If You Build It, Will They Come?

So you have a new website? Whether it is based on a great new idea, dedicated to covering an underserved niche, or aiming to promote your products or services, you have your work cut out getting it noticed. According to Royal Pingdom there are over 550 million websites in the world today and 300 million of them were added in 2011. Of course the truth is that many of them are inactive and attract little or no traffic.

You may be surprised at how many websites there are out there that receive no traffic. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come - you really need to give them a good reason. Using Alexa (which isn’t amazingly accurate but can give us a rough idea) we can get a ranking number for websites which is based on how many visits a website received over the last three months. The website with the most visits is number one and surprise, surprise – it’s Google.

What’s more revealing is taking a look at some low traffic websites. My own Scottish history website, Angry Pict, which I set up a few years ago has a modest amount of content and is very rarely updated. On average it gets around 230 unique visits per day (over the last three months) and that equates to an Alexa rank of 4,447,473. That ranking isn’t perfectly accurate but it does give you an idea of how little traffic the majority of websites out there must be getting.

How do you get traffic? It’s simple – you create content that people want, content that people are searching for, content that people want to share. The reason Angry Pict still gets traffic despite being updated only once in the last couple of years is that it has some content on subjects that people are searching for. If your website has no content then don’t expect any organic traffic. This is ultimately why content marketing is such a good idea.

If you create some content related to your business then:

• you show off your expertise,
• you are giving your potential customers something useful,
• you are building brand awareness,
• you are improving your business website’s ranking in the search engines,
• you are encouraging people to share your content and spread your brand for free,
• you are building potential leads.

Compare that with paying out a large sum to get someone to click on an ad and visit your site. They have no reason to stick around, no reason to share the website and no reason to come back. They also visit one time and they are gone. If you create content then it can pull in traffic indefinitely depending on the topic. Content marketing doesn’t just work; it is also more cost effective than traditional advertising.

So forget about fancy animations and expensive graphic design. If you really want people to visit your website give them a reason. Content is king and that’s never going to change.