Increasing my website traffic

Hi,

I want to make an early effort in the New Year to drive some meaningful traffic to my site. What would you do to achieve this? Is there any easy wins out there for me? What should I do in terms of a longer term strategy?

I have a great site but poor traffic figures in comparison.

Please help

Thanks

There are no easy wins. But there are wins. Do you have an overall marketing strategy for your business? Who are your target audience? What is the area of geographical influence to which you aspire?

I recommend you develop a rudimentary marketing strategy, and your site should be part of that. That will help people here advise you on how to make your site more visible to that chosen audience. Otherwise, it is just too big a question.

Thanks.
Just as an aside, does anyone have any problems using/ navigating around my site?

I didn;t have any particular problems navigating around your site.

I did find the white writing on the light blue background quite hard to read.

Cheers Mike

The site is very easy to navigate but needs some promotion to up its ranking.There are only 2 links pointing at your site so perhaps you should work at improving this.

Hard working to SEO, forum postings, writing blogs...building links!

Ahh it's a shame you don't service the Tyne and Wear area, one of our leaflet marketing campaigns would have been great for you.

Seems to me like you should concentrate more on offline marketing with some fundamental forms of online marketing in place. So I'd stick to Adwords and SEO as far as online marketing goes, then target homeowners via offline forms of marketing such as telemarketing, direct mail etc.

If you can find a source of data for people who are looking to sell their homes which you can use for online promotion then that would be extremely effective also. I haven't looked much into this so something like that might be out there.

Since you earn so much per sale I'd advise putting more time and effort into each individual lead and possibility of a sale.

Sorry I didnt return to this thread sooner! To answer your question, I had no issues with the navigation on your site. It's always a subjective thing, but I was ok with the site.

In fact, focusing on marketing it is the big issue for you now!!...and dont jump into spending money on that till you have a reasonably complete plan. It is so tempting to jump around, a bit of SEO, a bit of PPC, a bit of something else, without answering those so important strategic marketing questions. Despite making some of my living our of e marketing (whatever that is!!!!!!!!!!), I would advise a day or two of planning..research...sounding people out (like you are here already)...

then...go for it!!!

Thanks

What would you advise in terms of link building strategy, bearing in mind a limited budget?

You can get quite a few links going yourself, if you look around at directory sites and the like. You won't match the professional guys, but you will be able to make some useful progress. The trick is to do it gradually.

I have submitted to directories.
What are the directories that I should be submitting to?Some are a waste of time aren't they?

You might sign up with something like Site Explorer at Yahoo and have a look at your site through their analysis providers and have a nosey at the competitors sites.

I did run your site through the explorer and I was wrong about the number of links - its over 2000 but I suppose it is down to the relevance of the link.

It may at the end of the day easier to get a SEO guy in to advise you.

One of the best ways to get links to your website is just by doing "Link Baiting". Simply write quality useful content on your website (articles, videos, etc), submit it to various social networking websites and other related websites (digg, stumbleupon, twitter, facebook, forums, etc) and if its good enough people on the internet will start talking about it and linking to it on various forums, blogs and so on.

If done right this can work incredibly well.

Directories are not a waste of time you have to submit to relevant directories with PR .

ash davis is right using social networks will prove helpful and the traffic you generate from there is usually fairly targeted.

It's easier to promote a site if it provides quality services or products. If you have that or your site has useful content, I think its traffic may increase as well as its conversion.

Selecting right keywords is also one of the keys to be successful in increasing traffic. If you have targeted competitive keywords that rank well in search engines particularly with Google, this may help your site increase its ORGANIC traffic. To achieve this, you need to get quality backlinks from relevant sites and do proper targeting of your keywords...

A few quick ideas:

1. Your site has very little content - consider writing a few 'how to' articles (ex. http://www.rightmove.co.uk/resources/property-guides.html ) or maintaining a blog on the manchester property market to build SE friendly content

2. Do use social media to start building links to that content

These are l/term plays which will put you in a much better position next year - for some shorter term results ...

3. Use PPC advertising based on location keywords - even 'manchester estate agent' is probably too broad - select individual areas and even estates, less traffic but you'll be top

4. Take this same niche approach to your content keywords

5. Promote offline - ex. small ads in the local paper listing your properties for sale, targeting 'for sale' houses with leaflets, if you're a handy writer approach your local paper with a proposal for a weekly 'property tips' column in return for a byline

6. My only trouble with navigation was the menu item 'buying' - would it be better listed as 'properties for sale'? Just my opinion

7. Look for potential partners to team up with - ex. a solicitor

Just a few random ideas but hopefully there's something in there for you.

Hi Steve,

I think the site is fantastic, very professional and easy to navigate so no issues on that front for me.
I have done a number of things to promote traffic to my site including:

Press releases - online and offline
Advertising on cars - offline
Link exchanges - online
Business Directories (Scoot/freeindex/my kellysearch etc) - online

All seem to work well and are relatively cheap to do.

Hope that helps.

i would simply run a ppc campaign. start by testing it out with a small budget if it works roll it out on a larger scale.

make sure that you research the true keywords that your targeted audience are keying in.

regards,
stephen doyle