SMEs and VSEs: 8 best practices for generating traffic to your website

Having a website is essential these days for any small or medium-sized business. But it still needs to generate traffic. How do you achieve this when competition is fierce and resources are potentially limited?

We have listed 8 relatively simple best practices for you to implement, which you can apply without spending too much — or even do yourselves initially.

Download the ebook "How to turn your website into a lead generator through educational content" for inspiration in your web communications strategy!

1. Build your email list

Around 75% of visitors who land on a website will never return to it. The drop-off is therefore enormous.

To maximise your chances, building an email list is essential. Email communication gives you a direct link to users, in a way that even social media cannot always match.

Email is a powerful tool. So never miss an opportunity to capture a visitor's email address — by offering your newsletter in particular — to bring them back to your site regularly.

2. Optimise your SEO with Yoast SEO

The Yoast SEO plugin makes it easy to fill in the meta tags for your pages and articles. It is the ideal tool for improving your search engine optimisation effortlessly, and the most comprehensive of its kind.

It also tells you, on the one hand, whether your SEO is well optimised (based on the focus keyword you have entered) and, on the other hand, whether your page is readable and enjoyable for a visitor. For both aspects, the plugin advises you by explaining what is missing and how to improve it on your pages.

3. Work on your internal linking

Internal linking plays an important part in SEO. It refers to the links between your pages and blog articles. Internal linking gives search engines information about your site and its architecture.

Good internal linking connects the various pages dealing with the same topic to one another, and points as far as possible to parent pages — key pages where you want to direct your traffic.

4. Make social sharing and interaction easy

It is no secret that social media is a powerful source of web traffic. And it is not all about the social networks themselves. Many sites include sharing buttons directly on their pages; with a single click, your page or article can find itself shared on your visitors' feeds.

Specific tools can even pre-populate a tweet for the user. They simply need to click to quote a sentence from your site, citing the source, on their Twitter account.

Along the same lines, plugins allow you to embed a Facebook comments section directly at the bottom of your pages. Comment sections on a website are not always convenient, in that some require users to create an account in order to comment. A visitor may feel like reacting at a given moment, but if they have to sign up somewhere to do so, they will probably abandon the idea: the perceived effort may be too great to sustain that initial impulse.

5. Share old posts

If you already make a habit of sharing your content on social media, that is excellent. But it is worth knowing that posts on these networks have a temporary and relatively short lifespan — particularly on Twitter, where it is a matter of just a few hours.

To be visible, you obviously cannot create new content (a page, an article, a promotion) to share every two hours. To compensate, you can instead relay the same message a second (or third, or fourth, etc.) time at regular intervals.

Certain tools such as Missinglettr can even automate these posts. However, be sure to vary the wording for each one! Twitter, in particular, rejects tweets that are duplicated word for word.

6. Optimise your site speed

To improve your site, you can add visual content (photos, videos) and specific plugins — all elements that can drive traffic but can also significantly slow your site down. And a slow site is one your visitors will flee from.

Several practices can bring your pages back to a fast and acceptable speed. Caching plugins, web-optimised images, or an external provider such as Relaxx will all contribute to a fast, efficient site.

To gauge your site's speed, you can check it for free on Google PageSpeed Insights.

7. Secure your site with an SSL certificate

An SSL certificate secures the data on your site. In practical terms, it changes your URL from http to https, which reassures your visitors. This is all the more important for an e-commerce site where banking details are involved, but it applies to all types of site.

An SSL certificate also helps your site's SEO — a practice Google decided to implement precisely to encourage webmasters to adopt such a certificate. As a result, SSL is becoming the norm.

To improve your SEO, reassure your visitors and secure your data, switch to SSL. Your traffic can only benefit.

8. Analyse your site

Wanting to improve your pages is an excellent thing, but the analysis phase is all too often forgotten — and yet it is essential. Without it, how can you tell whether your efforts are paying off? How can you know which aspects to correct, which pages to improve?

Google Analytics is a particularly well-known tool in this area, and it is easy to install on your site. But there are equivalents, such as Kissmetrics, AFS Analytics, and many others. Take your pick.

We hope these 8 best practices will help you better identify the areas for improvement on your website. Rooted in content and the concept of a living, active site, these are broadly easy elements to put in place that can, over the long term, make a real difference.

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