How to drive traffic to your site

Posted Friday, 9 May 2008  |  Category:  All things web  |  Comments

So you have a business site with all the right basics – beautiful design, user-friendly navigation, carefully selected meta tags – but it is just not getting the desired amount of web traffic. Well, here are a few tips to improve your site and boost your hit rate.  

1. Offer Added Value

Search engines love sites with informational value – and so do people. Rarely do we stumble on a site because of its main business proposition, but rather because of an added educational benefit.

The trick is to offer quality information that updates regularly and is relevant to your target market.

Here are a few examples:

• If you are a design college, post interviews with up- and coming designers. This will attract your target demographic.  
• If you are a gardening supplier, offer "how to" articles on plant buying, pruning and greenhouse maintenance – information that avid gardeners are likely to search for.
• If you are an online furniture store, offer articles on home makeovers, interior design trends and furniture care. This will give browsers a reason to return again and again.
• If you are a management consulting company, upload reviews of the latest business books.
• If you are an agricultural company, offer news feeds on industry headlines...

The list is endless!

A great example is the online grocery store - freshdirect. This site offers pages and pages of themed recipes (each with a handy ingredient purchase form), detailed nutritional information on each product, taste and price comparisons on all categories, tips on how to prepare and store foods, and much more. The result? They now dominate the New York online grocery market with more than 250,000 customers and 5 million deliveries to date.