Since January 2009, Atkins Marketing Solutions’ annual website traffic has grown over one thousand percent. For 2011 thus far, my site’s had 31,000 visits and over 68,000 page views. A record? No. But for a small business, not bad. It’s been a journey of both quality and not just quantity. For 2015, my traffic is growing even more but it’s also traffic that is specific, relevant, and focused on small business marketing consulting.
How can you do this? Do you need a magic formula? Must you hire one of those “get to the top of Google’s page rank” SEO companies? Do you have to pay each visitor one dollar per visit? No. It takes a step-by-step, gradual, patient, and learn-as-you-go process.
Here’s how you can do it:
- Research and use both keywords and phrases that apply to your site’s focus, themes, and content.
- Include page content that matches these keywords and phrases.
- List your website URL on as many free external sites as possible. Not link farming but legitimate link building.
- Include links on each of your e-mail marketing newsletters that draw readers back to your website.
- Consistently update and revise site content.
- Include links back to your site from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn posts. Also make sure your site’s URL is included in all your social media profiles.
- Contribute to other blogs related to your expertise or business.
- Include a blog on your site. The most significant change I made was in April of 2010. I integrated a WordPress blog to my site. My entire website is now converted to WordPress and I love the interface and ease of use. One month after adding a blog, page views increased by almost five-hundred percent.
- Write at least one blog post per week that directly relates to your business. Keep writing. Keep posting. Provide free, relevant, and value-oriented content. Think benefits, not promotion.
- Add a “Share-This” plugin to your blog and e-mail newsletters so visitors can easily share content they like.
- Add a cache plugin to your blog. This will increase your page load speed, something Google now monitors.
- Add an SEO plugin to your blog. This will enhance and automate your post content to make it search friendly.
- Include relevant YouTube videos in your blog posts.
- Monitor your daily traffic and detailed page activity with a metrics tool such as AWStats and/or Google Analytics. Ignore hits. Track page views since they show engaged reading rather than meaningless hit clicks. Average time per visit also shows engagement trends.
- Stay patient.
- Keep writing creative, fun, and practical content.
Much of good SEO and increased website traffic takes time and effort. You don’t need a high Google page rank to see increases in traffic. It’s the trend not the rank that matters most. Growth trends now; rank increases later.
Your comments are welcome…
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