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How to get more traffic
Published: September 29, 2006
How to get more traffic to your website has to be the number one question I get asked, almost on a daily basis. This article was partly inspired by an hour long presentation I gave at the Innovation Centre last night for the eBiz Club we run. I was talking about Google and the vast array of services available when, by default, we veered on to the subject of promotion.
Content is king!
We've all heard it but why is it so?
The biggest mistake websites make is to focus on the service or product, but not the information that leads to the action of enquiring about the service or product.
Take a hotel. What's the steps that lead up to the point of booking?
Try to identify why people need the service of a hotel. Is it a business trip or a holiday. Once we identify the attraction to the area we can write about it. Very few hotel websites offer information that surrounds a service. If I want a hotel that has wireless internet access, no smoking, has a restaurant and bar, is near a swimming pool and is a bus ride away from the business centre I'm attending, then I'm likely to add some of these phrases to the search engines to see what comes back at me.
Take a look at your website and ask yourself am I providing the right information that is peripheral to my products or service? Think about the following:
- If you sell wine, what about writing online recipes with which you can recommend certain types of wine alongside them.
- Interior furnishings? Perhaps you could write about interior design.
- Hotel? Local attractions, whether business or pleasure, are the reason people are visiting, so write about them.
- What can you come up with?
Adding bus routes, train stations, local points of interest, events, restaurants and services to a website which provides accommodation as a service is hugely important.
Think about when you buy a refridgerator. We don't just buy a fridge, we need information which forms the educated purchasing decision such as energy consumption, dimensions, price etc. The same applies to almost all industries. What can you do to provide the right information to your visitors which will assist the purchase?
Information attracts links too, which in turn increases the rank of your website. I won't link to a product for sale directly unless there's something in it for me but I will link to information about the product that may have solutions to the problems you face as a business.
All too often people spend vast amounts of time sourcing links and although being proactive is a good thing, the best way to get a link is to have information on your site that is worth linking to. These are the kind of links that search engines are looking for and rewarding with the most rank. This in turn translates to visitors.
So, the question again...
How do you get more traffic?
Answer, write more useful content.