social media is an ideal tool for directing visitors to your website. It’s also a perfect example of off-page SEO.

Resources

Sign up  for “News You Can Use” at Sticky Brand Lab

WordStream - Free SEO tool

Longtail Keyword - Free tool - https://www.keyword.io/

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ConvertKit: Our #1 Favorite Email Marketing Platform   (This is an affiliate link)

Transcript

[00:00:00] Lori: Humor me a moment. Imagine yourself sitting in your car. You look up at the sky and notice it's a beautiful shade of blue with just a few wispy clouds. The weather is perfect. Not too hot, not too cold. Feeling like it's an amazing day, you look straight ahead and see that you are sitting in rush hour traffic. But rather than being upset, you are smiling because one, this is a daydream. And the traffic is representing prospective customers heading to your website. Do you wish this dream was your reality? Well, it can be. And we are here to help you. Stay tuned, listener, because in this episode we are sharing 13 DIY marketing tips and strategies to help you increase traffic to your business website.

Welcome to Sticky Brand Lab podcast, where we bridge the gap between knowledge and action by providing you with helpful information, tips, and tools from entrepreneurs and other experts, so you can quickly and easily jumpstart your side business. We are your hosts. I'm Lori Vajda, and this is my co-host, Nola Boea.

[00:01:07] Nola: Hey there.

[00:01:08] Lori: Hello, Nola. How are you today?

[00:01:11] Nola: I'm slick.

[00:01:14] Lori: slick. Okay, slick. Okay.

[00:01:18] Nola: You know, Lori, a lot of first-time entrepreneurs come with one of two perspectives, and that is first they'll either think, if you build a website, they will come. Like

[00:01:29] Lori: from the field of dreams.

[00:01:31] Nola: Yep. You've got it. Or their perspective is, you can build a website, but no one will come unless you pay someone to send them there.

[00:01:42] Lori: You know, I actually had a client who did not want best practices in his website, so every suggestion that I gave, he was like, no, this is, instead of giving them my business card, I'm just giving them a link. You are so missing, so missing opportunity. But I agree with you, Nola. I recently read a couple of interesting statistics about marketers who also shared this goal. According to WordStream, 61% of marketers said that generating traffic and leads was one of their biggest problems. A 2020 study by Content Marketing Institute found that 63% of professionals have trouble finding candidates with the skills to create traffic worthy messaging.

[00:02:31] Nola: Well, those numbers show that driving traffic to your website, it can be challenging even for seasoned marketing professionals, not just first-time entrepreneur. Yet, we know that driving online traffic to your website is essential for growing or expanding your company.

[00:02:49] Lori: And knowing how to do so for free is also important for entrepreneurs.

[00:02:54] Nola: Absolutely. Including us. Yes. So, in keeping with the theme of traffic, we'll discuss three general highways as well as do it yourself byways for boosting website traffic naturally. And as a side note, Lori, do you know the difference between highway and a byway?

[00:03:14] Lori: Well, you know, for the longest time growing up highway was with the term that we used. But Californians use freeways. So I was never quite sure if a highway and a freeway was like soda and pop. So I'm just going to plead the fifth here and go, why don't you tell me what's the difference between a highway and a byway?

[00:03:34] Nola: Okay. Well, highways tend to be wider and carry heavy traffic. Think of your four lanes while byways are those secondary roads that are less traveled.

[00:03:46] Lori: That seems very apropos here. Because not only did we come up with a theme and we are sticking to that theme, we are sticking to it, but our three major highways for today that we'll be covering our content, SEO, and social media, which means we have 13 byways that are going to provide you with free and low cost, do-it-yourself tools and techniques so you listener can increase traffic to your business website.

[00:04:18] Nola: And speaking of highways, since we're carrying through that theme, it literally takes content to drive traffic, which is why our first main highway. Content. Now, content is that stuff that you put on your website. It could be photos and videos, but it's the written words that currently get picked up by search engine bots, and we're talking both the written words you can see online and those behind your site, which we'll get to. And that's why just as most major city highways are congested, so is the amount of content we're seeing on a daily basis. I read that the average person in the US sees between 6,000 and 10,000 ads every single day, and that's just ads. I guess if you can think about it, you're seeing billboards, you're seeing all kinds of things in Facebook, your television, livestream, on demand. I mean…

[00:05:13] Lori: Yeah. Even your email, your regular free email, you have ads around there.

[00:05:18] Nola: That's right.

[00:05:18] Lori: But I think what's really important, when social media first started or digital first started, there were fewer ads. It was easy to sift through and find the information. It's why we fell in love with the internet. Then we learned how algorithms work and people started generating content. A lot of mind-numbing, no-point, terrible writing, content. And that's not what you're talking about, right, Nola?

