11 steps to create an effective business website

Regardless of the type of small business you have, an effective and engaging website is critical to your brand’s success.

With almost 2 billion websites on the internet and U.S. users visiting more than 130 web pages per day, you have stiff competition to not only attract users to your website but convert them into customers as well.

Whether you’re building a new website from scratch or want to improve your existing site, the following are 11 steps to consider.

Lock in a good domain name

“Good” is subjective, but your domain name (otherwise referred to as your website address) can greatly impact the success of your site. It’s often the entry point to your site, so you want to have a domain that’s easy to use and remember, as well as benefits your search engine optimization (SEO).

In general, this means that you want it to:

  • Be easy to spell
  • Use the proper domain extension, such as .com rather than .net unless it’s more appropriate to use .gove, .edu or .org
  • Be as short as possible
  • Avoid numbers and hyphens
  • Be unique (so that you’re not too similar to another website’s domain or breaching any registered trademarks) and memorable

Dive deeper with our Domain Name 101 guide for beginners.

Purchase proper website hosting

Simply put, a website hosting provider (or website host) offers the technology and services necessary for a site to be viewed on the internet. Ultimately, your domain name gets connected to your hosting provider so that when users visit your website address, they see (and can interact with) your website, which is stored on your hosting account.

Website hosting services vary in cost from about $2 to more than $100 per month, depending on what you’re looking for.

Essentially, there are three server types to consider:

  • Shared server, which can cost the least but can be problematic because you’re sharing a server and its resources with other customers. This can impact the performance of your site. Plus, if another website that’s sharing your server gets hacked, you risk getting hacked as well.
  • Dedicated server, which can be the most expensive but offers the best possible website performance. It’s when the physical server machine is entirely dedicated to your site, so all the resources are yours, which offers more security as well.
  • Virtual private server (VPS), which is somewhat of a compromise between shared and dedicated servers. A VPS is one machine that is partitioned to act as multiple machines, which makes it more affordable (like shared hosting) but with better security and performance potential (like dedicated hosting).

In addition, you’ll likely want phone and/or chat support available from your website hosting provider in case you experience an issue, as well as an easy-to-use server interface. This allows you to more easily view and make changes to your server contents without having to hire a professional server administrator.

Some popular website hosting providers include (but are not limited to):

Clearly describe your business in a prominent place

No matter how dynamic your vision is for your website, don’t forget the basics. Who are you? What is your business about? How do you help customers?

A business description must be prominently displayed on your website so that it’s the first thing visitors see. All imagery should be visual representations of your brand and services or products. While the text needs to be as concise as possible, visuals can really help convey exactly what your business is about.

In addition, ensure that “About Us” web page links are displayed in both your main and footer navigation menus. This makes more in-depth information about your business easily accessible for visitors who want to learn more.

Select your content management system

To put it simply, your content management system (CMS) is a software program or application that you use to create and manage your digital content within your website. A popular CMS that you’ve likely heard of is WordPress. But others include Wix, Squarespace and more.

A good CMS will help you maintain your website without requiring you to have a lot of technical knowledge. Of course, different systems are used for different reasons, such as available features and your budget.

Thoroughly review available CMS platforms that you find interesting. Will you get all the features you need for a price you can afford?

Pick an e-commerce platform (if you’re selling online)

Not all small businesses sell products or services online, but if you do, you need the right technology to do so. An e-commerce platform allows users to financially transact with you online.

Some popular options include (but are not limited to):

Design your website for engagement, efficiency

Designing your website can feel overwhelming at first, but it’s helpful to do your research first. Identify sites that you like. What aspects of their design can you incorporate into your own website? How do your competitors’ sites look?

