How can you attract more website visitors?
Are you missing opportunities online? With two billion websites online, just having one doesn’t guarantee potential customers will find you. You’ll need to promote it, just like any brick-and-mortar business premises. Paid ads are fast but addictive, and can massively inflate your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Free website traffic can reduce that and your ad-dependency. So here’s how to attract more website visitors cost-effectively.
First though, if your site isn’t attracting many visitors, you need to understand what’s going wrong.
What Website Visitors Really Want
Look at your site. What does it do? Well, it exists — and should provide a way for people to get in touch with you, at least.
That’s pretty much all most bots and people who want to sell to you will need. So you’re serving them — but what about your potential customers? How much of your content is honestly helpful for them?
Here’s the catch — sales-focused content isn’t enough. That can help customers who are ready to buy. However, it doesn’t help your potential customers nearly as much — and they are a much bigger audience.
Ready-to-buy customers are typically estimated to be under 3% of website visitors. If you’re only serving them, would-be suppliers and bots, you won’t impress the 90%+ of your site’s visitors who may want what you offer in future. They’ll just forget you exist.
So what are those visitors looking for, if not what you sell?
Answers. Not fully-formed solutions with a price tag. Just helpful, simple, free answers. When those vague initial queries turn into a need for something more substantial, they’ll remember the brand that gave them the best answers. More importantly, they’ll feel they know, like and trust that brand — and people buy from those they know, like and trust.
Building Your Brand With Content Marketing
Content can be targeted to attract the right visitors
This is what blogging is for. Blogging presents a golden opportunity to attract visitors by publishing valuable information and insights — aka “content marketing”. This is why an editable website, built around a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress, can be so much more valuable than a basic “static” website.
Yes, it takes work — but it got you here, didn’t it?
So now that you’re here, let me be helpful. How can you make the most of this opportunity, as cost-effectively as possible?
Writing Articles That Attract More Website Visitors
First, don’t rush off to churn out dozens of AI-scrawled blog posts. I’ll explain why that’s not the answer below, but let’s start with planning your content.
Real Questions and Real Answers
Content planning is sometimes called “ideation” and you probably have some ideas of questions you wished people would ask. Those could be useful articles, but addressing the questions they really do ask will attract more website visitors. Even better — they’ll attract visitors who already have an interest in what you offer.
Often, those questions will be about stuff you consider incredibly basic. That’s why they come to you. They’ll rarely use jargon unless they work in your field or are asking what it means. So if possible, start with questions that customers have asked you. Type those into Google and (at the time of writing) you’ll probably see a couple of useful things:
- An AI overview
- A “People Also Ask” section
Every question or point covered in those sections is a potential title for a blog post. So make a bullet-point list of them. Use a word processor if possible, so you can sort them in order of priority and add sub-bullet points to each one if you think of headings or extra points to cover.
To AI or Not to AI, That Is the Question…
AI has a point – but as an assistant NOT an expert
Now, the AI overview has already answered, so what’s the point, right? Well, if you’re just going to create another AI article rephrasing what has already been said — not much.
There’s more to it than that, though. Bear with me, as there’s a bit to unpack here…
First, a great deal of current “AI” isn’t technically artificial intelligence. It’s just advanced pattern recognition plus wholesale corporate copyright theft. Only those of us who have studied AI, and those being stolen from, seem to care about that though.
Still, that means this type of AI is incapable of being truly creative or insightful. Those AI Overviews just summarise things actual experts have said, without understanding their implications, nuances or consequences. They lack detail, nuance, originality, personality, passion, lived experience, wisdom and storytelling. All of which can add value to articles written by real human experts. Plus, actual human experts can tell that AI answers are wrong far more often than most people realise.
You might think that will get better. However, many people now use AI to fake expertise, specifically to avoid having to learn anything. As AI recycles its own mistakes, it gets worse. So those people won’t even recognise any warning signs of things going wrong, let alone be capable of fixing anything.
On top of that, search engines can detect AI content far better than humans, because they see so much of it. So they know it’s not original — and prefer to promote original content because that’s what humans prefer to see. It may be easy, but that’s precisely why it won’t stand out.
Is AI pointless, then? Not exactly…
Assuming you have real expertise, AI can still help to display that. It can be very effective at speeding up content research and first drafts. These days, it’s even half-decent at checking spelling and grammar. So use it to do that if you need to. Still, make sure your final article has been edited and fact-checked by a human and that the main value of the article is the personal insight you have added.
