Getting customers through a website is the order of the day in this age, if you want to take advantage of the online space you need to optimise your website for that purpose.
Having a website for your business is one of the best things you can do to increase customers and increase your visibility online. Since millions of Nigerians are now active online, looking for ways to increase your online visibility should be a priority.
A website can serve as a place where you display what your business is all about, the vision, the mission, how to contact your business and the like. It can also serve as a place where you display and sell products to people online.
However, having a website alone does not guarantee that you will have customers or traffic. It’s just like renting a shop offline stacked with your products and then you close the shop and expect people to buy your products.
It’s not magic, you will have to market your products to people, and you will also need to rent your brick-and-mortar shop in a strategic location.
The same principle applies online, to get customers to come to your website you will need to perform certain tasks for people to be aware that you offer the products and services.
This post will attempt to show you proven ways to bring customers to your website, keep reading to find out how.
Related: 200+ Best Products To Sell Online In Nigeria And Make Money
1. Perform Search engine optimisation ( SEO )
Search engine optimization is strategically positioning your website in a way that it will be available for search engines to access with ease. It also means creating great content that can compete for the top positions on the first page of Google Search Engine result pages for specific keywords.
When your website is optimised well, people can locate your websites when they make queries for content you have written or products and services you have written.
There are three types of SEO
1. Onpage SEO
2. Offpage
3. Technical SEO
The following are ways you can use SEO to attract customers to your website.
1. Use keywords
While creating content on your website, you should have keywords that are used by targeted audiences on search engines. When you create content around these keywords, you will attract the right audience.
Your aim should be to look for keywords your prospective clients are likely to search for online and create content around them to bring them to your website.
They may not buy your products or services immediately, but they will become aware of your products and services, increasing your chances of getting them to patronize at the right time.
2. Gain backlinks
Backlinks are like votes of confidence from other websites to prove that you have content worth linking to. What are backlinks? They are links received from another website to your website.
When your website has unique content worth linking to, people will gladly link to your website which will encourage search engines to bring up your content when people make queries.
Keywords research tools and experts have created a way to rank the authority of a website by the number of backlinks and other factors. This ranking method is called Domain authority.
Experts have discovered that websites with high domain authority tend to be favoured more than those with low domain authority, so getting backlinks for your website is something you should consider seriously.
You can get backlinks by writing guest posts and creating unique & comprehensive content. When you do so, you are most likely to gain backlinks continuously.
Related: How To Improve Your Website Ranking On Google in Nigeria
3. Perform competition analysis
Competition analysis allows you to see what your competitors are doing right and not right, enabling you to see areas you can improve on.
You cannot be the only one in your niche; there will be other people doing something similar to yours, so checking what they are doing and how you can improve on it is a good way to attract customers to your website.
4. Use Videos
Video content has proven to be one of the most effective ways of advertising online, if you can employ video content on your website you will attract and retain a lot of customers.
You can create content with your industry keywords in mind, not just popular trends but videos that answer people’s questions and desires.
5. Create content
Without content, you will miss out on the opportunity to get a lot of customers. Content like audio, text and video.
You need to create content that can attract the right audience to your website and turn them into customers. This is where blogging comes to play because it is a good marketing tool that you can use to increase sales. We will talk more about blogging later in this post.
2. Use Pay Per Click ( PPC )
Pay-per-click is a fast way of bringing traffic to a website by paying Ad networks like Google AdWords to send traffic to your website.
When people make queries on Google for content related to yours, it will appear at the top. When people search on YouTube, your video ad will appear, when people use mobile apps your ads will appear.
Do you now see how PPC can bring traffic to your website?
It is called Pay per click because you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
This is a quick way of bringing traffic to a website compared to SEO which takes years.
3. Use Social Media ( SM )
Social media is one of the places you can get customers easily. When you create content on social media consistently, you can build a great following that will become a huge source of income for your business.
How to engage with people on social
1. Use visuals
Use videos and images on your social media platforms to gain more engagement since research has proved that people are more attracted to visuals than other forms of content
2. Reply to comments and chats of your followers
When people comment on your posts, try to reply to them, when they chat you up, reply to them. This makes them know that there’s a person behind the social media pages that cares about their opinion. It also shows that you care.
3. Create relatable content
Let your content be what your target audience can relate to easily. It shouldn’t be strange to them, by doing so, you will get more engagements.
4. Show them you care about them
Perform little gestures occasionally to show that you care about your followers. You can do giveaways, give them gifts, or organise interesting events that they can attend.
4. Blog on your website
Blogging is a very strategic way of attracting customers to your website because it is a major way of attracting people. Business blogs are used to answer questions that potential customers are asking online.
A blog was initially an online diary where people post about what’s on their minds or about activities they do. Gradually, marketers realize that people are attracted to such blogs, so they decided to use them as a tool for businesses to engage with prospective clients online.
If your business has a website, it is wise to create a blog alongside the website.
We will discuss how you can use a blog to attract customers to your website.
1. Write content that answers people’s questions
When you are writing content on your blog, you are first to perform keyword research to discover the questions that are being asked by your target audience online, try to know how they ask questions, their intentions for asking the questions and how you can come in to answer the questions.
If you can do this, you will attract the right audience to your customers, that can become customers if you use the right call to action and marketing funnel.
There are keyword research tools like Uber suggest, SEMrush, Google keyword planner, Google search console and the like, that you can use to get the questions that they are asking.