Once you have a sense of the design features and functionality you want, keep the following best practices in mind:

  • Use compelling visuals and easy-to-read, large-enough fonts
  • Avoid any clutter
  • Compress your graphics for faster website loading
  • Keep your target audience (and what they’ll use your website for) in mind throughout the designing process
  • Maintain your branding throughout the website
  • Keep your menu navigation system simple and intuitive
  • Make it easy for visitors to understand what your business is, how to contact you and where to find you

Optimize for SEO

Once you have designed your website, you’ll want to consider your website’s SEO, which is a set of practices that ensures search engines both index and rank your website appropriately so that it appears when users search for terms (i.e. keywords) related to your business.

The better your website design and content is, the higher your website will appear in search engine result pages.

SEO is an ongoing process. It’s never a one-and-done or set-it-and-forget-it approach, not if you want to be successful. 

Check out our 12 SEO marketing tips for beginners, as well as seven tips to improve your website’s domain authority.

Install key webmaster tools

Being able to monitor the performance of your website is critical to your success. You can analyze traffic data by installing Google Analytics. We also recommend Google Search Console.

These tools can help you understand:

  • How many users visit your website in any given period of time
  • The bounce rate of your website, which is the percentage of users who arrive at your website but leave after viewing only one page
  • How many views the pages of your website receive
  • How long users spend on your website
  • If there are any broken links on your website
  • How long it takes your web pages to load
  • Any keywords that are leading search engine users to your website

See our nine tips to get the most out of Google Analytics. Plus, find out how to check your Google Search rank for free.

Optimize for mobile responsiveness

More than one-third of all American consumers shop online via a mobile device. In addition, Americans spend about 3 hours and 15 minutes per day on their smartphones. These numbers will only continue to grow. 

You must optimize your website to deliver a great user experience on mobile devices. If your web pages take too long to load or if the mobile version of your site is clunky, cluttered or confusing, you will immediately lose your  visitors.

Check out our 16 tips to make your website as mobile-friendly as possible.

Create (and publish) quality content consistently

Content is king, as they say. And the days of a static website with little to no content publishing being enough are long over.

Consistently publishing content that resonates with your target audience matters to search engines. This can be done through a blog section of your website, for example.

Content can include customer testimonials, how-to articles and more.

Check out our seven tips to level up your content marketing on your website and beyond, as well as our 19 tips to drive traffic to your new blog.

Create a maintenance plan for your website

Once you create your small business website, your work isn’t over yet. Not only do you want to regularly publish new content, but you also want to ensure that everything is in working order and that all technology being used is up to date.

Proper website maintenance is important. This can include checking your webmaster tools data consistently, confirming that your software is always up to date, running security scans to confirm there is no malware or hacking and backing up your website regularly.

In conclusion

Your small business website should be a dynamic representation of your business that engages visitors and easily enables them to find key information about your business or even purchase from you.

Remember that throughout any website creation or updating process, you’ll want to collect feedback from colleagues and customers so that you can tweak anything necessary to improve the user experience. When in doubt, put yourself in your customers’ shoes and look at your website with a fresh set of eyes. What can be improved? What can be made more clear?

As you’re creating or optimizing your website, consider leveling up your digital marketing with DailyStory and our 21-day free trial. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

19 tips to drive traffic to your new blog

Blogs can be a large part of your content marketing efforts.

Each month, about 409 million people view more than 20 billion blog pages.

If you haven’t already been maintaining blog content for your brand, you might be deciding that now is the time to get started.

Great! But once you launch your new blog, how do you begin to drive traffic to it? Clearly, a blog with no page views is like a tree falling in the forest without anyone hearing it. In other words, you’re not going to hit any of your marketing or revenue goals with a low-performing blog.

The following are 19 tips to help your new blog get attention.

Determine your target audience

This is a common requirement for any sort of successful content marketing tactic. While many small businesses would love to target everyone all the time (because who wouldn’t want your product or service?), you have to get real.

First, everyone has a budget. And yours is going to go much further when you are targeting a more specific group of people than if you’re trying to reach everyone.

Second, you’ll be that much more effective by targeting a niche of consumers who are most likely to purchase. That’s right. Aiming “small” (but targeted) will lead to a better ROI (return on investment).

