Driving Traffic to Your Website

In this blog post I’m going to introduce you to something called Search Engine Optimisation. Now you may or may not have heard this term before, but people in the know refer to it as SEO, and it’s a big deal in the web world.

In order to sell anything online, you need to attract visitors to your website. The more traffic you have, the more potential selling opportunities you have. More selling opportunities mean more revenue potential.

How does that translate for an author? Well, what good is a great website that showcases your passion and writing talent if no one ever sees it? To grab the attention of agents and publishers you need them to be able to find your website. Better still, you want to create a buzz that gets noticed.

Search engines such as Google are a major source of web traffic. When internet users search for a specific term or “keyword” by typing it into www.google.com they are presented with a list of websites with content relevant to that particular keyword.

The goal of any successful online business is to get your site to rank highly on that search results page. That is where Search Engine Optimisation comes in…

Now there is a whole science behind writing web copy that effectively uses those keywords to help the search engines find your site but as a beginner, you don’t need to go that far.

It helps to start with your keywords i.e. the term internet users will most likely be searching for when browsing the web. To continue with our crime writing example from last time… if you are a qualified forensic pathologist and you’ve written a potentially best selling crime novel, you’re going to look for keywords such as “crime”, “pathology”, “forensic” and so on… You will also include key phrases such as “crime novel”, and “forensic pathology”. This way if someone searches for the full term, your site will pop up.

The next bit is easy. When you’re arranging the content on your site, make sure you include these keywords and phrases in your website copy. Often. This enables the search engines to “pick up” what your site is all about. Include them in headings and main descriptions. Include them in your book reviews, your biography and everywhere else you can.

Tip: On the flip side, however, it’s important not to destroy how the page reads because you’ve used too many of the same keywords. This will turn visitors away and all your efforts will have been for nothing.

There are other ways besides organic SEO to rank your website highly on search engines and this is to pay for the top spot. Google has a convenient service called Google AdWords, where you can arrange to have your website appear at the top of the search results page for your chosen keywords.

Payment is based on a daily budget that you set yourself, and Google will display the ad (advertised link) to your website as many times as possible within your agreed budget. This gives you control over who sees your ad and how often.

It’s surprisingly easy to set up and only takes a few minutes. It’s a handy tool to familiarise yourself with if you’re keen on driving traffic to your website and you don’t have the time to optimise it yourself.

You can also hire a web copywriting or SEO specialist to do the job for you. The once off expense is usually worth it if you’re new to the web or launching your website. After that, with a few lessons, you can probably maintain your site yourself and tweak the SEO where necessary.

A professional web copywriter not only re-writes your website copy to help search engines, they also write the copy in a way that helps turn visits into sales. This is called conversions, or if you really want to sound impressive, your conversion rate.

It’s not enough to merely drive traffic to your site; you need to make sure those visitors take the next step which is usually one of three things:

1. Call you with a query
2. Sign up to your newsletter or service
3. Buy your product

These three actions are known as the call to action and I’m going to explain all about this in my next post.

Yours in successful online marketing,
Louise Rose-Innes

Author and Web Copywriter
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