[00:05:45] Nola: No. This is how you get past that clutter. You rise above the noise. I guess you can imagine if you're stuck in traffic, that website traffic, and there's the honking and there's the engines, and there's a motorcycles. This is how you can stand out. You're the big truck or you're the sleek car. Whatever's getting the attention.

Now, as a business owner, when it comes to creating content, here's what's effective. Having a blog. It's one of your best and easiest options, and that's because publishing a blog post on a regular basis, it serves the purpose of freshening your website. And that's what search engines love. And although we'll be talking about SEO in more detail in a little bit, a blog gives you opportunities to use keywords, which also helps drive traffic. So, you'll want to sprinkle keywords throughout your blog, and the operative word is sprinkle. But there are a few optimal places you do want to use them as much as possible on your website. And when I say as much as possible, I'm not talking about keyword stuffing, I'm just saying be intentional about using them in these places.

First one is the headline. That's what's the title of your post. Also, in the first paragraph, as long as you can make that keyword sound natural and within the sentence, that first paragraph carries a lot of weight with search engines. And with the alt tags you use to describe the images. That's those words behind, so the alt tags you use with images.

[00:07:13] Lori: Nola, I read that companies who put up a regular blog post get 97% more links to their website and 55% more website visitors than businesses that don't.

[00:07:27] Nola: I wouldn't doubt it.

[00:07:29] Lori: I don't know if you're familiar with Shakira, but she has a song titled that Hips Don't Lie, and kind of taking a lead from that, the numbers don't lie.

[00:07:39] Nola: Okay. . . I guess not.

[00:07:43] Lori: If writing a regular blog post is really too much of a time commitment for you, consider having guest bloggers on. This can be clients, it can be client generated content, it could be users, it could be complimentary business owners, it could be relationships that you have with your suppliers or affiliate links. Basically, what you're trying to do is get fresh content from people who would have a vested interest themselves by posting something on your website. And the reason that they would is because it talks about them. It talks about the brand or company that they represent. So, it's a win-win when you win them and win the search engine.

[00:08:28] Nola: There you go. Now, let's say you still don't want to have a lot of time commitment on your website and you choose not to update it regularly. There's still a tip here. You can still make sure you're getting the most out of what's already there. And one powerful way to achieve this is to make sure you optimize your website's, title tags, meta descriptions and headings, even updating the content on the pages with those things can help a lot to rank in search engines, to at least bring it up.

[00:09:03] Lori: Yes. I had a client that I was working with who was a pharmaceutical company, specifically targeting older adults, and what they wanted was the refresh of the content that was there. So, we worked on the stuff that you talked about, the title tags, meta-description, and headlines. We also put the keywords in those first paragraph in sub-headlines, and then about six to eight weeks later, we had an impromptu meeting with the client. And while I was listening in, I just quickly did a Google search to see how they were doing. And believe it or not, this was incredible to me, which I was like, I wish I could have high-fived my partner at that time, because what we were finding was that they moved from obscurity, which back then if you were on-page five or greater, no user found you. Well, they were in obscurity and probably about a third of the website pages we found somewhere on-page four or five. Another third we found on-pages three and two. And we even had a couple pages in which, for the keyword, they were on the first page.

[00:10:16] Nola: Awesome.

[00:10:16] Lori: It was, and all organic.

[00:10:18] Nola: Perfect. In addition to search engines sending people to your website, another thing you can do to send people there is to use email. For example, you can promote your website's blog topic by sending targeted and customized messages to your list of email subscribers. Or you can send exclusive offers or discounts that direct subscribers to your website. You can email offers to find, I don't know, a downloadable checklist, event, a webinar, anything that will drive traffic to your website to find that item, is a way to use email market.

[00:10:57] Lori: Here's a bonus tip. Your signature in your email, you can put links there. So, if you write a blog post, the link would be the title of your blog post that's in your signature. Or if you have a tip sheet, you can list what that tip sheet is. So, your email signature is another great way to drive traffic to your website.

Now our second major highway is SEO. And SEO stands for search engine optimization. It's basically a way to optimize your site so that search engines like a Google or a Bing, or even social media, so that it can rank in those results that show up. Nola, do you have anything that I'm missing here that you can add?

[00:11:43] Nola: Well, yes, I would say that when you mention SEO, a lot of people have misconceptions about what that is or how long SEO takes to work or how costly it can be to pay for. And a lot of people don't really realize that there's a difference between paid SEO and SEO best practices. So really, when you say SEO, it's just a big muddled mess for a lot of people.

