You’ve just decided that you want to build an online presence and have settled on building a website. Congratulations, that’s a positive first step to making your rock star content available to your visitors.

Assuming you recognize that Google values authoritative, problem-solving content, here are two essential elements for both newcomers and experienced veterans to boost website traffic and generate leads.

1) Ability to share your content

Giving people the ability to share your content gives your site a boost from two sides. One; from a traffic perspective. Two; potentially from an SEO and Google ranking perspective.

Controversially in 2012, Searchmetrics found that social signals to your web content was the biggest ranking factor in Google.

Now, this has been debated until the cows come home with Google even claiming their bots can’t crawl social media links, but in 2018 social media is even bigger than it was.

Whatever side of the fence you’re on, it’s worth providing your users with the ability to share your content if they wish to.

At worst, you’ll get traffic from these huge social media sites which is especially helpful if you can’t yet afford SEO services from a marketing agency. At best, Google will see people sharing your content and give you a nod of approval in the rankings.

If you’re using WordPress, the WP Social Sharing plugin in the WordPress plugin area has great reviews and is lightweight.

Being lightweight is important as your visitors are unlikely to wait more than 3 seconds for your website to load before giving up. Most social sharing plugins are quite resourced intensive.

Bonus tip: Ensure that the plugin does not load for mobile users. Research shows that 99.8% of visitors on mobile do not share content. At least, via the sharing buttons on your website.

Making sure the plugin doesn’t load on mobile will keep your website loading faster.

Crucial for mobile users; they may leave if a page doesn’t load in one second.

2) A method to contact your visitors again

Readers who enjoyed your content may want to hear more from you.

It would be a shame if you didn’t give them the option or it was hidden somewhere difficult to find on your website traffic.

You can avoid this by signing up for one of the many email marketing services out there.

They can be expensive, especially if you aren’t making money already but Benchmark offers a free account that allows you to have 2000 subscribers.

This should be more than enough to get you started.

Create a form in your account and place it on your website traffic for readers to sign up.

After sign-up, send valuable content and tips to build trust as an expert. Your website visitors are much more likely to buy from you if they trust you as a person. Remember, people don’t buy products, people buy people.

2 Simple Things Every Website Needs For More Traffic and Leads

 

Quick tip: to get visitors to sign up to your newsletter, offer them something of value for free. Perhaps an ebook, a course or even just your article in a ‘PDF ebook’ format!

Bonus tip: If your reader clicks on something that triggers your opt-in form to pop-up, they are more likely to sign up.

when someone clicks a ‘Get your free ebook’ link and an opt-in form appears, asking for their email to receive the book, they’ve essentially requested it.

When an opt-in form pops up without request, it’s likely to irritate visitors, unlike when they willingly engage with it.

Conclusion

In summary, writing content that your readers absolute love is the hard part. If you’re excelling in that area, it’d be a shame to lose readers who can’t find or connect with you.

Incorporate these two key ingredients into your recipe for a flawless online marketing strategy.