Gaining visitors to a new site or increasing visitors for a particular keyword can be tricky, so here’s some advice on how to get more traffic to your website.

Writing for search engines

To get the attention of search engines and start getting more traffic to your website, you’ll need to write articles that are optimised for a particular keyword (keywords are actually a short phrase like ‘eco web design’). Writing general articles will result in less traffic as they are not optimised for a keyword. While this seems a bit mercenary, everyone else is doing this so we need to do the same or lose out!

Choosing keywords

It’s entirely possible to just guess what relevant keywords your potential visitors might be searching for while trying to get more traffic to your website. However we can actually find out what phrases people are searching for, how many times, and how competitive these keywords are. Something like ‘sofas’ or ‘web design’ is way too broad so we need to zoom in a bit to stand a chance. ‘brown leather sofas’ or ‘eco web design’ is more specific and easier to get more traffic for.

Websites to do keyword research

• https://app.neilpatel.com/en/ubersuggest/ (free account available)
• https://analytics.moz.com/pro/keyword-explorer (free account available)
• Google keyword planner (login with your Google account)

All of these sites will give you an idea of how many searches are made for that keyword, and how difficult it will be to compete for a particular keyword. Make a spreadsheet of the keywords you think you can realistically compete on and then we can get writing!

Writing with keywords in mind

So now you’ve got a list of keywords, you can write an article or page on your website optimised for that keyword. Writing for one keyword is easier than multiple, so let’s start with that.

AI content writers

An AI content generator is a website you log in to that helps you create quality, original content to help you get more traffic to your website. This type of tool can help you produce blog posts, articles, or even social media posts on relevant topics. Additionally, AI tools can help you discover new ideas and sources of information to write about by analysing competitors for a particular keyword.

We’ve used a free trial of ScaleNut to produce some articles for our own sites and it’s scarily good!

Optimising in WordPress with Yoast SEO or SEOPress

There are several WordPress plugins to help you optimise your content within your control panel while writing a page or blog post. YoastSEO is free and one of the most popular, so we install that to all counsellor and therapist web design projects we carry out.

This plugin is awesome and will scan your content once you’ve set a keyword, telling you where to improve the content to make sure the keyword is in all the right places.

Other ways to get more traffic to your website

Posting regular links back to your website on social media and building a following by talking to other people can also help you increase traffic to your website. This can be a time sink however, and certain social media sites can be quite argumentative and even hostile to anyone promoting their own sites. Whether people you meet on social media will actually turn into counselling clients is another point worth thinking about. Posting links to your personal account might not actually help!

Paid adverts are a quick way to kickstart traffic to a new website. Once you’ve got your keyword list from the steps above, you could set up a small Google Ads, Meta business suite or LinkedIn campaign where you pay every time someone clicks your advert. Be wary though – it’s easy to spend huge amounts of money with little or no increase in clients!

Pay per click campaigns like Google Ads need to be set up carefully and monitored daily to make sure they are targeted right and resulting in sales or enquiries. It’s beyond the scope of this article to explain in more detail and to be honest, it’s quicker and easier to employ an expert to run paid ads on your behalf.

Summary

Hopefully this quick guide has given you some ideas of how to get more traffic to your website. By choosing realistic keywords, writing with those keywords in mind and promoting your site on social media you should start to see an increase in visitors. Paid ads can also help but obviously come with a cost attached.