How to get your website noticed is a question nearly all website owners think about. Today having an online presence is essential for businesses.
Just to give you an idea of how big online sales are: Global internet sales reached $5.5 trillion in 2022. Knowing how to get noticed on the web will directly boost your sales.
It’s not just software that is sold online, online purchasing is used by most people now. People use the internet for research, reviews, opinions and will look online first for most purchasing decisions. Post-Covid even purchasing groceries is routinely done online.
In short, if you don’t know how to get your website noticed on Google and are not selling online you are leaving money on the table.
Table of Contents
- Write high quality content
- Write frequently to boost search engine visibility
- Update your old content to get more views
- SEO is important for traffic
- Topics for content writing: “Evergreen” topics
- Check your search engine visibility
- Do your Keyword Research
- Steal ideas from your competitors
- Benefits of guest posting
- Promote your website on Social Media
- Conclusion
Write high quality content
Writing high-quality original content is a proven way to get more visitors to your site. This is the most effective way of getting organic traffic to your website consistently and for zero cost.
You don’t need to be a great writer to start blogging on your website. Just start and over time you will improve, just as with any other skill. Consistency in producing high quality content will give you huge rewards in time.
Let’s list some of the many benefits of writing quality content on your website
Companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites.
Source: https://optinmonster.com/blogging-statistics/
Educate your customers about your company
Your writing will inform your readers about your company, your values and how you do business.
You can talk about:
- Your products and services (obviously)
- Your customer service
- How you do business
- Your team
- The history of the company
- Changes to how you do business
- New products or services you will be introducing
- Suggest new products, services and ask for feedback
And so on…
Build Trust
The more website visitors know about you and how you do business the more they will trust you. That’s why so many e-commerce sites have customer reviews. We don’t like to buy blind. We don’t know whether the company is a real company or a scam that will take our money but not provide the product or service.
Trust will help you sell online.
Create a relationship with your customers
Business is about relationships. A regular website visitor will have a relationship with you, they will already value your content. You can build upon the trust you have already earned with your content to offer products and services to your readers.
Build credibility and authority over time
By writing on your website you are viewed as an authority figure, people treat you as an expert on the topics you write about. Your opinions will carry more weight, this can help you sell your products and services with visitors.
More content means more keywords
The more content you write, the more keywords you rank for. You might not be targeting keywords but you can rank for them anyway.
By writing consistently you will inevitably rank for many keywords on the topics you write about. If you focus on topics important to potential customers then you can expect potential customers to find your content and read it.
Adding content isn’t just about writing you will also need to do the following:
- Keyword research (see below for more on this)
- Research your topic before writing
- Write an amazing headline – spend time on this, it’s important!
- Write subheadings
- Write the initial draft of the article
- Find images, and infographics to add to your content
- Find links to other websites to include, also add links to content from your own site
- Edit your content – ensure no typos and grammar errors
- Publish
- Promote on social media
As you can see, it’s a lot of work.
Write frequently to boost search engine visibility
Write content every week, ideally several times a week. Search engines prefer websites that update frequently.
The more you write, the more keywords you will rank for, the more times you will appear in search results and the more traffic you will get to your website.
If you not great at writing you can use copywriting tools to help.
Is Copy.ai the best AI copywriting software?
100 Travel blog post ideas when you are stuck for content
Article Forge Review
Update your old content to get more views
Search Engine Journal wrote about the benefits of updating their old traffic. They found 2x increase in pageviews over a year.
One technique I use to help me update content is to look at the keywords I am ranking for on a page. You will likely find keywords you were not deliberately trying to rank for.
You can use your favourite SEO tool to help you analyze your keyword data. I use SE Ranking to track keywords but other tools will have similar features.
Rewrite your article and include relevant keywords you are ranking for already according to Google.
Look through the list of keywords and check for keywords you are ranking for but are not tracking.
From the screenshot above you can see a list of keywords I am ranking for from Google Search Console data. I am not tracking these keywords yet. I can look at the article to see if I can naturally use these keywords when updating the article to boost organic traffic.
SEO is important for traffic
SEO is a big topic so I won’t go into detail in this section. For a quick refresher for on-page SEO issues look at this article: 29 SEO Tips and Tricks to help you rank better in Google.
I will just mention one SEO issue here that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
Write compelling headlines
Learning to write compelling headlines can make a huge difference!
The headline will decide if the visitor will bother to read the article. Boring content will cause the visitor to bounce. You don’t want them to visit a competitor’s website do you?
