Below is the transcribed version of the video.

Hello everybody welcome to another edition of Feet Up Friday, I am your host Brendan Gilbert. This week we are going to talk about driving more traffic to your website.

The Problem

The most commonly asked question we hear from business owners and marketers is: How do i get more website visits? If you find yourself asking this question, great! How is this great? Well, it’s great because it means you are looking to grow your business and start generating leads via your website. 

Similar questions would be:

  • How do I get more traffic?
  • How can I get more people on my site?

Generally, people who are asking these questions have a website that is stagnant/outdated, in terms of content and freshness, and are not happy with the performance of their website. In contrast there are those who have a new website but need to start generating more traffic; because what's the point of having a Ferrari with no gas? If any of this has hit home with you stick around; we are going to discuss how to get the gas you need to fire that Ferrari up and start turning heads.

The Solution

What is Inbound Marketing?

If you are unfamiliar with the inbound marketing methodology check out a previous edition of Feet Up Friday for a crash course on what is inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing Methodology

The answer to the above questions is to begin implementing the attract phase of the inbound marketing methodology.  Now that you have a basic understanding of inbound marketing it's time to discuss how it can help your business.

The center piece to the attract phase is blogging, some of you may also know it as content marketing, which can bring you highly qualified visitors who are seeking out your products or services.

By using the attract phase of inbound marketing we will get people who are in the research stage of the buying process. Think of a funnel with the top, or widest part of the funnel, being the part that will allow you to capture any potential visitor. The wider this funnel is, the more likely you are to get more visitors on your website.

Below I will discuss the critical fundamentals that compose the attract phase of inbound marketing. This should help you get an understanding of what it takes to start attracting new visitors to your website.

Attract Phase - Keywords

Long Tail Keywords
Long tail keywords are a key part to the success of any new business looking to attract new traffic via a blog. The reason that long tail keywords are so powerful, especially to small businesses, is because they are easier to rank for. Why are they easier to rank for? The answer: not as much competition. Generally, the longer a keyword string the more likely it is to have a lower difficulty score. The lower the difficulty score the easier it is to rank on Google for it. What do I mean by rank? Ranking is simply where Google's algorithm decides to place you on it's SERP, aka search engine result pages. The higher your rank, the more traffic you will receive. This will hopefully mean more customers for your business.

Keyword Research
So what do I do with keywords? Keywords are simply what people type into search engines like Google and Bing. Whatever keyword the user is looking for, the search engines will return links that it thinks relate to the keyword. So you need to determine what you think people are typing in for keywords and start blogging about them. But first you need to investigate the difficulty of each keyword and determine if the keyword is likely to bring you traffic.

   

There are several keyword research tools out there from companies like Moz and Google just to name a few. I like the one from Moz as it gives you a score for each keyword on a scale from 0 - 100%. If you're website is new, or has been sitting stagnant for a few years, don't try to rank for anything over 50% because your domain/page authority isn't likely going to be considered strong enough to grant you high rankings.

   

Another important factor, when researching keywords, is search volume. Search volume gives you a better understanding to the value of the keyword. A low search volume and low difficulty will mean easier ranking but less traffic. So you want to keep that in mind when crafting up your blog title. The blog title is highly important and should include your keywords that you have decided to try and rank for. You also want to be sure you follow  search engine optimization best practices. If you're a bit foggy on SEO then take five and watch our search engine optimization best practices video here.

   
   

Attract Phase - Blogging

Now that you have your keywords and blog title figured out you want to start crafting your blog. The content in your blog post needs to relate to the title and if you've done everything properly you will start generating traffic. The key with blogging is consistency and patience. The more you blog, and the longer the time period, the more traffic you will hopefully see. If you're new to blogging keep it simple and start by doing one a month and slowly increase it to three a week if you can muster.

Time
Don't underestimate the time it takes to properly craft a quality blog post. By the time you have decided on a blog post title and have properly researched keywords you should have at least spent an hour or two figuring all of this out in my opinion. I personally block out at least a full eight hours to completely craft and post a blog. That is why you should start out easy. It's sort of like trying to work out everyday of the week, when you haven't worked out in months, you will probably get burnt out quickly.

Quality
If there is one thing you should hold above everything else it's quality over quantity. Absolutely a cliche, but I don't care. It's simply the truth. If you have content that easily outpace your peers Google will eventually recognize this and reward you with a nice flow of traffic. And here is a little food for thought; a recent study found that companies that blog have 97% more links pointing to their website than those who don't. That's essential having a funnel that is 97% bigger than your competition! What does that mean? It means more traffic and customers.

Attract Phase - Social Media

Social media is great for a quick turn around in terms of getting instant traffic and it can also help improve you ranking position in Google. So as an example we are going to use this edition of Feet Up Friday. Once I have posted the blog I will share it on social media and hopefully someone who is interested in increasing their website traffic will click on the post and find this information useful. If I am lucky - shameless plug, please share ;) - people will share my blog post and Google will recognize that this content was valuable to that person. In addition, people who are friends with the nice person who shared the post will now see it and it increases the odds of a higher rank! So it's a double dip - cough George Costanza - and who doesn't like to double dip?

Social media can be tricky. If you're trying to reach a new audience twitter is a good place to start by using hashtags to help make it easier for people to find your content. LinkedIn is great for relaying to your professional network, which in some cases can be your best leads, a new product or sharing your latest blog post. Facebook is good for a lot of b2c companies as it has a more casual approach in my opinion. These scenarios are not guaranteed and will be different for your company. If you're new to social media be sure to try different things and see how people react to your content, whether it's a blog post or an image of your team.

Summary

Providing useful content that answers people's questions, solves their problems, and educates them is the foundation of inbound marketing. The attract phase that we have just discussed will help you get more visits and can leverage your website in ways you never imagined. One thing to take away from this is that your website can be your best salesman, a salesman who never sleeps, eats, or takes vacation. All of this starts with the first step which is the attract phase of inbound marketing.

That's it, that's all I got for this edition of Feet Up Friday, I am Brendan Gilbert with PatraCompany. Have an A1 Day.

P.S.
Be sure to check out our Introduction to Business Blogging Guide. This guide will help you use that Ferrari to blow the doors off your competition.

An Introduction To Business Blogging