OK, so you’ve built your website.

Now what?

If your website has been online for any length of time, you’ll know that the maxim “if you build it they will come” doesn’t work.

You’ll also know that even if your website is reasonably well established, traffic to it isn’t assured.

Either way, you need to get people to visit your site.

And you need those people to spend money with you!

1. Make sure your site is fast and easy to use

People make a split second decision as to whether or not to stay on your website.

You know from your own experience that if a site takes more than a second or two to load, the chance of you being patient enough to wait for anything to happen is low.

The same goes for visitors to your site.

So make sure that your site loads as fast as possible – don’t load it down with a bunch of giant images that slide from one to the next. Don’t make visitors wait for a long video to load. Basically don’t make people wait!

You also need to make sure that your site has a clear path through it and clear calls to action when you want visitors to do more than be “just looking”.

For a small business, that usually means putting your phone number prominently on every page. Towards the top right is normally best but a prominent link to a contact form can work quite well if you don’t want to display your number everywhere and put yourself at the mercy of even more cold callers.

2. Remember that every page can be the first page someone finds

Google is good at giving people the precise pages that people are looking for.

This means that the main index page of your website that you spent hours slaving over and getting precisely right is only likely to be seen by a handful of visitors to your website.

Most of them (over 95% for most of the sites I’m involved in) are likely to arrive on a different page.

These “internal” pages are probably the most important factor for getting more traffic and sales.

Every single page on your site should be treated with the same importance as your main index page.

Optimising internal pages for an individual keyword phrase will help Google to better understand what they are about and will begin to deliver more traffic to them as they’ll show up more often in the search results.

That doesn’t mean keyword stuffing the pages. Just write naturally and use synonyms when appropriate. For instance, I’ve used website and site interchangeably in this article and done much the same with people and visitors. Google’s algorithm is intelligent enough to know that these refer to the same thing.

3. Build a list

This is probably the most important thing you can do.

Lists give you an excuse to contact people regularly.

Depending on your business, this may take the form of an email list or a physical mailing list or mobile phone numbers or getting people to like you on Facebook or follow you on Twitter or connect with you on LinkedIn.

You’ll probably have a preferred method that you’d like people to use but the more options you can use – without confusing your visitors – the more people are likely to sign up as everyone will have their own preferences.

Incidentally, don’t instinctively balk at the idea of paying every time you contact someone.

Whilst it’s easy to think that emails are almost free and are therefore the preferred method of contact, direct mail can work if you’ve got the margin.

And something like a mobile phone text message can definitely be worth the handful of pence it costs to send as it gets an almost instant reaction.

If your website has enough visitors you can also stalk them with Facebook adverts by building a custom audience in much the same way as Amazon, Argos, etc. follow you around the web with adverts based on what you’ve recently looked at.

If you’d like more help with getting traffic to your website then take a look at this video about the internet marketing training that I can offer you.

Or find out more about my internet marketing coaching here.