You’ve spent a lot of time and effort building your WordPress website, but how do you get the word out to visitors? Here are 8 tried-and-test ways to market your website and grow your audience!
1.Use the Hustle Plugin to Help Convert Visitors
Hustle is a plugin offered by WPMU Dev that helps you turn visitors into subscribers, leads, and customers.Sure, you could go the manual route, so to speak, and create all of the visuals you need to grab your visitors’ attention. But, with WordPress, there’s likely a plugin that will make the process easier.
With Hustle, you can create and display appealing pop-up and slide-in messages, as well as prompts for the user to visit your social media accounts and opt-in to your email list. It comes with animations that you can use, so you don’t have to bring your own visuals.If you want to encourage your visitors to share your content, you can take advantage of the easy-to-use social share icons provided by Hustle. You can style these icons to match your website.
To make sure that your work is effective (or not), you can see which users see what aspects of your marketing campaign. You’ll get up-to-date metrics on what was shown to whom and what that user then did with the information.
All in all, the Hustle plugin for WordPress makes it easy for you to display information to your user and encourage them to take the next steps, whether it is to sign up for your email list or to share one of your website’s pages with their social followers.
2. Run A/B Tests on Your Website to See What Works
Just because you think something will work doesn’t mean that it actually does. By running A/B tests on your site, you can find the wording, designs, and calls-to-action that resonate best with your visitors. Leave no stone unturned; titles, link text, images, the content displayed in your pop-ups and slide-ins — everything should be fair game for A/B testing.
Just because something is the default on WordPress (e.g., the sidebar is located on the right or the comments box is a certain size) doesn’t mean that it’s the best way to do it. WordPress is infinitely customizable, so why not customize it so that it appeals as much as possible to your visitors?
3. Make It Clear What You Want People to Do
Tell your users what you want them to do.
Rather than letting users “guess” as to what their next steps should be, consider being explicit. Show pop-ups or slide-ins that encourage users to sign up for your email list (possible in exchange for something, such as protected content or a product discount). Add calls-to-action at the bottom of your blog posts or product descriptions. Design your webpages so that there’s only one thing the user should do at that point (e.g., add the product to their cart).
We’re guessing that you want people to actively engage with your WordPress site, not just passively take in its contents and do nothing else.
4. Improve your SEO
One of the biggest drivers of traffic to your website is a search engine. As such, Search Engine Optimization should be a key part of your marketing strategy.
The following three steps are low-hanging fruit that you can take advantage of almost immediately.
- Make Sure Your Website is Responsive
One of the biggest sources of traffic for many websites is Google, and to take advantage of this, you need to make sure that your website is findable by the bots Google uses to “crawl” the internet and index websites for easy access whenever someone searches for a term relevant to your site.
Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites over those that aren’t, so to improve your chances of landing on the search engine giant’s front pages, make sure that your WordPress theme is responsive/mobile-friendly. Look for options that are marked as such, but be aware that you may need to make some manual tweaks even with those that claim to be “mobile-friendly” to improve your results.
- Make Sure Your Website is Fast
Not only do search engines care about how fast your website is, but users also don’t like webpages that take too long to load. WordPress sometimes has the reputation of being slow — because it can be used for so many applications and by so many people (some with lots of technical knowledge, some not), there’s a lot that’s built-in to the platform that might not be helpful to you.
Here are some ways to improve how quickly your WordPress website renders for your users.
- Compress your files so that the files that are sent to your users are as small as possible (and therefore get to the user as quickly as possible); you can do so by enabling Gzip compression
- Optimize your images. A picture is worth a thousand words, but only if it loads quickly enough for people to see it. Choose the best format for your usage scenario, reduce the image’s size, and compress it
- Minify your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript — remove any white space, comments, and other elements that appear in your files but do not affect the behaviour of your code; remember, the smaller your files, the better
- Avoid redirects; sometimes, redirecting users is necessary (if you change URLs, you’ll want users to find your new site, not see error pages saying the page they want can’t be found), but redirects take time
- Create an XML Sitemap
An XML Sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website. What this does is help the search engine know exactly what pages are available and what content is available on those pages. These are great for you to help Google help your visitors find what they’re looking for.
WordPress will generate a sitemap for you automatically, but there are plugins, such as the Google XML Sitemap Generator, that creates better ones.
5. Take Your SEO to the Next Step with SmartCrawl
The previous three steps on improving your SEO are great beginner steps, but there is so much more. Rather than tackling these on your own, we recommend a full-featured tool, such as SmartCrawl, to help improve your website as much as possible.
With SmartCrawl, some of the things that will take your WordPress website to the next level in terms of SEO include:
- The ability to create regular reports so you know how your SEO efforts are succeeding (or not)
- Managing how your website’s title and description appear in search engines (based on your keyword research, which SmartCrawl helps with)
- Managing your website’s content sharing on social platforms
- Analyzing your individual pages to identify how it can be improved
- The ability to automatically linking relevant pages so that users stay on your website and see more content (one of the factors Google considers is how long people stay on your web pages)
6. Protect Your Website
Last thing: now that you’ve put all of that work into your website, you will need to protect it. After all, nothing will kill the marketing momentum you gain and your customer’s trust in you than to get your website hacked.
One way to improve the security of your WordPress site immensely is by using Defender. Defender is a plugin that protects you from malware and those seeking unauthorized access to your website’s back-end, puts a firewall around your site, and scans and monitors for threats.
Wrapping Up
Building a WordPress website is an investment for sure, and to get the most out of your investment, you’ll want to market your website, drumming up as much traffic for it as possible. In this article, we covered eight techniques you can implement to drive as many visitors to your website as possible.
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