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Steps to Create a Converting Website

Published on 11.07.2024 by Tracey Chizoba Fletcher

Businesses and even individuals create websites primarily to increase the visibility of their brands, products, or services. That means the more visitors you receive to your site, the greater your chances of success. Unfortunately, most website owners struggle to drive traffic to their sites.

To do that, you should start strategizing before creating the website. This is because factors such as the design and usability of a website will affect its ranking and, ultimately, the traffic you get. Fortunately, this article will guide you on the steps you need to take to drive traffic to your website.

Steps to Creating a Website to Drive Traffic

To receive traffic to your site, you need to follow these ten steps:

Determine Your Website Objective

Before creating a website, you must determine what you are trying to achieve. Is it to drive traffic, increase brand awareness, generate leads, or improve user engagement? Once you have determined your goal, you must consider the resources needed to meet those goals. Consider your budget and the people responsible for the different aspects of your business.

Determine Your Target Audience

This is closely related to the object, but it's worth mentioning. Also, consider your target audience and how you will reach them. A target audience is a group of users characterized by a certain demographic or behavior. For instance, you might have female athletes aged between 18 and 30 as your target audience.

Understanding your target audience will help you create a website that addresses their needs and pain points. Then, you can design a website that meets their needs and create content that addresses their pain points. There are several ways in which you can determine your target audience. These are:

Using Google Analytics 

This is a great tool for showing your audience's details and interests. It will show you important website insights by location, age, and gender. When used well, this tool can be great for showing who is visiting your website and the content they are interested in.

Create a Reader and Buyer Persona 

You can define your target audience using a reader’s or buyer’s persona, a rough representation of your ideal customer, or demographics such as age, location, sex, income, and gender. Remember that a reader’s persona and a buyer's persona should almost be identical. 

However, a reader's persona usually focuses on informative content to help them solve their problems, while the buyer's persona focuses on your products or services. This fosters the need to write content for each persona. For instance, while the content for a reader's persona can focus on solving a problem, the content for the buyer’s persona can be a buying guide to help them choose a product.

Check Social Media Analytics

Determine when your social media audience is most engaged with your audience. Is it when you post memes on Facebook or create a Twitter meme? This data can provide important clues about the content your audience is mostly interested in. However, you need to remember that every social media channel is different, so it might help to look into different channel analytics to get a clearer picture. 

For instance, TikTok has a younger demographic between 16 and 30, while Facebook has an older demographic. Twitter also focuses on short-form content, while Facebook focuses more on long-form content. On the other hand, Instagram focuses on visually appealing content; therefore, such content would perform better on the platform.

Check Your Historical Data

Historical data is important for one reason: It will show you what is working and what isn't. Therefore, use it to monitor your website's best- and worst-performing areas. By determining your best-performing blog posts and landing pages, you can repurpose content that isn't working and focus more on what is working.

Do Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis can provide priceless information on the behavior of the audience and marketing strategies, enabling you to remain ahead of your competition. You can use it to benchmark your website's performance and determine the areas of improvement. It can also help you determine the source of their traffic, the keywords they are using, and the type of content they are creating. 

Then, you can use this information to identify the areas of your content strategy that require improvement. Finally, competitor analysis can help you stay relevant and change tactics in response to the changing market conditions and customer’s needs. Here are the top competitor analysis tips:

  • Determine your competitors. It's not possible to do competitor analysis unless you begin by understanding who your competitors are. These could be sites in your niche or other direct rivals whose products overlap yours.
  • Gather key data. You can use SEO tools, web analytics platforms, and competitor analysis data to check your competitor's major traffic source.
  • Check the traffic source. You will need to analyze the source of the competitor's traffic. Is it from sponsored posts, organic search, referral, or direct traffic?
  • Evaluate their content and keywords. Check the kind of content they are creating. How is it performing in driving engagement? Are there certain themes or patterns that seem to resonate with their audience? Consider whether you can use a clear strategy.
  • Check user behavior. You will also need to evaluate the time users spend on the page, the conversion rate, and even the bounce rate. This will again provide a clearer picture of how users engage with their audience. You can use this data to increase your conversion.
  • Check social media profiles. Monitor your competitors' social media activity to understand their strengths and weaknesses.

Once you gain a deeper understanding of your target audience and competition, creating content your audience will appreciate becomes easier.

