Seven Proven Ways to Drive Paying Customers to Your Website

If you want to generate online sales, you need to do more than just build a striking website. You need to advertise your website and create content that’s genuinely useful for your target market. It can take a long time to reap the financial rewards of online marketing. However, if you keep the following tips in mind, you will soon start to see your sales increase.

Advertise

This may sound obvious, but many people neglect to pay for advertising online, usually because they want to drive traffic to their website via organic search (ranking high on the search engine results pages). However, while you should certainly be trying to boost your website’s ranking for keywords that relate to your business, you need to remember that it can take a long time to get featured on Google’s first page. For that reason, you should consider paying for advertising to get your content in front of people quickly.

You can pay to advertise on Google, social media and other websites, all of which come with their pros and cons. Dig deep into the benefits and drawbacks of paid advertising before reaching for your credit card. You may have to spend a little to spread the word of your website, but the investment could pay dividends.

Mix up Your Content

If you’re serious about online marketing, you may have already started blogging. Do your blogs appeal to all your readers? Or, do they all follow the same format that may put some people off?

Many SEO agencies such as Smart Traffic recommend mixing up your content in terms of length and format to make sure you have something that appeals to different kinds of readers. Nowadays, long-form content tends to fair well on the search engines, but that doesn’t mean that’s what all your readers want. Consider interspersing your lengthy articles with shorter, news-based blogs and infographic-driven pieces to maximise the impact of your content marketing.

Don’t Neglect Social Media

Simply posting blogs and squeezing in keywords where they fit naturally isn’t enough – you need to promote your content across as many channels as possible to drive paying customers to your website. We’ve already discussed the idea of paying for advertising on social media platforms, but if you’re not ready to invest in an online marketing strategy, you can entice your followers to read your latest articles by posting on your social media page for free.

When you post links on twitter, remember to keep your tweets short and snappy. On Facebook, you have the freedom to write longer posts, but posts that are too long and convoluted may dissuade some people from bothering to read them. Including an image in your posts comes highly recommended. Your primary objective is to get people to interact with your posts and follow links to your website.

Don’t Neglect On-Page SEO

Many people think the days of search engine optimisation (SEO) are over, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. SEO has changed dramatically over the years, but it’s still a crucial aspect of any online marketing strategy.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that plugging in a certain keyword a certain number of times will result in a high search engine ranking. If you force keywords into your content and diminish its quality in the process, you could do more harm than good. Instead, consider optimising your headlines, meta descriptions, page titles and image alt text. Make sure both readers and Google know exactly what your content contains so that they can determine how useful it is.

You should still focus on ranking highly for keywords that relate to your business, but you need to think about how you can provide your readers with valuable information that relates to them. Make sure you only use keywords where they fit naturally, and write unique, compelling content that provides solutions to problems.

Write Enticing Headlines

Even if you produce the most useful blogs in your industry, you’ll struggle to encourage anybody to read them if your headlines aren’t up to scratch. Some writers, including those at BuzzFeed, may write dozens of headlines before picking the best one for their articles. Remember – your headline is the first thing people see when they follow links to your blogs or landing pages. Make sure they’re so irresistible that people can’t take their eyes off the screen. You might want to learn how to write compelling headlines and then go back through your blogs to make edits.

Target Long-Tail Keywords

Many businesses only target the keywords that are the most relevant to their business. However, broad, generic terms are incredibly hard to rank for. Moreover, long-tail keywords account for most web searches. You may think targeting long-tail terms is a waste of time due to the low volume of searches. However, it might be easier to convert those who do find your blogs into real paying customers due to the specific nature of their query.

It’s becoming increasingly important to target long-tail keywords as more and more people start to use voice search. If you need any tips on how to optimise your website for voice search, you should seek advice from a qualified SEO specialist.

Start Guest Blogging

One of the most effective ways to boost your SEO efforts is to generate backlinks to your website. The more links you have to an article, the more authoritative Google will interpret it to be. You can build backlinks by volunteering articles to third-party websites and including a hyperlink to your website within the content. However, nowadays, quality is more important than quantity when it comes to backlinks, so don’t bother posting blogs on websites that don’t have any readers or are filled with spam content.

Look Forward to More Online Sales

The most effective digital marketing strategies combine all the techniques and tips detailed above. Don’t just focus on one aspect of online advertising hoping to triple your profits, and remember that it often takes a while to see any results at all. If you persevere and utilise many different methods to drive traffic to your website, you’ll soon improve your position on the search results pages and see your customer base grow.