[00:12:13] Lori: I agree with you. I had another client who wanted SEO, and when I wanted to clarify, are we talking paid SEO or best practice SEO, I think they were offended by my asking that question. But the work that they wanted help with referred to best practices more than it referred to paid. So even though I'm sure she felt like somehow, I was indirectly insulting her, I really was trying to be careful and make sure that I understood what the expectation was because it is very confusing for a lot of people.

The good news though, is that you can get many of the benefits organically by just using best practice and you know, I gave that example of the client that I had, so let me give you some "byway" examples, do you like that? I'm sticking with our theme here.

[00:13:05] Nola: The roads less traveled.

[00:13:07] Lori: That's right. To help people use some tools for SEO.

Now here, when we're talking about keyword, we often use keywords in our own search in a sentence, but it really is a singular word. You can start to determine for your target audience, what are the keywords. that they would use, and you can do this by doing research. Look at your competitors. Even look at a book like on Amazon; you can also see it in the reviews. Once you start to see what people put in there, you start to notice those words that keep getting used over and over and over. That's a good indication of a keyword.

A tool that can help you. Word Stream has a free tool that you can use. Most people don't use free tools. They use like a Google for their keyword search, but Word Stream has a free tool to use, and we're going to share that link in our show notes as well as on our website resources page. Once you have the keywords, you want to do what's called on-page SEO. Like you had mentioned earlier, Nola, these are the things that you can do to your website pages to help them rank individually in search engine results.

So why is on-page SEO so important? Well, it's because any search engine reads the content that's on your page, and that information often will show up as part of the meta-description. So even though you might put in a meta-description, the search engine might feel that the content on your page is far more accurate than your description. So, keep that in mind. It doesn't mean that it didn't work, it just means that the search engine made a choice.

Using SEO in this way ensures that your site is optimized for both the human eye as well as for search engines. Now, some on-page SEO elements include how you write the page title, the headline, the meta description, and as I mentioned, images like to have an alt text. These are the things that you can put that you don't necessarily see when you look at the image, but if you mouse over it, you could see the alt text. That's a good example of where you might see that.

Internal links, as well, and your URL in the domain name might have a keyword in there. Now, individually, you might not get a lot of lift from doing these tips that we're giving, but collectively they all work together. And that can have a powerful effect.

[00:15:50] Nola: Absolutely. Now, what you've been talking about, which is focusing on short, high volume search terms, that's simple because doing research on them is quicker and easier. You want to know what people are searching for the most that pertains to you and your business.

But if you don't consider longtail keywords, you would actually be losing out on potential page views. If you're unfamiliar with the term longtail keywords. That's okay. Longtail means that typically, when someone searches online, what they do is instead of putting in just that one, single word, they're actually putting in phrases, and so longtail keywords are those phrases people use to find information or to find products and services.

I recently put in a phrase, "natural ways to repel carpenter bees." I mean, that is a longtail phrase. If I had put in carpenter bees. I could have gotten about everything I wanted to know about carpenter bees. But by making it longtail, putting in more context in that phrase, I'm of course going to get more relevant search results. So that's what longtail is.

[00:17:02] Lori: Yeah. I did a similar search as well, putting in "starting a side business." And I had less than a hundred results that came through. But just to give you listener a sample of what those were, I started with starting a side business, so results that came back: I want to start a side business but I don't know about what, how to start a side business along with the job, and you get the idea here that what you get are different results that show up. So, when you, business owner, want a particular page to show up, you have to think like the person searching.

[00:17:40] Nola: And so the idea is to be able to put those search terms into the language of your web

[00:17:46] Lori: copy. So, I have bonus tips here. One is, your longtail can help give you ideas for what you should blog about, which was what you spoke about earlier.

[00:17:56] Nola: Very good. Here's a free tool to help you discover some of those longtail key phrases. That tool is keyword.io and we'll again have that in our show notes.

[00:18:07] Lori: Here's another bonus tip, or to also go back and touch base on the idea of linking internally. Many people don't do this, so whether it's content on your website or you're refreshing or updating what's already there, or you're even writing a regular blog post or semi-regular blog post, be sure to add at least two, three, maybe four, but definitely two to three links to other pages on your site. And the reason you want to do this is because it keeps visitors searching within your site. It gets them to view more pages on your site, and it allows visitors to get more understanding of the value you bring. Not to mention that all three of these will help your site improve its ranking because all that traffic is a signal to the search engine that there's something of value that at the end of this link.

[00:19:04] Nola: Okay. Social media is our final main route for directing visitors to your website. Now, this is an example of off-page SEO. Up to this point. on-page means that those are things you can do on your actual website. Here, this is what you can do off your website and specifically through social media. Now social media is one of the most flexible marketing strategies available, and a lot of seasoned marketers use social media to drive traffic from their company's social media pages to their business website.