Tips for writing better headlines:
- Make them punchy
- Use numbers, 5 ways…, 93% of…
- Use emotional words
- Use powerful words
- …and don’t forget to put your keywords in them!
Topics for content writing: “Evergreen” topics
Evergreen topics are topics that people are always interested in. While it can be more interesting to chase the fashionable or newsworthy trend it’s a bad idea. The problem is the topic could soon be out of fashion and then no one is searching for that topic anymore.
You want your content to be always in demand and popular with your audience. High quality content takes a lot of time and effort to product so you want a good return on investment – lots of visitors and potential customers.
Content to avoid
- Seasonal, e.g. Christmas, Back to school
- Single events, e.g. sporting events
If you do want to do a “Best of … 2022” then you should publish early in the year so your content is useful for 12 months. Copying the article for 2023 though will create duplicate content that can damage your ranking with Google. Better to write some new fresh original content.
Check your search engine visibility
Submit an XML sitemap to Google to increase your visibility
An XML sitemap is a file that search engines can use to discover all the content on your website. Ensure you have an SEO plugin installed on your website, it generates the sitemap for you.
Go to Google Search Console and create an account, if you haven’t already. From Google Search Console go to the section on XML sitemaps, from here submit your XML sitemap. Once you have done this Google will crawl and index your website (this can takes weeks before your content appears on Google, so be patient).
Submit your XML sitemap to Bing
Although the vast majority of searches are done on Google there is no reason not to submit your sitemap to alternative search engines like Bing.
Bing Webmaster Tools: https://www.bing.com/webmasters/
As an added bonus, other search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Swisscows take feeds from Bing so you will get indexed on those sites too!
Check your pages are not being excluded
Check to see if Google Search Console is excluding any pages. Good reasons for exclusion would be duplicate content on your site. For any pages excluded that you want indexing you need to fix it. Google Search Console will give a reason why it is being excluded, possible reasons are:
robots.txt
this is a text file that is on your website. Search engines look at this file when crawling your site to decide whether a page needs indexing. Check the page you want indexing is not blocked by this file.
noindex
Individual pages marked with the noindex parameter are not indexed by Google. Removing the noindex parameter will fix the issue. Next time Google crawls your site it will index the page. To speed up indexing submit the URL to Google Search Console.
Do your Keyword Research
Keyword research is really important. Otherwise, you could write amazing content, with cool graphics, and fantastic SEO and get no visitors. Why? Because no one is searching for that content.
Save yourself wasting time and effort by first checking visitors are interested in your writing. Don’t have lots of money for premium SEO tools? No worries, here is a list of free keyword research tools to get your started.
You can use this free widget to get some keyword ideas. Type in a keyword to see the report listing monthly search queries for that keyword and difficulty score plus information on competition:
Steal ideas from your competitors
Do a competitor website audit. What keywords are they ranking for? What topics are they covering?
Obviously don’t steal their content, but stealing their ideas – and keywords – is fine.
While you are there why not see what other sites are linking to them. Maybe you can reach out to those sites and get them to link to you too? Other sites linking to your site are great for SEO.
Not sure how to do a competitor website audit? SEO tools will usually have this feature. You can use this free tool from SE Ranking to get started. Just type the domain of a competitor in the widget to generate a report.
Benefits of guest posting
Invite other people to write on your blog.
Collaborate with brands, ask them to write a high quality article about their brand for your website. It’s a win-win, they get more exposure and you get more content.
Collaborating with partners and brands will boost your site’s content and diversify your opinions and perspectives.
Just make sure the content is original and high quality.
You can also guest blog on other sites and link back to your site. This will give you a valuable backlink that will boost your SEO.
By establishing relationships with other experts, influencers and content creators in your field you can increase the visibility of your site and boost your rankings.
Promote your website on Social Media
First, ensure you have social share buttons on your content pages. For WordPress websites you can use the Shared Counts plugin, it’s easy to use and configure.
Promote your content on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and other relevant sites for your business.
Social media can take a lot of time so you may want to consider using tools that can help automate some of the work for you. For Twitter I use Typefully, here is a review I wrote recently.
Conclusion
So, a summary on how to get your website noticed on Google and other search engines:
- Write content and use SEO
- Ensure your content is visible on search engines
- Keyword research
- Look at what your competitors are doing
- Guest posting can benefit you
- Use social media to promote your content
If you liked this article please use the share buttons below to share with your audience. Thanks!