Of course, your target audience is more than a handful of demographic characteristics. See our seven tips to help you determine the best target audience for your brand.

Plan engaging blog content ideas

It might sound obvious, but there’s not a huge reason to push for more blog traffic if your content is lackluster. You’ll simply lose the readers you do get and definitely won’t be able to build a relationship with them.

Content that’s clear, engaging and even solves a problem that your target audience might be dealing with will not only attract visitors but also leave your audience wanting more. Both are good things!

Consider as your brainstorming blog topics:

  • Your expertise. What relevant knowledge can you share?
  • The interests of your readers. What are they wanting or needing to know?
  • Trending topics. What can you contribute to the conversation?

Once you have a list of topic ideas, get organized. Check out our eight tips to create an effective content calendar.

Develop attention-grabbing blog headlines

Headlines can greatly impact how well your blog posts perform. They are on the frontlines representing your content and impacting whether an internet user will click through on your link or not.

In a nutshell, you want to be clear, catchy and detailed while also not being too long. 

See our 19 tips to write effective, engaging headlines.

Optimize for SEO

Keep in mind the phrases and keywords that your target audience will most likely use in search engines, like Google or Bing. You’ll want to naturally incorporate these throughout your content.

You can try any of these 11 free keyword research tools to get an idea of the proper keywords you should use.

This effort can help search engines find you and recommend your specific piece of content to the potential searching audience, which can then lead to free website traffic.

See our 12 SEO marketing tips for beginners to dive deeper.

Consistency is critical

You’ll want to publish new blog posts consistently. Of course, consistency does not mean posting daily at the same time each day. It just means that you must decide on a posting schedule and then stick to it.

This serves your visitors, so they know when to expect new content, but this also can help your ranking for search engines, which trust websites with consistent new content versus those with an erratic posting schedule.

When deciding how often to post, consider your time and resources first. You don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver as soon as you start. Remember that you can always build up your posting schedule over time as it makes sense to do so.

Go long with your content

This isn’t permission to go long just for the sake of going long. There needs to be substance behind it, of course.

Long-form content offers readers deeper, more concise information. But that’s not the only benefit.

Sharing rates typically increase along with the content length of your blog on all the major social media platforms, especially Twitter and Facebook. In addition, the top ten results for any given search tend to go to content with at least 2,000 words, and the rankings tend to decrease along with the word count.

Just make sure that you break up your longer content with subheadings, images and so on.

Never go out of style with evergreen content

Evergreen content remains relevant over a long period of time. It’s not time-sensitive in any way, but it could be seasonal, where the content can continue to come back every year and be just as relevant. This sustainability will help feed continued traffic to your blog.

To get the ball rolling on evergreen content, think about the questions you’re frequently asked by customers.

Use visuals

We as humans are more visual by nature. Our eyes are drawn to images before text.

About 80 percent of people remember what they see, compared to 10 percent of what they hear and 20 percent of what they read.

Leverage this by incorporating images, GIFs, videos and graphics into your new blog. Plus, you have the ability to properly tag your images so that search engines can understand the types of assets you’re offering to visitors within your text content.

Confirm your website loading speed

About 57 percent of online shoppers will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds for a page to load. And search engines are paying attention to your loading speed as well, which will lower your search ranking if you’re slower than you should be.

Not sure what your website’s loading speed is? Start with Google’s Page Speed Insights. You’ll not only find out the loading speed of your pages on mobile but also get some diagnostic advice on how to fix any of the slower pages.

Website loading speed is critically important to mobile marketing in general. Check out our 14 tips to help you optimize for mobile consumption in additional ways.

Embrace internal linking

Internal linking is all about linking to your other content that’s relevant in the current blog that visitors are reading.

This benefits your SEO efforts, and it can help keep visitors on your website longer by visiting that related content in addition to your original content that attracted them in the first place.