2. Make your content simple to understand
Writing big words to impress your audience and thinking you will win them over that way is far from the truth. To win your clients over, you need to use words that they are familiar with and easily relate to.
So make your blog post simple and understandable so that they will keep coming back to your blog for further information. Research has shown that a large percentage of people search online first before making a purchase.
If you can answer them simply and genuinely, you will win them over to use your products or services.
3. Create a captivating title
The titles of your blog posts are also significant, you need to write a title that will captivate the minds of your prospective clients. If your blog post is the best post ever written on a particular subject and you fail to use the right title, you run the risk of not having many readers on your blog.
Therefore, you need to learn to write titles with hooks that can attract more people to visit your website.
4. Make your blog post comprehensive
If you are writing on a particular subject, make sure you exhaust everything you can about the subject, doing so will help you achieve two things. Firstly, people that visit may not see the need to go to your competitors because you will be able to answer them satisfactorily, and secondly, your content will rank on Google, because you will be able to use more keywords and LSI keywords in the blog post.
5. Have a clear call to action
Have a target of what you plan to achieve even before writing the blog post, ask yourself, “what are the aims of the blog posts?” “How can I lead them to use my products or services?”
If you can answer these questions, you will be clear on the right CTA to use.
5. Make your website beautiful
Have you noticed that people are always attracted to anything flashy and beautiful? Your website is not excluded, the attractiveness of your website is one of the things that will make customers keep scrolling to your website to get information.
When your website’s User interface is not attractive enough to your customers, they may not stay long to know what you are offering on your website.
1. Add only the necessary features
Don’t add unnecessary features on your website that do not carry any importance because it can make your website too cluttered. The design should be simple, so customers will easily know the purpose of your website as soon as they visit your homepage.
2. Design for the customers’ first
When designing your website, your customers should be your priority, therefore, you need to think like them. Do you think they will like what you are designing? What colours and images will appeal to them?
3. Let the colours align with your brand
Let your brand colours reflect on every page of your website. Keep the colours simple.
Experts advise that 2 to 4 colours are okay, anything above that could hurt the way people engage with it.
4 Choose the right fonts
Having the right fonts on a design is very important, experts know the right combination of fonts that makes a beautiful design. If you are designing it yourself, seek the advice of experts to help you with the fonts that will do the magic for your website.
5. Add visual elements
Let your website have images and videos that tell people more about your business and let every visual have a meaning.
Images shouldn’t be there only for decoration, each visual should have a purpose.
6. Use a simple layout
The layout of your website should be simple to navigate, so your customers won’t find it difficult to get whatever information they are searching for on your website.
6. Create special offers
Sometimes, to increase the number of customers visiting your website, you can create a special offer that the website visitors cannot resist. These people can turn into repeat customers.
7. Write guest posts
Guest Posts are posts written on another website to get backlinks. Backlinks are like a vote of confidence from other websites to your website, proving that you have something of value to offer.
You can gain backlinks by
1. Look for leading bloggers in your niche
You need to search for bloggers in your niche that accept guest posts and pitch to them your desire to guest post on their websites. If you try and you receive no response or a negative response. Don’t get discouraged, try again.
Another way to know where to get backlinks is by checking the source of your competitor’s backlinks.
2. Pitch them
Send them great pitches that show that you know what you are doing and they have a lot to gain when they accept your guest posts.
3. Write guest posts
You should put more effort into writing guest posts than your content so that you will greatly impress the readers on the person’s website that could become your visitors too.
8. Use squeeze pages
Squeeze pages are websites created to gain leads. These pages normally entice people to join an email list.
When people join your email list, you aim to keep feeding them with helpful resources that you know will impress, educate or inspire them. After a while, you can send them offers for your products and services.
Digital marketers like Subry claim that this is a proven way to get repeat customers.
9. Use Email marketing
Email marketing is the use of email to market your products and services to prospective customers. To start marketing you need to perform some specific tasks
1. Choose your email provider
There are different email service providers you can use to send emails to customers online, these email providers have templates you can select from to send your emails. Examples of some email providers are MailChimp, constant contact, Sendin blue, HubSpot and drip.
2. Have a target
The next thing you are to do is to know why you want to send email newsletters, how frequently you intend to send the email and other factors.
Planning your email newsletters will make them more effective.
3. Create your email list
Try different means to see that people add to your email list, and use enticing words to tell them the benefits of joining your email lists.
4. Engage
Create interesting content and send it to them consistently. Divide your audience into sections based on their time of registration and interest.
5. Test
You can try more than one strategy to see the one that works better.
10. Use Google my business
Google has created a way for businesses to be located online with ease. It allows businesses to add their location contact and other business information.
Customers are allowed to rate and write reviews about the business.
You will need to place your business on the platform to improve Local SEO and bring in more customers to your website.
Related: 7 Reasons Why You Need A Website for Your Small Business Now
11. Organize your website page
Your website ought to be organized so that visitors can locate what they are looking for without difficulty. To do so, you should have specific features on your website
1. Self-service
Allow customers to perform some tasks by themselves on your website.
2. Social sharing
Provide the links on your website for customers to share your content on their favourite social media platforms.
3. Call to action
Strategically lead customers to perform specific actions you desire.
13. Pop-up messages
Use pop-up messages on your website to lead customers to perform tasks. This task could be registering for your email list, downloading an ebook, or joining a webinar.
Conclusion
These are some of the best tips for using your website to bring customers to our business. Try to apply the tip that resonates with you and watch your business grow.
Related: How to Set Up a Website for Your Small Business in Nigeria