How Do I Get My Website to Attract and Engage Visitors?
It’s pretty annoying when you’ve poured your blood, sweat, and tears into your website only to get a handful of visitors each month.
As a web designer, it’s a problem I’ve grappled with for a long time, not only for my clients but also for myself.
I feel a responsibility to my clients to provide some guidance and direction for attracting website visitors and increasing website traffic.
To help my clients, I often referred them to social media strategists which just resulted in my clients spending even more money on strategies that weren’t cohesive and didn’t get the desired results.
And if I’m being honest, it happened to me too.
So, what’s the answer?
I present a 3-part solution to attracting and engaging website visitors that works for me and is much better than the year I spent wasting precious time, energy, and FOMO focusing on Instagram:
Create a website built to grow your business
Put AT LEAST one really good lead generator on it
Blog consistently
First, you need to come to grips with this: The website is more important than your social media accounts. Your website is the hub, everything else branches off of the website, not the other way around. You own the website, you don’t own your social media accounts.
Build a Website to Grow Your Business
What Does This Even MEAN?
Let me break it down for you.
The first thing you need to determine is your brand “message.” Not your colors, not your fonts, not your logo. Your MESSAGE. Because that’s all your customers care about.
People don’t make buying decisions based on how pretty your website is. They make them based on how your brand message makes them FEEL.
There are lots of other businesses that can solve their external problem—the thing they typed into Google—but they will decide to do business with you if you can tell them how the lack of this external need is making them FEEL and prove that you can solve it.
They want to know that you understand their pain point and that you have the empathy and authority to solve their problem.
This is why the content on your website is so vitally important for attracting and engaging your audience. You must be able to convey your brand message in WORDS and present them in the right sequence on your website.
Wireframe Your Homepage
I’ve created a Guide to Writing Effective Website Copy you can use to help you create this valuable content. It breaks your homepage down into sections and asks the right questions to craft a message that will engage visitors.
My guide takes into account the fact that people interact with websites in a very predictable way and helps you lay out the sections so that they will attract and engage website visitors.
Whether you’re a web designer, a DIYer, or even a copywriter, this guide is an excellent resource.
I know you want a beautiful website, and you can have one, but sacrificing the message for the aesthetic is a mistake.
Get your brand message nailed down FIRST. It will help inspire you or your graphic designer when building a professional visual identity.
Your Website Needs to Look Professional
Yeah, yeah, I know what I just said, but there is a difference between obsessing over the aesthetic of your website and ensuring it looks professional.
A professional-looking website is laid out in an orderly fashion, is uncluttered, easy to navigate, and uses good-quality photos, not fuzzy, amateur-looking ones.
There are plenty of places you can get stock photos for free for your website if necessary, such as unsplash.com (built right into Squarespace), pexels.com, or pixabay.com.
If you’re going to use stock photos, it’s a good idea to mix in some good-quality photos you took yourself or had a photographer take for you.
Put a Lead Generator or Lead Magnet on Your Website
This is imperative for growing your business, because this is your list of customers, and you own it, not Mark Zuckerberg.
That’s right, you do not own your social media accounts, so if you have a huge following, good for you! But your account can be taken down any time and there’s nothing you’ll be able to do about it.
If this happens, you lose your entire list.
Create an awesome lead magnet (or several) and promote it! In fact, you should promote your lead magnet MORE than you are promoting your products or services because you are MUCH more likely to get engagement with your brand this way.
Once you’ve captured an email, you can nurture the relationship by staying in touch and continuing to offer free, valuable content to your subscribers.
You now have an opportunity to continue to show your subscribers how much knowledge you have, how trustworthy you are, and how much value you can offer.
You are essentially building a relationship with your list that will (hopefully) lead to sales.
It can be a bit overwhelming trying to figure out what your lead generator should be, so I’ve created a list for this too, The Ultimate List of Lead Generators.
It’s a great idea to have more than one lead generator because it provides more opportunities for people to subscribe.
