How to Get Your Website Noticed & Drive More Traffic: 25 Ways

Whether you are a freelancer or a business, you need a website to present your offers and establish your brand.

The higher goal, of course, is to drive more revenues, opportunities, and even more connections through it.

Essentially, growing your business. And that will only happen if you get people to visit your site and know more about you.

Here’s how to get your website noticed and increase the number of visitors, in 25 ways.

Create Your Website

1. Get your custom domain and paid host.

If you want to establish any credibility as a professional, business or otherwise, you need to get your own domain name. It is at the top of your business website checklist.

Of course, you can set up a business page on WordPress.com for free, but then you will have a ‘wordpress.com’ at the end of your domain name. For e.g., ‘abc.wordpress.com’. That doesn’t look very impressive.

And if you’ve not even made an effort to get a site that you own, then it’s even harder to convince someone to check you out.

Getting a domain is simple. And cheap. Just go to Namecheap and browse for the domain you want. Prices start at 99 cents!

Then you can just host it on a shared domain host like Siteground or Bluehost. Siteground has better performance, but Bluehost is cheaper.

Now just install a Content Management System, and you’re good to go!

2. Make your site responsive.

Mobile accounts for approximately 50% of online traffic. So unless your small business website looks good on mobile and loads easily, you could lose a lot of traffic. So make sure you have a website that loads easily on all devices.

If you’re using WordPress, themes like Elegant Themes, Elementor, & Divi have a lot of fabulous-looking responsive themes, for all kinds of portfolios and businesses.

Here’s an example of a responsive website.

3. Create the important pages.

Once you’ve set up your website, the first step is to create the most important pages like About, Contact, Products/ Services, etc., and put all your information there.

The more content your website has, the easier it is for search engines to find you, understand what your site is about, and show your site in results when people search for relevant queries.

4. Submit a sitemap.

Usually, Google is able to crawl and index any properly set up site and content. But if you have a new website or one with not too much content and activity, it might take some time for Google to get around to you after crawling billions of others.

So get a step ahead and submit a sitemap to Google. If you have a website that’s been around for some time, and you have published a new piece of content, submit your sitemap again. This essentially asks Google to crawl your site for updates.

5. Write valuable, shareable content.

Pages can provide information about what you have to offer, but your expertise is really established when you create great content that provides value to your readers.

This value could be in the form of answering questions, tips and tricks, educating them about your niche, etc. Build topical authority by creating multiple pieces of content addressing the topic, and linking them to each other.

When people read your content over a period of time on a specific topic. you become an expert on that topic in their minds. They are much more likely to visit your site repeatedly out of interest and contact you when they need help on the topic in question.

On top of that, if your content is really valuable for your target audience, they are more likely to share it, which in turn gets more visitors to your website.

6. Create content for varied channels.

Besides having content on your website, consider creating different kinds of content for other platforms.

For example, videos that you can host on Youtube or Vimeo, podcasts that you can add on, etc. And when you put up this content, write a description or add a link to your website, so people can visit it to know more and get even more content.

7. Build a brand.

If you want to be really memorable and have more people visit your site, then along with a website, you need to distinguish yourself from the competition. Create a strong positioning, and craft a brand story.

When you share your story along with your website, it is much more attractive to your target audience and you can get more hits on your site.

Optimize Your Site

8. Use relevant keywords.

This is the most elementary part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

To help search engines find your website easily and rank you higher, and thus to get organic traffic, find the keywords that are most relevant for your business, and add them to your site’s content.

While you can choose one primary keyword for one page, and make it your focus keyword, use semantic (related) keywords within the content of that page.

For example, if your primary keyword is ‘coffee’, semantic keywords could be ‘cappuccino’, ‘barista’, etc.

9. Match your content to search intent.

You can have different kinds of content on your site, like products/ services, company information, and also blogs. And your audience is also looking for different kinds of content at different stages of their customer journey.

Sometimes they are looking for information like how to solve a problem (informational), sometimes for reviews and price comparisons (commercial), sometimes to buy and discounted offers (transactional), and sometimes just the domain name of a brand (navigational).

So to get traffic to your website, it is important that you match the content of your page to the intent of your searcher. For example, for a product/ service page you can use words like ‘buy’, ‘offer’, and similar, whereas for blog posts you can use words like ‘how to’.

10. Optimize your site’s metadata (tags).

Metadata is essentially data that provides information about other data.

In the context of your website, the metadata for every page are the HTML elements that indicate to search engines what that specific page is all about.

The most important tags are:

• Title Tag
• Meta Description

These elements are not present ON the page, but are shown in the results pages of search engines when people search for a term or keyword.

It is important for the title tag and meta description to indicate accurately what the page is about, in a way that’s attractive to the target audience. That makes them actually pick this link out of the 10 they see in the search results, click on it, and visit the page.

11. Use an attractive web design.

To encourage your website visitors to come back to your site and also encourage others to visit your site, make sure your website design is attractive for your audience and matches your brand attributes.

Take care with the use of colors, fonts, and images. Make the aesthetics appealing and true to your brand personality.

12. Optimize your visual SEO.

Remember when your audience is trying to find answers to their questions, they are not restricting themselves to text.

They are also looking at images to understand the information better, and in case of how-tos or reviews, are also searching for videos.

In fact, image search constitutes 27% of all searches done on the 10 top US search engines.

So if you want to maximize your website visibility, then you need to add alt text to the images you use on your website.

