Are you suffering from LWTS? (low website traffic syndrome)

Are you being ignored on the interwebs?

Have you looked at enough cat memes today and figured you better actually do some work?

If you answered yes to one or more of the above questions then you have come to the right place.

Go grab a beer or make a brew, then prepare to have your mind blown with this epic blog post…

OK, welcome back. Let’s get started with how you can:

Get More Website Traffic

Now, before I jump straight into blowing your mind, let’s use an analogy to help you visualise how it all works.

Imagine your website as a metaphorical bridge: each component has to be equally strong in order for that bridge to carry traffic to your website.

With that in mind, you can now begin to find the holes in your bridge, which are allowing your customers to fall to their gruesome demise, or non-metaphorically, what’s causing prospects to leave your website and go to your competitors.

Website Hosting

Your website hosting is where all your website data is stored and is the integral part of your system that actually delivers your website to your customers’ screens.

Website loading time is incredibly important to User Experience, which is what Google judges your entire website on.

If your hosting provider is not in the same country as you, is frequently down, or you’re using a slow provider just to save a couple of quid over the year, then it’s fair to say Google won’t show you much love.

There are plenty of UK providers out there that are fast and cost effective, however when compared to us, they all seem like asthmatic snails, so save yourselves the hassle 😉 More about our epic awesome mega super fast website hosting here.

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Website Load Speed

Aside from good, local hosting (from us obviously), you need to ensure your website is optimised.

All the images, CSS, HTML, Java and content etc. can all be compressed down without any noticeable loss of content or quality.

A well optimised site has all of this and if you’re using a content managed system like Wordpress, there are plugins such as W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache or WP Rocket that can take all the “heavy lifting” out of this for you.

Google has its own Page Speed Insights tool which tells you exactly where you need to improve, but please bear in mind this can be a little pedantic and some of the advice can actually result in slowing your site down.

My personal favourite is Real Site Speed Tool. It tells you what is worth doing and what isn’t worth doing, further to this it tells you what files you need to change and even auto generates the files that need changing.

All you have to do is upload them to your web server. Nifty stuff.

Website Design Quality

Take a long hard look at your website, obviously we’ve all got different tastes, but, hand on heart, do you look at your website and get a self contented glow and think to yourself….. “that is the proverbial dog bits!”

Or do you think your website would hate itself and perhaps even jump off the metaphorical bridge to kill itself if it could?

You need to ensure that your website carries the image and reputation that you want your customers to perceive. We’ve all been on those websites that are poorly designed and immediately turn us off.

This is purely common sense, if your website is lacking in quality then you’re better off not having a website at all as it’ll probably do more harm than good to your business.

If you need a quality website designing and building, there is absolutely no shortage of skilled people.

We offer website design ourselves and as you can see from our own website, it’s well built, however, if you’re looking for a specialist web company, I am happy to recommend a good friend of mine, Chris and his team over at Expert Web.

Content Is King

Right, now you’re happy with your load speed and design, feel free to give yourself a crisp high five, or feel free to give me one down in the comments!

However, if your content is not relevant, has lots of grammatical and spelling errors, or appears to have been typed up by a blindfolded monkey, then it’s safe to say your visitors won’t engage, your bounce rate will be terrible and Google will look at your site with digital disgust.

The other thing you must not do is focus entirely on keywords, if you over stuff your site with unnatural content then it won’t read right and will deliver the same result as above.

The most sound advice I can give you is to write the best, most relevant content you possibly can.

If you do that, it should naturally contain the right keywords and also provide your visitors with some great reading material, which will all help to boost your traffic.

If you cannot write content (as it is an art form in itself), I would like to recommend a good friend of mine, Steph, over at stephlouis.com.

She really knows her stuff and is very easy to work with. She also has some great blog articles if you want some expert tips and tricks for writing your own content.

Google Webmaster Tools

Once you’ve got an epic website built, the first thing you need to do is invite Google over for a look around (not literally).

Google and other search engines can and will find your website without your help, however, if you want to speed up the process, then register for Googles Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap.

This is the best way to tell Google about your website and all the great content within.

Google will also report any issues in here that it finds with your website, and advise you of how to fix it.

Drive Some Traffic

You’ve got a good reliable host (that’d be us!), your website is beautiful, your content is perfect, but you’re still not getting traffic?

Well, what exactly are you doing to get people to your website?

Let’s just forget about Google for a minute, if you’re doing everything else right, your rankings will climb naturally.

Have you registered your business in all the free online directories, such as Yell and Google?

There are absolutely loads and a quick search can bring you great resources like this.

I suggest you put some time aside and register with as many free listings as you can, as this will generate organic back links to your site if nothing else – which is a good thing.

Social Media

This is without a doubt one of the best things you can do to promote your website or blog. The most common mistake is simply not posting often enough, or just a lack of consistency (more on that later).

If you have social media, to get the most benefit and drive traffic to your money site, you must post awesome content regularly.

There are great free tools such as Hootsuite that take the pain out of posting all the time. Just sit down on a Sunday evening and schedule a weeks’ worth of content to go out. Simple as.

Just to clarify I’m not saying don’t have social media accounts if you’re not going to post, they’re still a great way for people to find you, so it’s always worth having them.

If you don’t have the time or energy to manage your social media accounts then you could consider using an outsourced company such as AT Social Media.

I know Adam quite well and he offers a very comprehensive service and can expose your business to an incredible amount of local and national prospects.

Make It Easy To Share

When you do get some visitors, they might see your content, they might like it, but how easy is it for them to share?

If you just look at this blog, there’s a share button to your left (floating at the bottom on mobile), there’s one at the bottom and there are share buttons on the main blog list.

You need to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to share your content.

If it’s not ridiculously easy, then people just won’t do it.

I personally use the WordPress Shareaholic plugin.

Email Marketing

This is another great way to drive traffic to your website, “but I don’t have an email list” I hear you cry. Well there are plenty of places you can get them.

You can actually export your LinkedIn contacts to help get you started, but officially speaking, you shouldn’t do this, as they haven’t agreed to it.

The correct way is to naturally grow your own “opt-in” email list.

To do this you must ensure you have a sign up button on your website and preferably give them an incentive to sign up i.e. “Sign Up To My Newsletter & Receive My FREE PDF On How To <Your Special Subject>”

Once you have a contact list, you can start sending out your emails. MailChimp offer a free email service which includes 12,000 emails a month for up to 2,000 subscribers.

Engage With Your Audience

This mainly applies to blogs, but engaging with your customers anywhere and everywhere will create a much stronger relationship.

Invite people to ask questions, leave feedback and provide other suggestions.

If someone comments, then getting involved can open so many doors without even thinking about website traffic.

With stronger relationships comes a regular client base that will share your content and help market your website. They are the life force of your website, so spend some time answering questions and engaging with your followers.

Consistency

Rome wasn’t built in a day and traffic to your website won’t be either. You need to work hard. Damn hard in fact.

Post regular content and make sure you’re writing what people want to read.

Promote it relentlessly. Mix it up but never stop posting it to social media accounts, you never know who hasn’t read it.

Explore new and unique ways to get your articles seen, such as forums and even guest posting on other blogs.

Most importantly, DO NOT GIVE UP. If you know you’re doing everything right and you’re delivering something you’re proud to stand behind, then you need to have faith and keep pushing. It will come.

If you have any questions, feedback, ideas for any new posts or liked this post, please let me know in the comments below 🙂