You can try out different lead generators and compare results to see what is working. If you have one that’s not working very well, you can replace it.
Blog Consistently to Increase Website Traffic
This is the real gold in this equation!
The benefits of blogging are practically endless. From building trust to boosting SEO, blogging covers all the bases.
SEO Benefits
When it comes to your website, don’t make the mistake of “set it and forget it.” This is a big problem for Google because Google likes active websites and does not like static websites.
Blogging is the best way to keep your website active because you are continually adding more valuable content on a regular basis. The better the value, the more Google will like it, because Google is all about the user experience.
Blogging provides the opportunity to add long-form content to your website. Long-form content is exactly what it sounds like–quantity, ideally between 1000-2000 words per post.
I often preach about limiting the number of words you put on your website (like your homepage, about page, and any other internal pages), and for good reason.
When someone goes to your website to learn about your business, products, or services, they don’t want to read a novel, they don’t care what your hobbies are, and they’re probably in a hurry. All they will do is skim to determine if you can help them solve their problem.
But with limited copy comes limited opportunity to provide enough searchable content for your website to show up in searches.
Enter the blog!
This is the place where it’s not only okay to put a lot of copy, but it’s encouraged! There’s a ton of opportunity to use keywords that improve your Google ranking making it more likely you will show up in search results for the keywords you want to be ranked for.
The purpose of the blog is completely different from any other page on your website. It is a place where you can dive deep into specific topics and problems that you solve for your audience.
Visitors often find you through your blog. They search for a specific topic, one that YOU have written about, and your blog post pops up in Google results (hopefully). They click on it and BAM–they land on your website!
To really get a blog to work for you, it’s super important that you blog consistently, and I’m not gonna lie, it needs to be at least once a week.
I know…you’re busy. But this really works, and if you have to cut back on something else, like, let’s say, making reels for Instagram that literally never result in website traffic or lead generation, then I would suggest you do this instead. Your time is much better-spent blogging.
Blogging for Lead Generation
If you are blogging, then you MUST incorporate your lead generator(s) into your blog posts, and I mean, every…single…one.
Let’s go back to the aforementioned scenario.
Someone does a Google search for a specific topic, one that YOU have written about, and your blog post pops up in Google results (hopefully). They click on it and BAM–they land on your website!
Now you have a captive audience! Offer even MORE free value with your awesome lead generator and capture their email, nurture the relationship, continue to offer more great value, and build trust.
Blogging to Build Trust With Your Audience
This one’s a no-brainer. In your blog, you are highlighting yourself as the expert at what you do and providing tons of free advice and resources (like lead generators) that help your audience. What’s more trustworthy than that?
If you’ve captured their email, then that provides even more opportunity to continue to build trust as you nurture the relationship and keep your audience engaged from week to week by sending emails with exclusive content, free downloads, special discounts, etc.
Putting It All Together
If your aim is to increase website traffic and engage your visitors, then you must have all 3 elements optimized and working together.
If you have a great website and great blog, but no lead generator, you’re missing a key piece of the puzzle and squandering an opportunity. Your visitors will eventually leave your site and they probably won’t come back because they’ll forget about you–no offense.
If your website is optimized to grow your business and you have a great lead generator but no blog, it will be difficult for people to find you online, and you won’t get the traffic you really want which means you won’t get many subscribers downloading your freebie. Eventually they’ll leave your website and they probably won’t come back because they’ll forget about you.
The blog is the thing bringing the traffic to your website. The lead generator is the thing that collects emails so you can remind people you exist and build a relationship with them, and the website is the thing that houses these key elements as well as selling your products or services so it needs to be done right, because eventually you want people to do business with you.
Below is a flow chart that visually demonstrates this 3-part solution, and if you’re visual like I am, you should print this sucker out (mostly because it took me forever to make it) and display it on your wall next to where you create your magical website and copy and lead generators as a reminder!
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Have you been struggling to attract website traffic? Do you feel like you’re not getting click-throughs from social media? Do you have a blog already? Share your thoughts in the comments 👇
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