How can you do that, whether you’re using an AI shortcut or not?
How to Write Articles Like a Pro
Really good content can be a lead magnet or even worth paying for
Research every article, even if you know your topics backwards. It’s astonishingly easy to overlook key points or recent updates, so there’s always room for improvement. You may be surprised at how much you learn (or relearn) from doing this, and even if you don’t, the process can inspire the valuable insights your article will really need.
When writing content, don’t imagine your first draft will be good enough — no professional writer does. Write as you would speak to that ideal customer, and write far more than you mean to publish. Explain everything — don’t assume your reader will understand any specialist terms, whether you consider them jargon or not. They’re too busy to look them up.
Once you’ve created that first draft, edit it down to between 500 and 2,000 words. Pack as much value into every paragraph as you can, or you’ll lose readers. Most undergraduate audiences have a reading age of 8 to 9, which is about the level tabloid neswpapers target. So use subheadings, bullet points, short paragraphs and images to break down complex information into digestible chunks for readability.
Writing Tips to Attract More Website Visitors
Pay special attention to your main title, first paragraph, heading structures. — and your article’s “meta description”. That’s a bit of hidden text your site should let you edit, but it can be quite crucial for attracting visitors.
If your main title directly addresses a popular question, that’s great, but it has to grab attention one way or another. That’s its main job. Before they visit your site, searchers will see only your article’s title and maybe its meta description. Make sure both of those give them strong reasons to visit and read your whole article.
Your first paragraph’s job — like that of all the others, but moreso — is to convince visitors to keep reading. If you have a vital point to make, don’t bury it — either tell people what to expect in that first paragraph, or summarise the point right there.
Keep paragraphs short. Brevity sells.
Headings within your article provide essential structure to boost readability. Like your first paragraph, they tell people what you’re about to tell them. So search engines rely on them to confirm what your article is really about.
Finally, we all tend to be a bit blind to our own recent mistakes. It’s hard to proofread your own work effectively when you still remember what you meant. That’s why professional writers often rely on editors to catch their mistakes.
If that’s not an option, then before you publish your article, leave it a day or two and read it afresh — and aloud. You’ll be surprised how many more mistakes, typos or opportunities for improvement you find that way.
As Hemingway said, “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”
What About SEO?
SEO and content marketing work hand-in-hand
If you’ve written an effective answer to a real customer question, your article should naturally contain relevant search keywords. If you’re running paid search ads, you may want to focus more on phrases you’re competing for whilst editing your early draft, as that can reduce the cost of some ads. Otherwise, without access to SEO tools, it’s easy to pick ‘obvious’ phrases that are too competitive to compete for easily in organic (unpaid) searches.
Either way, inserting such phrases naturally without overdoing it can get surprisingly tricky. Besides, this “on-page SEO” is only one small part of SEO. It won’t be enough. Search engines look for external signs of your expertise and authority, too (aka “off-page SEO”). Building high-quality links to your site can be time-consuming, but you won’t get far without them. That goes for your articles, too. While it’s great to build links to your homepage, building relevant links to your articles will also help them to attract more website visitors.
Publish and Be — What? More?
Finished? Not unless you’re willing to wait ages for search engines to find and index your content and for visitors to eventually find it. All of which can easily take weeks or months. Professionally built small business websites can notify search engines when you publish stuff, but that only speeds one step of that process up. So now you’ll need to promote your article.
How? Well again, building links from high-traffic sites is important, but that typically takes a while. So this is where your Google Business Profile and social media profiles come in. Share your post on the channels your potential customers are most likely to use.
Social posts have a very small window of attention though, so make sure you share your articles repeatedly. It’s often possible to automate that, but doing so is beyond the scope of this article. So if you need a hand with doing that — or any of the other steps above — please let me know.
Otherwise, once you’ve published, shared and promoted, it’s time to start on your next article. Because doing this consistently is how you build an audience.
Conclusion — And One Last Tip
If you want people to remember something, tell them at least three times. Tell them what you’re about to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them. That’s why many articles have a conclusion section like this one.
The takeaway here is that while creating and promoting strong non-sales-focused content can be a lot of work, it’s the most cost-effective way to attract more website visitors. It also builds trust in your expertise — the trust that’s vital to make sales. If you need proof, pick up a newspaper. Media barons have got rich from such content marketing for centuries. The good news is that there are writing shortcuts and services to help you attract more website visitors.
