Owning a small business in 2023 can be both stressful and rewarding. You’re charting unknown waters each and every day, you’re making all the big decisions along the way, and, when things go swimmingly, you’ll feel an immense sense of satisfaction as you watch your business grow and prosper.
But just like owning any sized business, there will be challenges and hurdles, and it’s not always plain sailing. If one of your main concerns for 2023 is a lack of website traffic and/or engagement on your site, there are some steps you can take to stimulate growth via an increased number of visitors to your page, ideally turning clicks into customers in the process.
With that in mind, here are some things you can do to increase traffic to your small business website in 2023.
Is Your Small Business Website User-Friendly?
A user-friendly website that is free of glitches, bugs and other issues should be a top priority when trying to increase traffic. If a visitor lands on your site only to find pages slow to load, the menus hard to use, and information difficult to find, then they will click away as fast as they arrived.
Put yourself in the shoes of your target market and ask yourself if you’re providing the kind of user experience they want, need and expect. And don’t forget, just as the site needs to be user-friendly, it also needs to be eye-catching in terms of layout.
To explore this vital facet of small business engagement further, do check out these useful ways to improve your website from a customer’s perspective.
Is Your SEO On Point?
Es, see, who? Don’t worry, SEO is simply a tech acronym which stands for Search Engine Optimization. Essentially, it’s what will help you stay on page one of Google instead of drifting off to the unseen, barren wastelands of page two. And if you want to get noticed, trusted and patronised to the full, then page one is where you want to be. Key elements of a cohesive SEO strategy include:
- Be clever with keywords. Keywords are a crucial part of the SEO equation. However, you need to be clever with them. Using keywords on your website that relate directly to your business is clearly important, but try to get creative by discovering other keywords that your target audience might use and implement them in your content, web pages, headings and image descriptions.
- Create valuable content. Keywords mean very little without great content. But remember that content isn’t just a vehicle for keywords—to convert customers, you need to offer valuable resources. Great content comes in many shapes and sizes, but we recommend that you create blog posts, videos, infographics, how-to guides, guest blog posts and product reviews to attract new prospects to your website.
- Getting serious about backlinks. Without a robust backlink plan in place, the company will struggle to move up in the rankings. Sometimes the problem isn’t that the company is ignoring the significance of backlinks, rather they don’t know how to create them or what would be most helpful. Hiring professional link-building services in the UK can be a solution, as you can then rely on the experts to guide the process.
It’s Time To Get Social
In the UK alone, it is estimated that there are more than 57 million people active on social media in 2023, and that’s a number that is always growing. If your company isn’t active on social media, it’s obviously missing out on a huge opportunity. And don’t forget, just as your social media posts should link to your website, so should your website link back to your socials, too.
If you haven’t taken the leap into the social media world yet, firstly, get with the times! Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and TikTok have millions (sometimes billions) of users – and these are users who might be interested in engaging with your business.
Social media platforms might seem complicated at first. However, creating engaging and valuable content will improve the visibility of your business by attracting prospects to your website, and represents an affordable, relatively low-effort way to promote your products with maximum reach.
The Bottom Line
There are plenty of other ways to stimulate growth, including getting a keen grasp on controlling the details, modernising your advertising output, and investing in networking. Check out these tips on increasing your business visibility for more on this essential topic!