Alt text is essentially the text you add to an image to help search engines understand what your image is about.

If you have videos, you should definitely put them up on Youtube as well, to help your audience find you easily. And add the relevant keywords to your video title and description as well. In fact, YouTube SEO is a whole different topic, so put some effort into it when you put up your videos.

13. Provide a great user experience.

When you can provide a smooth, easy user experience (UX) for your audience when they browse your site, they are more likely to:

• Spend more time on it
• Do repeat visits
• Share it with others
• Recommend it to others

So ensure that your site is easy to browse through and provides a good experience.

Here are some steps to take:

• Keep a clean user interface
• Minimize the site loading time
• Create a good site structure and flow

14. Brand your materials.

As a brand, you will be creating multiple print marketing materials like posters, brochures, flyers. Along with content giveaways like infographics or other images.

Ensure that all these have your brand elements, like the logo, your brand colors, your brand slogan if you have one, your brand font, etc. And in a way that’s not so easy to remove.

So that whenever any of these marketing materials are shared online, your website name is always included.

One easy way to design consistent brand and marketing materials quickly is to use a user-friendly graphic design tool like Canva. Check out my full review of Canva and how Canva compares to Adobe Illustrator.

15. Make your content easy to share.

If you put up solid, valuable content on your website, your audience would like to share it as well. That in turn would get you more website visitors.

So when you create content, for example, blog posts, just add social media buttons on one side of the post. Preferably also below and above the post.

One free tool to use for this is a WordPress plugin called Shareaholic. It lets your readers share your content on different social media, email, and even texting tools like WhatsApp.

You can also choose whether you want to add buttons to your pages or just your blog content.

16. Republish your content

If you have blog posts or other website content that are more than 6 months old, give them a revamp!

Search engines like fresh content, so just update them and share them again, to get your site noticed by more people than before, and get traffic.

Here are some ways to refresh your content:

• Optimize for more keywords
• Make it longer
• Add more images

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Promote Your Website

17. Share your site URL.

Once your site is up and running, share the URL everywhere that your business is mentioned. This could include but is not limited to business cards, invoices, letterheads, social media profiles, and even your email signature.

Here’s an example of a website URL as an email signature. In fact, this signature is a business card in itself.

18. Register with Google.

Unless you’re in a country where Google is not so operational, like China, you absolutely should register your business with Google.

Create a Google My Business profile, and include all your products/ services and contact information in it. Make your profile as detailed as possible. Include opening hours, and of course, your website. You can also include blog posts if you want.

It makes it much easier for your audience to find you, especially when they are looking for a business in a specific area.
Just go to the page and create a profile.

In the following image, on the left are some of the fields you can fill.

19. Get reviews.

Once you have your business profile on Google, reach out to past clients/ customers and request them for a review.

Your customers may review you anyway, but the more reviews you have, especially high-rated ones, the more trust it generates from your audience.

So if you are an accountant in Dallas for example, and someone searches for ‘accountant Dallas’, and your profile shows up with plenty of high-rated reviews there is a very high chance that the searcher will visit your website.

20. Write guest posts.

One good way to both build your brand and get your site noticed, both by search engines and by people, is to publish guest posts on other websites.

Especially the sites in your related niche. So you use the visibility of other websites to reach a big pool of your target audience. Usually, most guest posts allow you at least one link back to your site.

Not only does this help in your SEO, but it also puts your website link in front of your audience, giving them a way to visit your site.

21. Promote your content.

Content creation is only 50% of the job. The real traffic comes by constant sharing and promotion of this content.

There are different ways to maximize content distribution:

• Share it on various social media, especially the ones most used by your audience.
• Repurpose one piece of content to different formats and share them on different platforms. For e.g., one blog post can be repurposed to infographics, videos, podcasts, and shared on different platforms, all linking back to your site.

22. Get backlinks.

Just like in a guest post, it is valuable to get as many links back to your site as you can. Of course the best way to get links is to create valuable high quality content, consistently, which will motivate other sites to link to you.

You can also do outreach campaigns to ask other sites to share your link, you can do broken link building, etc.

23. Get business listings.

Whatever your business, there will be online directories that will contain the names and addresses of many businesses.

Try to get listed in directories relevant to you, be it by industry or location.

These directories will also usually have high domain ratings (considered to be authoritative), and thus getting a backlink from these sites would also contribute greatly to your SEO.

If you are a small business operating locally, getting listed in directories in the region could be especially helpful to get your website noticed and even to boost your SEO and lead generation.

24. Build a network.

You or your business team can only get so many website visits. Your reach is amplified if people not directly in your business also invite others to check out your site.

So build relationships with professionals and experts in a similar niche as yours. Share their content first, so they also want to return the favor and promote your site to their audiences.

25. Invest in advertising.

If you have the budget, invest in online advertising like Google Adwords or social media ads.

These are quick ways to get traffic back to your site. Over the long term, these may be difficult to sustain with limited budgets, but if you have a special offer running or a particular blog post you would like to drive traffic to, then online advertising could really be fruitful.

Here’s a recap of how to get your website noticed and drive traffic:

Concluding Notes

Driving traffic to your website takes time. You need to consistently build visibility, work on your content and SEO, and eventually your number of visitors will go up.
Don’t be disheartened if you don’t see immediate results.

What are some of the ways you used to drive traffic to your website? Share in the comments below!