Getting Visitors to Your Website: Part 1

So you’ve got your website online. Maybe it’s something you’ve built yourself, or maybe it is something that you have hired an agency to build for you. Either way, looking at the server logs (which is a must have feature for any online presence), you find that not many people are visiting your site. In fact, most of the visits are coming from you, colleagues and friends!

One common incorrect assumption is that you simply need to build a website and then people will flock to it in droves. After all, you’ve put time and effort into your site; they should be grateful, right? Wrong. A website is a passive medium. Unless you already have an established source of traffic, getting those first few visitors can seem a frustrating task. That’s where online marketing – in all its various forms – comes in. The purpose of online marketing is to drive traffic (visitors). Of course if you have a non-online presence (e.g. bricks and mortar presence) that will help if you can promote your website through offline media (print, radio and so on), however how can you drive visitors online?

The first - and one of the most crucial – steps is to ensure your web site is indexed in all of the major search engines, particularly Google, Yahoo and Live/MSN. If your site is new, it probably won’t get much natural traffic from search engines initially, but the key here is patience. Which brings us to our second step…

Content: keep it fresh, keep it up-to-date

The only good visitor to your website is someone who is actively interested in the information you are providing. Very rarely will someone stumble-upon your website and browse around if they’re not actively seeking what you’re promoting. Your website content should always be a careful balance between a marketing tool and an informational tool. If you’re too heavy on the marketing angle (Buy now! Last chance! Don’t miss out!) you run the risk of scaring your visitors away. If you place too much emphasis on the information side, you risk losing some of the potential to convert your visitors into customers. Strike a balance, providing concise, useful information with a clear – but strong – marketing message. A user who finds the content on your site informing will have a much more likely chance of following a “call to action”.

Keep your website content timely and up-to-date. If you’re introducing new products of services, make sure you website continually adds content to promote them. There are millions of “ghost” websites online, sites which have long since been abandoned or not-maintained. Don’t let your site become one of them. Getting visitors to your web site is one thing, but if a visitor stumbles upon your site and it appears to have been last updated in the late 1990s, it’s not going to give a good first impression and they’ll no doubt simply leave straight away.

First impressions count, when a visitor first comes to your site, you have around 10-20 seconds to “catch” them. If you can’t get them hooked in that first instant, it’s usually a downward struggle from then on. This area delves into the complex and sometimes confusing science of usability and marketability, something which I’ll cover in part two.