Just make sure that you’re only using links that are relevant and valuable. Keep an eye out for opportunities to link to other content as you’re working on new content.

Build up quality backlinks

Backlinks are hyperlinks that point from one website to another (as opposed to internal links that are linking within your website). About 91 percent of all web pages never get any organic traffic from Google, and that’s mostly due to the fact that they don’t have backlinks. 

Don’t be one of those pages.

We all want to improve the search engine ranking of our website, but when it comes to getting others to link to you, it’s easy to feel lost. Plus, you don’t want just any backlink for your site. Quality (meaning that the backlink is coming from a trusted website) is important as well.

See our seven tips to help grow quality backlinks to your content.

Consider guest blogging

By featuring other writers on your blog, you’re not only adding to the value you have with different perspectives, you’re also potentially reaching a new audience.

When you’re working with potential guest bloggers, make sure you agree in advance on how the partnership will work.

  • Will they share the content on their own social media channels? If so, how often? What does that look like?
  • Does anything need to be linked back to for them? What links? How many?

Of course, this can also be flipped where you’re guest blogging on another website.

Partnerships can truly be a win-win for everyone involved if planned and talked through in advance.

Social media promotion is key

Maintaining an active social media presence goes a long way toward driving traffic to your new blog. You can directly share your content with the context that should encourage users to click through to your blog.

You’ll want to consider every social media platform different and unique. What works on Twitter is not the same as what can work on Instagram.

Consider your audience and the platform when posting. You might even want to consider creating a YouTube channel to work in tandem with your blog.

In addition, having social media sharing buttons that are alongside your content will make it easy for your visitors to share your content organically on their own social accounts as well.

Learn about what you should know about social media.

Leverage email marketing

Email marketing is a great way to build personal relationships with your subscribers, and you can use snippets of your blog content within your emails that can link back to your full content.

In 2022, the number of email users worldwide is estimated to be about 4.3 billion. This is expected to grow to about 4.6 billion in 2025, making up more than half of the estimated world population

See these 48 statistics that show the value of email marketing.

Even in a world of social media prevalence, more consumers use email than any social media platform, and more than half of consumers check their email before they check their social media in the morning.

Check out our 16 email marketing best practices so that you can put your best foot forward.

Host a contest or giveaway

You can create opportunities for your audience to win prizes by subscribing to, liking, commenting on or sharing your blog content, which can all further the reach of your blog.

Prizes could be a product you sell or a service you offer to keep it simple.

Make sure you plan ahead so that any giveaway works efficiently for you and for the participants. Plus, you’ll want to keep it all legal with thorough Terms and Conditions tied to your giveaway.

Encourage comments and discussions on your blog

Google naturally improves the search ranking of a blog that’s receiving a lot of comments because it indicates that the content is engaging.

Of course, what can help these discussions is your thoughtful responses to any comments left by readers. It creates a trusting relationship and encourages them to continue commenting.

You can always try to get the comments going by ending your blog post with an open-ended question that readers can answer in the comment section.

Participate in various Q&A websites

Question-and-answer websites are definitely one of the biggest online communities in the digital world.

By answering questions on such platforms as Quora, TripAdvisor and others, your answer will be live for a long time and could potentially drive traffic to your blog.

That being said, you want to avoid any link dumping on these sites. Instead, focus on giving as detailed an answer as possible and only include a link if it makes sense to do so.

Experiment with influencer marketing

In the simplest sense, an influencer is anyone with a digital following (or audience) on a social media platform or elsewhere whom you’d like to attract to your own brand.

The purpose of influencer marketing involves increasing brand awareness, targeting new and niche audiences and increasing impressions and reach.

By identifying and partnering with an influencer, you can reach that new audience and drive up traffic to your new blog.

But before you dive in headfirst with your first influencer marketing campaign, check out our seven tips.

Spread social proof across every platform possible

Social proof refers to potential customers assuming that what others are doing is correct based on how often they see those actions. In other words, social proof is about looking to others to figure out the right way to interact in any given situation.

