Right, much like a long journey, we have a lot of ground to cover this week so I’ll skip the formalities and get straight to it, I think we know each other well enough by now anyway…?
How to Park your Website Traffic
When contemplating the content of this week’s blog, I couldn’t help but be reminded of that dreaded phrase every journey curator hopes they won’t hear, “are we nearly there yet?”. But I suppose we can learn something from the childlike innocence of it. The ‘speaker’ is obviously looking forward to where he or she is being taken so it must be interesting on arrival to fulfill their anticipation…either that or they are bored but I have faith in your capabilities to not let that scenario even get a look in.
Okay, so you’ve arrived at your destination… debutmarketing.co.uk in this case, what now?
Now I need to grab hold of your attention and not let go so my aim is to make the site’s content interesting and engaging. This is done without the aid of boiled sweets and I Spy but instead by initially making you feel welcome and showing you that we are genuinely pleased you have visited us and you’re not just a statistic.
So:
- pre-empt what your visitors will want to see/read, no services of Mystic Meg need to be hired, it’s just common sense
- keep content light, informative, fun and free of subliminal messages…stay on this site, add to favourites…love marmite…
- don’t make it too friendly or in your readers’ faces, and definitely not offensive or too subjective, you are a professional!
- always copy the best ideas that made you stay on a site or engaged you on another site (at Debut Marketing we do not condone plagiarism)
- post videos and links, these help engage your user and don’t do any harm with Google either
And, of course, don’t make them work too hard, the simpler the better, think clear navigation and minimising clicks. Remember the 3 click rule, anymore and I’m likely to stray.
Now here is the other common sense bit:
- Keep content updated and relevant, what would you think if you visited a site and it hadn’t been updated for 9 weeks??
- Remember seasonality, don’t advertise jumpers in summer and salads in winter
- Consistency – make sure all pages have a similar look, style and tone. I’m sure teleporting is not too far away but it’s not here yet!
And finally, make sure all spelling and punctuation is correct. This may sound surprising what with the aid of spell check an all, me ol’ muccas, but all too often ‘have’ and ‘of’ are mistaken and ‘is’ and ‘are’…not cool!
Your goal is to get traffic to return…ah returning traffic, music to my ears…that’s right, you’ve guessed it, next week the topic shall be…drum roll…Analytics! What you can tell from page visit counts and time spent on site etc. etc….Goodbye.