Ten years ago agencies urged clients “you must have a website”. Then five years later the message was “it’s no use just having a website if no-one is looking at it – optimise, optimise, optimise” The most important thing became optimising your website so the search engines could work out what it was about and rank it highly for relevant and popular search phrases. And rank it highly they would! I have worked on many a campaign where the site gained top 5 positions for massively popular phrases in very competitive industries. What halcyon days they were!

Optimise your site for search – but make it social too
In the current world of web, SEO is still very important. Ensuring your site is accessible by the most important search engine crawlers; creating the right amount of clearly tagged content to inform and attract; and encouraging related external links are all still essential parts of creating a successful online presence. But with so many gazillions of websites competing for a place in the first few SERPs (search engine results pages), something had to give. What happened was people started exploring the web through recommendations from people they know instead of just relying on Google to find great websites. Thus, other ways of getting traffic to your site have come to the fore. So what is this other avenue of natural traffic? It’s social media of course.

Create content that attracts natural search traffic - and then encourage sharing via social media
Just as in SEO, we recommend creating content that attracts people to your site. Whether this is a blog, WIKI, videos, or white papers – implement a sharing facility so people CAN distribute your article, video etc if they think it’s something that will be of interest to other people. This way you are extending the reach of your marketing and getting more bangs for your buck. Even if you don’t add a Share button or similar (they are free, just search for Share button), people can discover your site and promote it using social media by tagging your site of their own accord – however, if you provide the facility you are enabling them to share with even greater ease.

Put your content out there where your customers are
It’s fantastic to create content and then encourage sharing. But what about doing more to encourage engagement via social media? How about going where your customers spend time rather than waiting for them to come to you? Create channels on appropriate social media sites where you think your customers might spend time. Facebook generally is more consumer focused, whilst LinkedIn is great for business audiences. You’d be surprised at how many professionals are on Twitter too so consider using that for conversations with potential and existing customers.

Engage people first and then you can concentrate on converting them…
So what is our overriding message to clients now, ten years after the web exploded? It would be something like this: “Create communication materials that attract people to your site and that you can place elsewhere to engage people and drive enquiries to your site. Then when they arrive at your site make sure they can find what they want easily so you can convert them into customers”. It’s not as short and snappy a message as ten years ago but then, it’s not as easy as it once was to get people to your site and make them want to become a customer as it was back then. That’s why you need the right people to help you achieve your online business objectives! Feel free to talk to me on Twitter, email or phone about using social media to grow web traffic.