One common question business owners have is “how to get website traffic?” After all, without visitors to your site, your URL just takes up room on your business card.
It’s not really living up to its full potential for you.
Wouldn’t You Rather Attract More Clients with Your Website?
Ideally, your prospects visit your website, gather the information they need and fill out your contact form or pick up the phone to call you, right?
Yet, before that has a chance of happening, they have to know you exist.
Set Their GPS
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could “set” the GPS of your future client? Guide them right to your site?
In a way you can.
You can guide your prospects to your website.
Have you ever been driving somewhere and you get lost? It’s really frustrating not to know where you are and feel the time slipping away from you isn’t it? Sometimes it’s a lack of clear signage on the highway that causes you to miss your exit.
This is not unlike prospects missing your website because of lack of clear signage along the information highway.
On the Internet, those signposts are called keywords or keyword terms. Used correctly these terms can answer the question “how to get traffic to your website.”
Keywords are like signposts leading visitors to their desired destination – i.e. your website.
Keywords Are the Foundation of How to Get Traffic to Your Website
Use the words your prospects are using.
By using the same language, you’re helping Mr. or Ms. Prospect to find you because Google (and other search engines) serve up what your prospect types into the search box. These are your “keywords”.
Without good keywords, your website will be lost on page 938 (or deeper) on the search engine results pages.
Maybe you think you’ve used “good” ones on your website. The problem I find is, most business owners don’t realize there’s system to find and analyze the terms you come up with.
Instead, people just use the terms they think their target audience uses and call it done. The problem is, you go that route, you’ll never know some of the most profitable terms.
The keyword research is one of the first steps I take with clients because without it, SEO copywriting is impossible.
There are two steps to Keyword Research:
- Keyword Discovery The process of determining what your most profitable keywords are by learning what terms your prospects are searching. Using the same language as your prospects is essential.
- Part art and part science, the science part is achieved through a software program. The art is in determining relevancy, supply and demand.
- Keyword Distillation
There are “seed words” which can be good terms for the initial discovery process and maybe to use in optimizing your top tier pages.
Although if they’re too broad, for example, “dogs” for a dog trainer, they won’t help you.
The key here is “profitable keywords”.
Many small businesses can narrow their terms geographically too. For example, if you’re a landscaper in Bucks County, you don’t need to reach people in Canada to sell your local landscaping services. In such a case, “landscaper in Bucks County” could be a great term for you.
Without the research and analysis, you won’t know which terms your prospects are using.
Next, these terms should be strategically used in your page titles and descriptions and throughout your copy. Keywords tell search engines and visitors what your pages are about. Without them, getting traffic so you can build your list, make sales and everything else you want your site to do is going to be impossible.
If you’d like to learn more about how to use keywords to improve your traffic please download my free guide 5 Keys to Website Success.