You can use social proof to promote your blog on your website and across your social media channels.

Here are a handful of ideas to get started:

  • Use a feedback form to collect user feedback about your blog that you can then share.
  • Ask users to rate your blog articles.
  • Share your social media following number, email subscribers or any other numbers.

Learn more about what social proof is and nine ways to use it, as well as 17 of the best social proof tools that you can try.

In conclusion

The biggest thing to keep in mind when launching a new blog is to have patience. Growing your website traffic organically can take time. 

Focus on offering quality content that resonates and getting creative with your promotion beyond even these tips. 

Check out our seven tips to level up your content marketing, as well as our Digital Marketing 101 Guide for Beginners.

As you gain traction with your new blog, consider optimizing your digital marketing process, such as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

How to evaluate your company’s marketing data

Gathering marketing data is a great first step to understanding your target audience and ensuring your campaigns are effective.

However, after gathering data, you’ll need to understand that data by being able to read and evaluate it. Evaluation is key to ensuring you cut out ineffective strategies. That way, you can develop a successful marketing plan that helps your business earn more profits and build its reputation.

Here’s how to effectively evaluate your company’s marketing data. 

Sales

Ultimately, you market and advertise your business and its products to increase sales and revenue.

You can use the data you get from your marketing and advertising campaigns to determine whether or not sales are increasing and how much. Additionally, depending on the type of campaign, you can determine your return on investment (ROI). ROI is important because it can help you determine which campaigns are the most successful.

While you may get more sales from one type of campaign, you may also find it costs you more to advertise. That would give you a lower ROI. 

In many cases, ROI can tell you how much it costs to acquire customers through one medium. It also indicates how much you’re earning from advertising or marketing. For example, if you advertise on social media, you might have a higher ROI on a certain type of ad or within a certain region.

Check out our six tips to maximize your social media advertising budget.

Customer responses

Customer reactions to campaigns can help you determine customer sentiment as part of your marketing data-gathering efforts.

You can provide your customers with surveys or general customer service feedback forms through email to understand what your customers think of your company and your marketing campaigns.

Simple questions about how customers felt about specific campaigns can help you understand which initiatives are most successful and which customers are making the most purchases. 

See our nine tips to improve social listening and gain customer insights.

Reach

Whether you’re implementing search engine optimization, social media marketing, or digital advertising into your overall market strategy, one of your main goals is to increase brand awareness and reach.

Ultimately, you want to reach more people within your target audience who are more likely to purchase from you. 

Expanding your marketing reach can help you find new people who may not have heard of your products or services yet. This also grows brand awareness in your current markets.

If you use digital marketing strategies, you can easily measure your reach, but it becomes more difficult when you’re using traditional marketing. For example, if you do a billboard campaign, you won’t have exact numbers on how many people saw the billboard, but you can estimate based on data how many drivers use a particular stretch of highway.

Lead generation 

Marketing is supposed to support sales by generating warm leads to give salespeople a higher chance of converting.

While some marketing efforts can lead to direct sales, others do not, especially in the B2B space. Lead generation comes in many forms, including appointments, form submissions, and subscribers to mailing lists. 

You can easily track lead generation as part of your marketing data if you’re doing it through your website by counting the number of form submissions.

Additionally, you should always compare that data to sales data to ensure the leads you’re generating are quality leads that purchase at the end of their journey.

While you can’t expect every lead to make a purchase, your lead generation efforts should be increasing overall sales. 

Check out our 12 strategies to capture more email leads without annoying everyone, and level up your website pop-up ads with our eight tips to get more leads from them.

Website traffic

Your website is a valuable sales tool, even if people can’t make direct purchases on it.

Building a website can help you generate leads and increase brand awareness, but only if you’re getting website traffic. Website traffic is an indicator that SEO efforts are succeeding, but it can also tell you about your other marketing campaigns.

