Who doesn’t need more website visitors? I believe that Google, even with their 3.5 billion searches per day, wants more web traffic. So why the rhetorical question? Well, not having enough traffic can be painful.
Attract people who are most likely to become leads. Attract your ideal customers by sending the right content to the right people at the right time. By understanding the pain points of your ideal customers you can create content that they are looking for; content that helps them work through their problems and addresses their pain points.
You have a great product or service and you just need to get it out there more. Right? Right. If more people knew about your product more people would buy it.
So how do we attract more visitors to our site? In the Inbound methodology, the attract phase is all about getting strangers to visit your website.
If they’re strangers; we need a plan that will not only attract more people to our site, but the right kind of people. If we’re being honest, everyone is not our potential customer. Once we’ve come to grips with this, we can begin to focus our efforts on the people who actually are our potential buyers.
How do we attract strangers? We attract these folks by providing content that they would want to read to help them through their decision to buy. Not salesy stuff; just helpful, relevant stuff.
What kind of content? Well web-based searchable content. Content that can be shared through social media and lives on your website.
A few examples would be:
Using a bit of SEO and Social publishing, we can get this content out to the world. Promoting your content across social platforms and making sure that it has the right keywords can help strangers find it on their favorite social platform or through search engines.
Doing these things consistently is an example of how we use Inbound Marketing to attract more visitors to your website.
So how do these things fit into Inbound marketing? Why do they matter? Let’s take a closer look at blogging, video content, audio content and podcast, social posts/publishing and a few other things that are at the onset of inbound marketing.
You will get a clear picture of why they matter and how they fit into the Inbound Methodology.
People search the web for helpful content, so the single best way to attract people to your site is by adding more content that speaks to their needs. The best way to organize and provide this content is through a blog. Writing educational content that answers the questions of your ideal customers is where Inbound Marketing begins. If you want to attract more of your ideal customers; start blogging.
Let’s face it, people love to watch videos. Another great way to attract more visitors is by creating engaging videos that answer questions and solve the problems of your ideal customers. You can post your videos as stand alone content or use them to enhance your blog articles. Keep in mind that Youtube is the second largest search engine – bigger than Bing, Yahoo, Ask & AOL combined. You want content in the places people are looking for it.
Audio content for some is a step down from video, but for others a step up. Much like video; audio can stand alone or be used to enhance your blog posts. If you can provide helpful audio content, your audience will listen on their mobile devices, in their cars and while they’re working. Audio content is great for helping people while not being visually distracting.
Once you’ve created all this wonderful content you can’t keep it bottled up and wait for it to rise up the search results on it’s own. You need to be proactive. Share it on social media. This allows your ideal audience a chance to connect a human face to your brand and interact on the social channels they enjoy most. If your content is really good, they’ll “like” and share it with their network as well.
A study from Forrester found that over 90% of all internet traffic comes from a search engine. What does this mean? Most people start their buying process online by using a search engine to find answers to their questions, or solutions to their problem. So you need to carefully, through research and analytics, choose the right keywords, optimize your pages, create content and build links around the terms your ideal customers are using when they search for answers. This will help you show up when they start their search for something you have answers to.
It would be negligent of us to talk about bringing all of this traffic site and not discuss how to make a good first impression so more of your new visitors stay and are willing to come back.
We’re not going to go too deep into this topic (because we have another blog that is completely dedicated to converting visitors to leads), but we do want to emphasize the importance of making a good first impression.
There’s another type of optimization outside of SEO. Website optimization or conversion optimization. This is making sure that your site is easy for users to navigate, and the right information is easy to find.
The goal is to make the site appealing to your ideal customers. Your website is your digital storefront; make it a resource that your ideal customers want to come back to.
In summaryWe attract our ideal customers by creating and promoting good quality content to the right people, at the right time in the right place. This is how we (at E-W) help our clients turn strangers into visitors. This is the beginning of the Inbound Marketing process.
If you follow this framework, you will attract visitors and get more web traffic.
Next stepsThere are a few things that you can do from here. Look for your options under the statement that fits you the best.
I’m new to Inbound Marketing and need to learn more about the methodology and the process.
I’m familiar with inbound marketing, but may need some help from an agency.
I love inbound, but I’m looking for information on how to do it myself.
I’m not sure any of these options fit me.