Create a Content Strategy

You might have heard the phrase “content is king,” meaning the type of content you create is a major ranking factor on Google and other search engines. If you want your website to rank high on the search engine and drive traffic, you need a good content strategy outlining how you create, publish, and manage content on your website.

The main aim of a content strategy is to ensure that you are creating content that meets the user’s needs and business expectations. It helps you develop an identity that users can identify with your brand. Here are tips for delivering a winning content strategy:

  • Determine your goal. Again, you need to decide what you want the content to achieve. Is it to help with your SEO ranking, improve your online presence, or answer customers questions?
  • Analyze your current content. Semrush suggests that repurposing old content can save a lot of time, money, and effort. Check the tone used in your current audience, and how you can use the same tone in your current content.
  • Create pillars of your content. By creating the pillars for your content, you can see if there are any overarching styles and themes. For instance, if your website aims to convert buyers, your content pillars can cover all the stages of the buying process, such as awareness, interest, evaluation, and conversion.
  • Brainstorm your content ideas. You can spend time with your team brainstorming new ideas that resonate with your audience. Determine the kind of content that will work. Is it information articles, product reviews, interviews, videos, quizzes, etc.?

No matter the content you choose to create, ensure that it is relevant, valuable, and engaging. Such content will improve your results and drive traffic to your site. Users are also likely to share such content, thereby increasing its visibility and traffic.

Design a High-performing Website

Users and search engines have a user-friendly site; therefore, you should ensure your site is easy to navigate and visually appealing. The look of the site should align with your brand goal. If users can navigate a well-organized site, they will engage with it more and share it with their friends. Again, the time users spend on a website is a ranking signal, showing the search engines that the site meets their needs.

A user-friendly website should have several key elements. These are:

Simpler Website Navigation

Your website should be well-planned so users can easily move from one page to another. This is important as it will help users easily find what they are searching for. Ensure that each of the web pages is short and concise. Also, keep all the web pages well organized so they don't appear overcrowded from the menu bar. Ensure that your contact details are visible on each of your pages.

Mobile Compatibility

In an era when users access their favorite websites on mobile devices, it has never been more important for website owners to create mobile-responsive designs. If your site isn't mobile-friendly, people trying to access it on their mobile devices will hit the back button. Therefore, ensure you have scaled each page to a mobile screen size.

Beautiful Design

While the aesthetic appeal of your website isn't everything, you cannot ignore it. You must ensure your website looks good with a simple layout and professional-looking images. Its look should be consistent with your branding.

Fast Load Time

Web page load time is also an important factor you cannot ignore. Remember that website visitors have very little patience. If your website takes more than six seconds to load, visitors will abandon it and move to the next fast-loading site. Many factors, such as third-party widgets, plugins, and social media pages, affect a website's load time.

Simple Scannable Content

Nowadays, people are bombarded with content from all corners, from social media sites to websites. Therefore, they want to spend as little time as possible on a website. They want to get information as fast as possible even when they visit your website. If you create content in long blocks of text, it won't do any good. Most website users tend to skim through the text to find key points.

Therefore, you must ensure that your content is concise and broken down into small subtopics. It should also be clearly defined using some large and bold headings. Create the content in small paragraphs and bullet points, making it easily skimmable.

Use SEO

Unless you use paid ads, you need SEO to help drive traffic to your site. SEO stands for search engine optimization. It involves optimizing your website to rank high on search engines. When you rank on the first page of Google and other search engines, your website will be visible to people searching for content in your niche. More people will click on your site, increasing your website traffic.

SEO optimization is a broad topic that cannot fit in this article. However, we will mention some basic SEO tips you can use to optimize your site for search engines. First, it's important to note that SEO is divided into two categories: On-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to the steps you take to optimize your website. On the other hand, off-page seo refers to the steps you take outside your website to optimize your site, such as backlinks.

On-page SEO

Here are the steps to follow when doing on-page SEO:

  • Keyword research. Determine the keywords you want to rank for. You can use keyword research tools such as Ahref to determine the keywords people are searching for in your niche. You can check details such as search volumes and competition level to determine the ease of ranking for the keyword.
  • Use keywords in your articles, such as the body or the header. When using keywords, make them feel as natural as possible. They should also not be overused, as this will penalize your site.
  • Create high-quality content. As mentioned, content is king and will affect your ranking on SERPs.
  • Good page experience. You must ensure that your site loads fast and is easy to navigate.
  • Well-optimized images are also an important part of SEO trends. Ensure that you use the right captions with keywords for your images.
  • Internal links. An internal link is a hyperlink from one page to another. When you strategically interlink relevant pages to your page, you can increase your site's topical relevance, helping it achieve a higher ranking.

