3 tips to help startups and small businesses grow website traffic

Hands up if you want more website traffic? Almost all startups and growing businesses have invested in a website and most of these are looking at ways to grow their traffic. Let’s face it, it’s easier said than done but hopefully we can give you a few tips to help you boost your online visitor numbers.

1. Keyword research.

Keyword research allows you to see what people are searching for on Google and other search engines, including the volume of searches and difficulty to rank for those search terms. This kind of visibility allows you to plan your website content around what people are searching for and prioritise what you want to rank for based on search volumes. That said, it’s not going to be easy to rank for the most popular keywords so try not to be too ambitious to start with and instead, try to focus on long tail keywords initially. These will be easier to rank for. Once you start to rank, you can aim for the shorter more popular, higher volume keywords later on. Let me give you an example in the context of Spaces. It would be easier to rank for a phrase like ‘benefits of a coworking office space’ as opposed to trying to rank for ‘office space’. Once you create enough relevant content around a topic and link it together, you have a much greater chance of ranking for the more popular keywords but along the way, you have started to build traffic from your long tail keywords.

There are a number of tools to help you carry out keyword research including MOZ, Semrush and Google Keyword Planner (which is free).

2. Create quality content

By creating content such as blogs, case studies, research, white papers etc., you will be developing content that your audience is interested in reading and in parallel, positioning yourself as a thought leader. If your content is relevant and based around your long tail keywords, it should start to rank and hopefully drive impressions and traffic from Google and other search engines. As you create more relevant content, your authority should increase and hopefully, other sites may start to link to your content which will increase your authority even further.

It’s not just about creating new content though, once you have carried out your keyword research, you can go back and optimise your website (if you haven’t done so already) around those keywords. Another quick win is to repurpose any other content you might have such as printed brochures, pdf-format case studies etc. These could be easily made into web pages and optimised around your new target keywords and phrases.

3. Promote your content

As a startup or small business, you may not have the budget to spend on a big online advertising campaign. If you have created some great content however, you can try to get more bang for your buck by running some paid social campaigns to help amplify and boost your content. Networks like Pinterest and Instagram could work well for visual content and Facebook and Twitter could work well for content that people may want to share. Remember though, great quality content will have a better chance of being shared, so it’s worth the investment. LinkedIn is good for business contacts and if you want to turn traffic into leads, here is a great article about B2B lead generation.

As with most things in life, developing good website traffic will take time, effort and probably some kind of investment. Results won’t be instant and it will be a bit of a journey, but for those who are willing to give it some focus, the results can be very rewarding. As you can imagine, there are many techniques and strategies to help grow a website so we have focused on just a few that we think most startups and small businesses could either handle themselves or with the helping hand of a web design and digital marketing agency.

This article is a guest publication written by Alex Weller at Above Digital, Member at Spaces in Reading and London. Want to get in touch about your website? Contact Alex right here, or give him a call at +44 (0) 7776 250075