So you’ve hired a freelance web designer to assemble the WordPress site that perfectly suits your brand’s requirements – but are you then just sitting on it, or actually doing something with it? What separates those online businesses that only attract, perhaps, 10 or 20 visits a day, from those that see thousands of visitors?
The answer is conscious action to attract more traffic, even once the web designer’s work is done. Here are some of the things that will most help you to boost interest in your site.
Pore over your analytics
A lot of owners of WordPress sites don’t spend enough time checking their analytics; Google Analytics should be considered almost essential, and you should check it once a week, or perhaps even more often than that.
One good idea is to check your analytics after every ‘event’ – for example, the posting of a blog or podcast, or the addition of a new page to the site. You’ll need to wait for a day after the ‘event’ before checking, as it will take this long to register, but doing so regularly helps to give you a sense of what is working on your site and what isn’t.
What is bringing the greatest positive response from your visitors, and which you therefore need to do more of… and what needs to be quickly abandoned due to how it depresses your traffic? Your site’s analytics will give you answers to these important questions.
Be savvy with your blog titles
While it is obviously important for the main content of your WordPress blog posts to be well-written, the titles of those blog posts must also be eye-catching – it’s no less crucial than it is for the headlines of a newspaper.
Particularly when you share links to your blog content via other platforms like Twitter, the title may be all that the viewer initially sees. With this in mind, don’t hesitate to experiment with different title formats that are known to attract attention, such as ‘5 reasons for…’, ‘What you should know about…’ and ‘How to…’
Reduce your image sizes
This is one of the many ways you can help to speed up your website – neither human users nor the search engines like slow websites, so this can be a great ‘quick win’ measure for SEO.
WordPress will resize your images and will also create images at 2x the size for retina screens but you should also consider a plugin like Smush to compress and optimise your images for the web. It is still good to adjust the size of the original image prior to uploading to ensure you don’t take up unnecessary space on your hosting account.
Use keywords intelligently
While keywords have certainly not ceased to be relevant for the purposes of search engine optimisation (SEO), they should be used in a manner that reflects the actual terms being entered into online search boxes by your target consumers.
Consider the titles, meta descriptions and main page content on your WordPress site; are you missing opportunities to be more specific and relevant about what casual searchers can expect to find on a given page to address their needs?
Introduce polls
Whether in your blog content or on your main website, a poll can help to boost engagement among your visitors, giving them an obvious means of participating in your site content. It may also tempt them to revisit your site simply to discover the poll results.
Working with a freelance web designer
You do need to make a certain amount of effort on an ongoing basis to ensure your WordPress site continues to enjoy a high level of good-quality traffic. However, it’s also important for your site to be designed in a suitably optimised fashion from the beginning.
Talk to me and find out how a freelance web designer can create the ideal WordPress site for your business or brand in accordance with your bespoke requirements.
