If your answer to these two questions is either ‘I don’t know’ or ‘not many’, then it is perhaps time to have a rethink of your strategy and a revamp of your website.
But just how do you go about identifying and then trying to expand your website’s audience? Well, there is no magic button but here are a few things you can do.
Who is Visiting Your Website?
While you are never going to know everything about the people that are visiting your site, you can find out a little information about them by asking them to fill out a survey or a quick poll. But alongside these more obvious methods, there are also many pieces of software that can help you measure and view the key data metrics of your site.
Google Analytics is perhaps the most popular programme for really trying to get to the bottom of what makes the people who look at your site tick. Analytics can help you to measure a number of important things about your site:
- The amount of people who come to your site and leave straight away (bounce rates)
- The return rates and the amount of time that each visitor tends to stay for
- What keywords or phrases people are typing into search engines to find your website
- What the most popular pages and posts on your site are
- Whether most of your site traffic is coming from search engines, links on other websites and social media, or from people coming directly to your site
Increasing the Visitors to Your Website
The first thing you will need to understand is that increasing the traffic to your website is most likely going to be a long and fairly time consuming process.
We don’t really have enough time or space to get down into the nitty gritty of SEO and hardcore link building, but we can touch on a few essentials.
Firstly, you need to have good quality original content that is regularly updated on your site. This can be in the form of guides, blog posts, product reviews or just links to funny videos on Youtube. Another good thing to do is to add a video that is relevant to your site to your landing page. However, the one thing that will make your site look amateur and increase your bounce rate is poor writing, spelling and grammar so be careful!
You are also going to need to build up the link profile of your website. This is best done organically through exchanging links, guest posting on other sites and having sites link back to you because of your content.
With regards to your actual website itself there are a number of things that you can do:
- Make sure your pages are balanced, easy to navigate, not too busy and have clean backgrounds
- Make sure that your text font is easy to read
- Break up your text into easily readable chunks
- If there is any horizontal scrolling on your site, try you best to get rid of it!
I have a simple test: take ten minutes to research what a log file analyzer is on Google. If after ten minutes you can’t tell why you would want one, then maybe it’s time to call in an expert.
James Duvalis a freelance IT man who helps companies work out what they are doing wrong on the internet and helps them to fix it. When not writing blogs for companies such as the makers of Opensphere software, James likes to ride through the English countryside on his motorbike.
Source http://site-reference.com
How to Identify and Expand Your Website Audience