Increase Website Traffic and Enquiries Today – 3 Things I Did That Got Results
If you operate a business online increasing website traffic is likely to be a high priority. Of course, visitors alone don’t help – you need to turn visits into enquiries and enquiries into sales. Learning how to do that and improving website visitor statistics is an ongoing challenge for most of us. While having a lot of good quality website content goes a long way towards bringing the visitors and encouraging contact, there are other small things you can do to improve traffic and enquiry rates. As I discovered this week, sometimes small changes net nice results.
Our content writing service website attracts a modest amount of visitors but as a high percentage of new clients become regular clients, relatively small increases in our website traffic can have a big impact on our work levels. Here are three things I did this week that had an immediate impact on our website traffic and the behaviour of website visitors:
- I put our Contact Form on more pages.
- I spent a few hours adding anchor text links between our site pages.
- I added a ‘related posts’ Word Press plug in.
The Contact Form
Should you have your contact form on all pages? Some say yes, others say no. We had it on just two of pages, our contact page, and a page that outlines our article pack deals. I decided that having the contact form at the bottom of more pages would make it just a little bit easier for prospective clients to make an enquiry. I set about adding the contact form to our other pages and before I had finished doing that I’d received an enquiry via a page to which I had added the contact form just minutes earlier. Would that person have enquired if they had to click through to our contact page? Maybe…and maybe not.
Anchor Text Links
I set out to do this shortly after out site was established. I put in a few links then promptly forgot about it as we became busy. Of course, it’s great for SEO and after coming across yet another article on the benefits of anchor text links between site pages I decided to get back onto the task again. It’s difficult to identify firm results on this over such a short period (a few days) however it’s evident that we’ve had an increase in visitor numbers arriving via keywords used in the anchor text links, particularly those that haven’t been our main focus. The result – organic visits doubled in comparison to the same period the previous week.
Related Posts Plug In
Surprisingly, this might prove to be the change with the biggest pay-off. I spent a bit of time this week looking over some of the most successful blogs online and I noticed that many of them display a list of ‘related posts’ at the end of each blog post. I hadn’t really thought about doing that before but it didn’t take me long to find and install a WordPress related posts plug-in so I could try it out.
The impact has been significant – our site statistics show a big increase in the number of pages visited per visitor and the average time visitors are spending on our website. That’s a very good result if you have a decent amount of website content and interesting blog posts or articles on site, because your credibility increases as the visitor reads, making it more likely they’ll feel confident enough to make an enquiry. The more website content visitors have to read and the easier you make it for them to read more of your content, the longer they are likely to stay on site.
Combined, these three changes appear to be responsible for in a healthy increase in the number of enquiries received over those few days. Considering that I was making these alterations and monitoring changes to the website traffic over the few days of the week that are traditionally quiet for us, the results are very encouraging.
I thoroughly enjoyed the hours I spent looking over high traffic sites and successful blogs and thinking about the things that have contributed to their success. All of the advice to be found on the Internet can’t substitute for crystal clear examples of what works. It was such a fruitful exercise that I’ll be making the effort to do it more often.
