Building a website is relatively easy these days. Often, you can single-handedly create your own within a day using preconstructed templates.

You could hire a professional instead to customize your website with the latest and greatest. It’s a lot more expensive and time-consuming, but sometimes, you need knowledgeable expertise.

Once your site is live, everyone wonders how to get more web traffic–no matter who you are as a brand or business owner, what you’re selling online, or how you created your website.

Without web traffic, you’re like a kid who set up a lemonade stand in your yard…and that yard happens to be miles away from the closest neighbor. In today’s fast-paced digital world, it could also compare to setting up a lemonade stand next to a thousand others in the heart of New York City.

​You have to put effort into standing out from the crowd. So, how can you drive more traffic to your website? Let’s look at our four favorite needle-movers.

The last thing you want to do is spend valuable time and resources targeting a customer segment that isn’t right for you. In other words, make sure that ‘lemonade stand’ is something customers want–you’ll have a hard time selling the ice-cold stuff to an Eskimo in the winter, for example.

​Take time to pinpoint your target audience. Then, discover where they hang out online. Identify about 10 places in each of the following categories where you might try to attract their attention:

SEO stands for ‘search engine optimization.’ It encompasses everything that affects where your website ranks
when a customer searches for keywords that relate to your business–it’s a laundry list of to-dos.

​At the very least, you want to get the basics down. SEO is never said and done. You must continue working on it and revising your website to give the search engines what they crave if you want to continue ranking well–things like:

You can’t rank for what Google can’t read. Insert typical words your target audience is already searching for in your content (ex., ‘Best lemonade near me’).

These keywords (also called long-tail keywords) are more specific and have low competition.

The longer a visitor stays and reads/looks, the more credible your site appears to search engine algorithms and the higher you’ll rank.

Ensure you are creating content your target audience is interested in.

Link your content to other content on your page (a.k.a internal linking) to encourage visitors to stay and browse.

Try to publish content that will be relevant to your audience years from now.

​With meaningful and evergreen content, refreshing it with a recent post date will help those algorithm bots take notice of you–again.

The easier your URLs are to understand (ex., ‘mywebsite.com/best-lemonade-around’), the higher you’ll rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Set your H1 (headings) title tags and meta information correctly so search engine algorithms can easily read and distinguish your content.

Broken links hurt your rankings. Ensure all your URLs correctly link to what they need to.

Most of your customers will interact with your site via their mobile devices. The more responsive and fast-loading yours is, the better. Plus, making your site mobile-friendly prevents it from getting penalized by search engines.

​SEO includes so much more, and so much more affects your SEO. For now, we’ll leave you with these basics to nail down. An SEO company can help you with more creative marketing strategies to help your online presence and visibility if you need it.

Your target audience gets together somewhere online, be it Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, all of the above, or more. You want to be there, too, building relationships and advertising your answer to their problems.

Help your audience find you by promoting your content on their most-used social media channels. Create a Google Business Profile and appear in local search results. Post there often. Add relevant hashtags to boost your posts’ reach and visibility. Also, add share buttons so readers who like what you post can advertise for you by sharing it with their followers.

Know when to post. Do more research on your target audience to find out what time of day they typically use their favorite platforms–on their lunch hour, just before bedtime, first thing in the morning, etc. Post your message at their favorite time so more people see it.

Wondering what to post? You want to stay unique, but you can get ideas by watching what your competition does.

​In addition to posting on social media to promote yourself, you can also pay for advertising banners.

Start building (and keep growing) your email list. The more people you have on it, the more traffic and sales you can drive to your site.

Unlike social media platforms that can block you, delete you, or do whatever they want with your followers and information, your email list is all yours to use when and how you want. So, create lead magnets and capture email addresses whenever you can.

​Send the emails. You aren’t a robocall interrupting your potential customer’s family dinner. You are a viable business, and your email list subscriber elected to hear from you, so send them regular emails to stay at the top of their mind. Send email newsletters that reveal your brand’s background and identity. Send promotional material, sneak peeks, or anything that builds excitement or a relationship.

There are many more ways to boost traffic to your website, but these are our top favorites. When you target the right people, you can find the right communities of people to advertise to and to help you amplify your messaging. Establishing the SEO basics will give you a fighting chance in cyberspace. Advertising on social media and regularly emailing your subscribers improves your visibility.