Off-page SEO

As mentioned earlier, off-page SEO refers to external factors that boost your website's ranking.This involves a wide range of activities, such as:

  • External link building. When other sites link to your site, Google interprets that as a vote of confidence and rewards you with a higher ranking on the SERPs. Therefore, a key part of off-page SEO involves reaching out to other sites and requesting them to link to your website
  • Social media marketing. Social media sites are an important source of website traffic; therefore, you should not ignore their importance in driving traffic. Sharing your website pages and links to social media sites is a part of off-page SEO.
  • Influencer marketing involves collaborating with people in your niche with a considerable following to market your brand, product, or services.

Monitoring Site Security, Health, and Performance

Website visitors are searching for sites that are safe and secure to visit. After all, nobody wants to be faced with phishing attempts and online scammers. Therefore, you must take the necessary steps to ensure that your site is secure for your visitors. There are several tips you can use to ensure your website's safety. These are:

Select a Reputable Web Hosting Company

Remember that your website hosting company keeps your website files and data on its servers. Reputable host service providers invest heavily in advanced security measures such as firewalls, malware scanners, and detection systems to protect your website. This proactive action prevents your website from being exploited.

SSL Certificate Installation

HTTPS encryption is a major security step that protects your website's communication with visitors. It ensures that all the data exchange is encrypted and that anyone who intercepts the data cannot read it. This keeps user data safe, giving them confidence when visiting your site.

Use Strong Passwords

While this looks obvious, a strong password is a key defense mechanism for protecting your site and visitors. This is because it can help to protect you from hackers. A strong password policy will also minimize any chances of data breaches. To add an extra layer of security, we recommend you also implement a 2FA.

Update Your Software, Themes, and Plugins

According to a recent study, 56% of all attacks on a WordPress site are caused by outdated plugins. Updates usually come with extra layers of protection, addressing any vulnerability that hackers could exploit.

Updates also help fix bugs, prevent website downtime, and improve performance. They also include new features that boost your site's functionality. Therefore, you should regularly check for updates in your plugins and themes and install them immediately.

Have a Great Social Media Strategy

Having a social media strategy aligned with your website objective is important. With around 5 billion social media users, you can easily reach 70% of the world's population with a good social media strategy. However, since social media sites aim to keep people on their platforms, they are also not very enthusiastic about directing users to your site. That is why you must be creative when designing a social media strategy. Here are tips to promote your website on social media:

  • Post regularly. The right posting schedule can help to increase the visibility of your social media content. Therefore, research the best posting time of each social media site and implement it in your content strategy.
  • Optimize content for each network. Remember that each social media site has its own content format. For instance, you can easily share all your posts on LinkedIn, but you might need to repurpose them into carousels to share them on TikTok.
  • User-relevant hashtags. Hashtags help discover posts on social media. Therefore, make sure you use them in your social media posts. However, do not overuse them. Instead, choose a few popular ones in your niche.

You can read our guide on promoting your blog on Twitter.

Track Website Traffic and Performance

A marketing strategy cannot be complete without tracking the results. This is a key step that helps you to find out what is working and what isn't. Therefore, you need to analyze your website traffic to see if the strategies above are working. The best method of tracking your website traffic is through Google Analytics, which will show you the traffic to your site. Again, third-party tools like Semrush will also show you this information. On top of visitors, you should track other metrics like lead generation and conversion.

Update and Adjust

Once you have noted which strategy is working and which isn't, you must implement your findings into your marketing campaign. Monitor changes in customer or market trends. Regularly audit your website to ensure that it is performing at an optimum level.

Conclusion

A well-built and optimized website will rank well on Google, increasing its visibility. Besides, when website visitors find a user-friendly site that serves their needs, they are more likely to share it with their friends. By following the above steps, you can create a website that aligns with your business goal, engages customers, and brings traffic to your site. We recommend you read our guide on uncovering unique e-commerce opportunities.