For example, whether you do a traditional marketing campaign or a digital marketing campaign, you should see more traffic to your website. This is because effective marketing makes people want to look for you online to learn more about your products and services. 

marketing-data-website-traffic
Website traffic is an indicator that SEO efforts are succeeding, but it can also tell you about your other marketing campaigns.

Additionally, all digital marketing strategies should lead back to your website. For example, if you’re doing affiliate marketing, the goal should be to get an influencer’s audience to click on a link that leads them back to your website. If you’re not seeing an increase in traffic, your campaigns are ineffective. 

If you’re not sure how much website traffic you’re getting, you can use Google Analytics to learn more. 

Check out our eight tips to increase organic traffic to your website.

Testimonials 

Testimonials are essential for all marketers. Consumers rely on the opinions of their peers to decide whether or not it’s worth it to purchase from or work with a business.

Of course, testimonials and product reviews can help convince potential customers to trust your business based on others’ feedback.

Learn more about social proof, as well as nine ways to use it in your digital marketing.

Unfortunately, measuring the impact of testimonials can be difficult. However, you can experiment by putting testimonials on different pages of your website and checking your web stats, such as views, clicks, and generated leads to see if adding testimonials has an impact. 

Reviews can be easily measured because your customers can provide you with a star rating. That average star rating can tell you how much your customers enjoyed their products. Allow customers to make comments on their reviews to explain why they gave you a certain star rating.

By learning about your customer’s experiences with your product and business, you can find ways to improve both. You also can leverage that knowledge for better marketing initiatives.

See 17 of the best social proof tools to boost your sales.

Customer retention rate

A customer retention rate tells you how many customers you retain over time.

It’s easier and more cost-effective to keep your customers returning rather than constantly finding new ones.

In addition, your retention rate impacts revenue. It also can help you determine which marketing campaigns work best to keep customers coming back. For example, many companies use email marketing to ensure their current customers don’t forget about them. 

Check out our six tips to create brand loyalty for your business.

In conclusion

Collecting marketing data is important if you want to learn about the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. However, you should always determine the most important statistics to you and your business.

Instead of measuring everything and deciphering tons of data, look at the most important metrics first. This will help you determine which strategies are performing well and which are costing you money.

From there, you can start digging deeper into each campaign. Use marketing data to learn more about how to make them better.

About the author

Ashley-Nielsen

Ashley Nielsen earned a B.S. degree in Business Administration Marketing at Point Loma Nazarene University. She is a contributing writer at 365businesstips.com where she shares knowledge about general business, marketing, lifestyle, or financial tips. During her free time, she enjoys being outside, staying active, reading a book, or diving deep into her favorite music.

8 tips to increase organic traffic to your website

While digital advertising likely has a recurring portion of your budget, not all website traffic has to be paid for.

It is possible to increase your web traffic organically.

Keep in mind that 51 percent of website traffic is organic, while internet browsers opt to use organic search results (versus paid results) about 94 percent of the time.

There is power in optimizing for an increase in your organic traffic, as well as a payoff when prioritized regularly.

The following are eight tips to help you boost the organic traffic to your website.

Think about humans over search engines

It’s easy to dive head-first into all things search engine optimization (SEO), but don’t forget who you’re trying to reach and engage with. Humans.

Yes, search engines determine your ranking, but search engines are paying more attention to user behavior and activity on your website than you might realize, such as time spent on pages and the pages visited.

For example, if visitors are spending a lot of time on your website and browsing several pages, that’s a positive signal to search engines.

When you forget about humans in the design and content of your website, you risk a high bounce rate, shorter amounts of time spent on your site and/or few pages visited within a session (if the visitor hasn’t already bounced).

That all leads to lower rankings on search engine result pages.

Create a blog

You might have noticed more blogs on business websites lately. This is because content serves as the gravity to pull more visitors into your website (like a planet).

In addition to increasing organic traffic over time, a consistent blog can help boost your website’s authority on the topics that are important to your audience and within your industry.

