Congrats, your new website is up and running! Creating a website is a pivotal first step for any small business, but it’s still the first step. Next up is figuring out how to get a new website noticed among a sea of billions. It might sound daunting, sure, which is why we’ve put together a list of tips that will help your website grow to new heights.
How Do I Get My Website to Show Up on Google?
Before we can talk about growing a website, we need to understand how search engines decide which websites rank higher than others. Every search engine uses software known as “web crawlers” to scan websites for information and then report that data back to servers. Crawlers are constantly taking note of everything on the web: links, keywords, images, posting dates, etc. Making sure these crawlers scan your site properly is essential to increasing your search volume.
How Do You Get Your Website Seen?
To make sure crawlers view your website favorably, you’ll have to take some time to do keyword research. With over a billion websites on the web, a small business would benefit more from identifying and targeting a unique niche and including specific keywords in content and headers rather than taking a broader, catchall approach.
Step one is keyword research, followed by step two: Meta tags. Meta tags are bits of text that describe a web page’s content, but they only appear in that page’s code instead of on the page itself. Use a platform like Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) to do your keyword research and find your relevant meta tags, and you’ll already be on your way to better search volume.
How Can I Get Traffic to My Website Faster?
1. Blog Posts: A Business Owner’s Best Friend
Blog posts are one of the single most effective tools for websites to rank higher in search engines. Google itself lists having good content as “the single most important thing to do” in terms of web design (and who are we to argue with Google?). Each blog post has a chance to be noticed by search engines, but having blogs just for the sake of having them won’t help.
Each blog post can massively increase traffic to your website by providing relevant, helpful content that people search for, but they can also get you backlinks. Backlinks are links to your site that other pages include in their content, and each one is like a vote of credibility to search engines. Long-form blogs (2,000+ words) tend to perform the best, as longer articles tend to provide more relevant information (and include more keywords) than shorter ones.
2. Consider Cross-Promoting Content
Getting backlinks for a new website can be a Catch-22: how do you get people to link to your website if no one knows it exists? Reach out! Networking is always a vital tool, and promoting a web page is no exception. There is no shortage of influencers, local media outlets, and other websites that would happily link to your website, typically in exchange for cross-promotion.
3. Growing Your Website With Social Media
Web directories and social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are also ways to advertise your website and expand your base. Having accounts on these platforms gives your website more chances to be noticed and shared. However, while posting on a regular schedule can grow your base, you will need to strike a balance between promoting links to your site and sharing general content.
4. Investing in Image Search
Like blogs, relevant, high-quality images with appropriate alt text and file names can help your website rank higher. As people search for images, the ones you include in your content will appear, leading to more engagement. Again, they function similarly to blogs, although Google itself has said that its crawler understands text better than images, so this is probably the case with other search engines as well.
Use images and make sure they have appropriate meta tags, but also don’t count on them to boost your website to the top of every search result.
5. Knowing When To Use Ads
Buying ad space is a quick way to rank higher and boost traffic to your website. By bidding on keywords and buying better web page positioning, you can get quick jolts of traffic to specific pages.
The downside to ads is, if you’re using them as THE primary way to increase traffic, they become costly in the long run. Additionally, visitors may be untrusting of pages visibly marked as ads and may overlook them in favor of organic results.
6. And Knowing When To Fold ‘Em
On the flipside of ads, there is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO boils down to including keywords that people search for and is a more organic approach to getting your website noticed. Generally speaking, visitors who find your website through a search engine are already interested in your product or service and actively seek you out.
While SEO is a less costly route than ads, it also takes longer to see results—sometimes a business needs three to six months of ongoing effort before its website truly sees results. Ideally, the best practice would be to use both, as they complement each other beautifully.
7. Optimize for Mobile Web Design
Your web design matters significantly to both crawlers and real people; if it takes a website more than just a few seconds to load, most people will back out without reading a single word of your content. This applies especially to mobile devices, as far more people now browse the internet from their smartphones.
When looking over your web design, remember to optimize for mobile devices, as a slow or broken mobile website will hurt your growth.
8. Keeping Track of Your Stats
After you build your website, you’ll have access to all sorts of valuable digital marketing metrics: bounce rate, average page views, session duration, traffic sources, plus much more. With these metrics, you can see what people are drawn to on your web design, which helps you figure out what is working and what isn’t.
9. Don’t Scrape Content
“Scraping” content, or “scraped content,” is Google’s word for plagiarizing another page’s content. If Google notices a site using scraped or deceptive content, they could either ignore it or Google may even take action against your website.
Instead of using deceptive practices, ask yourself, “Does this actually help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
10. Consistently Producing High-Quality Content
The best way to help your website rank higher is to produce good content that real people search for. As mentioned earlier, search engines also note how often other pages link to your website, so by creating content that other people refer back to, you’re making your website more reputable in their eyes.
Get Help From the Experts
Hopefully, our tips on what to do (and what not to do) help you understand how to get a new website noticed but, if not, then our last bonus tip for you would be to contact the experts. Voted as one of the best SEO companies in Houston, Versa Creative has a team of experts that can help you figure out what’s holding your website back.
Contact us today for a free audit, and start reaching your full potential.