Now, the first thing you need to do is to optimize your social media profiles. This includes both your business pages and your personal pages. If there is a field, fill it in. And make sure to enter your website's domain name. Don't leave any stone unturned. Take full advantage of any place to put something about you and your business. I mean, that's what they're there for.

And also social media platforms. They're really more of a two-way street. By engaging with your target audience on a regular basis, you can help boost traffic to your social media profile and ultimately to your website. And engagement is so important. I mean, did you know that nearly 34% of customers prefer social media for customer care? That's like customer service. Yet only 11% of customers actually receive replies from online brands. So can you imagine you have your social media page out there and you have a customer or somebody who's like really considering your business, and they post something there, and it's crickets.

[00:20:50] Lori: I actually can because I have seen that happen. I have liked something that a person that I don't follow has posted on social media, and I go to their website to learn more about them, their business, and there's nothing there. I mean, nothing. Not even something that drives me to their business page. I'm really always surprised by that because you and I did episode #122 - 7 Media Trends for Small Businesses in 2023. And we talked about how the social media platforms have really changed and more so as a result of how people were using them during COVID. A lot of that has stayed true, and that episode not only included the trends that we were talking about, but it also talked about the different ways that people have been using social media during and since Covid.

So keeping that in mind, here are four social media platforms and how you can use them to drive traffic to your website. The first is LinkedIn. Now, as you know, LinkedIn is pretty much used by professionals, but one idea is to share excerpts of your most recent blog post and link it from your post to your website. That's the same if you have any free downloads or checklists or templates, you can again post the link to your website.

The next one that I want to talk about is Facebook, and here we recommend that you keep your posts short and to the point, and invite engagement. Be sure to include a clear call to action along with the link to your website.

And here's a bonus tip. You can use videos, you can create memes, you can use photos that add value and can help people to want to share within the platform, but also keep in mind that it could drive traffic to your website as well. And the benefit of this is Facebook's algorithm measures the time that users stay on the post and the level of engagement. So, if your post is a little bit longer, or you break up your paragraph into individual sentences and have a bit of a space, it requires some scrolling, and that scrolling is a form of engagement in and of itself. So think about the variety of posts and the different ways that you can use content to get more visitors, not only to your website, but within your social media.

[00:23:35] Nola: Very good. Now, visual content is really important, especially if you have one of those kinds of businesses where, you know, photos or videos are so important. And visual content is ideal on Instagram. And one of the simplest ways to drive social media traffic from Instagram to your website, it's by adding link in your bio. You can also add a tap to shop button to the images of your products or other calls to action in your posts and stories. This will make it easier for people to go directly from that image to your website. And again, another visual one, Pinterest. It's one of the original search engines. If this is your preferred social network, one of the best ways to get website traffic flowing from there is by pinning your products and blog content multiple times a week.

Now, what do we mean by blog content? If sharing a blog post, you can actually just pin all of the images within that post and people can click on those and be driven to your blog post where they can read that. But it's all going to your website.

[00:24:40] Lori: In episode #122 when we were giving the social media trends, the things that we were talking about are slightly different than how we're talking about using them in this episode. And that's because in general you want to test things out. You want to see what works. What connects. And also, you just want to have variety. It's interesting for the reader, it's interesting for you to come up with different ways of engaging your potential customer.

[00:25:10] Nola: Absolutely. That's spot on. Well, listener, we hope these tips and examples help drive traffic to your business website. And keep in mind that while having a strategy for driving traffic is great, it does take time to see the effect of your efforts.

[00:25:28] Lori: We'll be sharing more tips, trends, and best practices to help you create a successful business. So be sure to come back. And remember, starting a business comes with its own set of challenges, so take time to determine if the risks as well as the rewards are right for you. Just don't let your analysis become your paralysis. And listener, be sure to stick around to the very end of this podcast for a fun little surprise!

[00:25:53] Nola: If you found the information we've shared helpful and want more tools, tips, and inspiration delivered to your inbox, sign up for News You Can Use, over on our website, stickybrandlab.com.

[00:26:07] Lori: Be sure to come back next Tuesday and every Tuesday for another informative, inspiring, and motivating episode. And remember, actions create results. So tap into your desire to create a business and brand you love by taking 1% action every day.

Small steps, big effects.


[OUT-TAKE]
Lori:  Our topic talked about not only the trends, but how to use them effectively in order to get more of, oh shit

[00:26:41] Nola: It was such a natural segue.
​
[00:26:43] Lori: I didn't mean to do that; I was so close to getting it off my tongue.