Always think about a question or pain point that your audience might have and use that to decide topics for your blog posts. Doing so helps keep your content relevant and effective.

It’s important that once you begin to publish a blog, you’ll want to keep posting consistently. Determine a schedule in advance that works for your time and available resources.

Check out our seven tips to help level up your content marketing specifically.

Refresh and update old content

The older your blog gets, the more opportunities you’ll have to refresh out-of-date content.

It’s important to set a schedule to regularly review older content for updating. Consider:

  • Any dates
  • Statistics used
  • Other outdated information
  • The structure of your page (considering user intent)

Beyond the updating, you can consider repurposing existing content as well to increase your website’s relevancy and draw. Check out our 13 tips for repurposing content like a rockstar.

Keywords still matter

In terms of SEO, keywords might feel played out at this point, but they still matter.

Consider your target audience. When they’re searching in a search engine, what would you want to appear for? Stick with the most relevant keywords, and remember to always think of the user experience on your website. Don’t overstuff keywords on your pages.

Take a look at these 11 free SEO keyword search tools, which can help.

Optimize for the featured snippet

A newer feature, especially on Google, is the featured snippet. This is the breakout box that appear at the top of your search results to provide you with direct answers to your search query.

Appearing in that can’t-miss spot at the top of the search results will generate more organic traffic.

How can your website get selected for the featured snippet? Some suggested best practices include (but are not limited to):

  • Using lists to answer a particular search query directly, whether it’s bulleted or numbered.
  • Offering short, to-the-point answers. 
  • Including your core keyword in your content.

In other words, it’s about having clear, direct information that answers specific questions. Think skimmable content.

Don’t forget about your title tag and meta description

Think about the results you see when you enter a query into any search engine. What do you do with the results?

Commonly, internet users skim the headlines and descriptions of each result until they find what they think satisfies their search the best.

Therefore, it’s not hard to underscore the importance of title tags (search result headlines) and meta descriptions (the paragraph below each headline).

This pair can make or break the organic traffic to your website. You should think of them as the “advertisement” to browsing internet users, trying to convince them to go to your website instead of all others.

For the title tag, try to keep it at 60 characters or less, with the core keyword up front and an engaging angle as much as possible.

For the meta description, strive for 160 characters or less, with both your core keyword and a reason why users should click on your website. This is an opportunity to offer insight into the value of your search result.

Dive deeper into the difference between on-page and off-page SEO.

Quality backlinks are worthwhile

Backlinks are links to your website from other websites. Quality backlinks boost your site’s authority from the perspective of both search engines and internet users.

They can boost organic traffic by:

  • Sending website visitors from other sites to your website directly.
  • Increasing your SEO and thus your search ranking on results pages.

Check out these seven tips to grow quality backlinks to your website.

Embrace social media

Successful websites don’t rely solely on just a blog and SEO to maintain strong organic traffic. Think multi-faceted content marketing and multi-platform.

Enter social media.

Depending on who your target audience is and what your goals are, your business might be on a limited number of social media platforms.

That’s fine. It’s definitely best to do one or two things well than to overextend and not do anything particularly well.

Resist the temptation to cross-post the exact same content across platforms without at least some tweaking to each post to better reflect the platform it will appear on (to better engage the intended audience on that platform). In fact, if you can curate unique posts per platform, even better.

What works well on Twitter wouldn’t necessarily work on Instagram, and so on. Be mindful of what you’re sharing and how you’re sharing it on each platform.

But ultimately, success on social media is like extending the gravitational pull of your content beyond what your SEO is doing for you.

Dive deeper into the seven ways your social media can influence your SEO.

As you’re working to increase your organic traffic, be sure to review the 13 most common SEO mistakes you could be making right now. The last thing you want is anything to be working against your website.

Looking to level up your digital marketing process? Consider DailyStory, which offers automation, audience segmentation and more to help your business be more efficient and successful. Schedule a free demo with us today.