Kate Gingold / Monday, March 14, 2016

5 Ways You’re Diverting Traffic FROM Your Website

The Sprocket Report

Driving traffic to your website should be the goal of every business and organization. But if you look at Analytics once a month and wonder why, even with all your marketing efforts, website traffic isn’t increasing, it may be that you’re sabotaging yourself.

The simple answer is that folks just forget to mention their website. Or if they do, they do it in such an off-hand way that it’s ineffectual. It sounds unbelievable, but scroll through your Facebook or Twitter feeds and check the last time you linked to your own website. We’ll wait…

Yup, that’s what we thought.

To be fair, the deck is stacked against you. Social media platforms put a ton of effort into keeping their audience within their world so it’s not surprising that it worked. Great for them – but you need to promote your organization. Here are five ways you can start driving traffic to your website right now:

1. Limit Reposting on Facebook
With so much important information available that your clients would love to hear, why should you stop reposting? Because that great article sits on someone else’s site. Instead of sending your clients away, send them to your own site by writing a brief blog post of your own. Give your opinion of the article you read and then post that on Facebook. Now the Facebook link goes back to your website instead of the other guru’s.

2. Use the “Open in New Window” Option
In your blog post, of course you’ll want to reference the original article and you’ll probably use a hyperlink. When you do, be sure that you activate the option to open the link in a new window. Otherwise, when your reader clicks on the article link, it will replace your website and you’ve lost your connection. If they open the link in a new window or a new tab, your website will still be waiting once they close that window, giving you a second chance to win their attention.

3. Reconsider Event Planning
Third-party platforms like Eventbrite or Facebook’s Create Event can make inviting and tallying attendance easy, but all that action is not happening on your website. Unless you plan ahead. There are ways to embed tools like Eventbrite right on your own web page so you get the benefits of their service while still keeping visitors on your website.

4. Don’t Make Your PDF Flyer a Web Page
Here’s a common scenario: Someone in the office creates a lovely flyer full of details. To save time, they just upload that pdf to the website – all done! But a pdf needs a little effort to work well with search engines so people can find it and the link looks lousy when you share it on Facebook. You’re much better off posting the information on your website as text so people and search bots can find it.

5. Use the Right Landing Pages
Since we do social media work for clients, this is a particular pet peeve of ours. We’d love to share news from our clients’ followers, but they make it really difficult by using their home page link instead of the news or event link. Now we have to search through their website to find where the event is actually talked about to get the right landing page. Or if we don’t have the time, we just move on and now those folks have missed a marketing opportunity.

If you want people to share your news and events, give each one its own landing page with a catchy graphic and use that link in your press releases. Make it easy to spread your news around.

The number and variety of online marketing platforms are incredible and yes, you should use them. But remember you’re the boss of your own website and that’s where everything should point to give you the best opportunity to control the conversation with your prospective clients. Too busy to make this effort? We’re happy to help, so just give us a call.

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Tags: Website Marketing Facebook Small Business Social Media Marketing Analytics Business Strategy

Kate GingoldKate Gingold

I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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