You’ve spent a lot of time and money on your website. You spend hours each week posting on social media. But the results aren’t there. It’s a competitive world out there with hundreds of thousands of other sites vying for attention. So how do you get your website noticed? How can you stand head and shoulders above the competition? We’ll show you.

1. Put your pedal to the metal.

A slow site negatively impacts your traffic, conversions, and SEO. Google reports that most visitors will leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Now, there are a lot of different factors that contribute to a slow site. If you’re using a cheap hosting plan, you’re probably getting what you pay for. But we’ll stick to the easy fixes – feel free to set up a complimentary consultation for us to run a speed test and walk you through the results. The easiest way to speed up your site is to reduce the size and amount of images. We’ve worked with clients where simply compressing the images (without killing quality) has cut their load time in half.

Action 1: Compress your images.

2. Have a clear call to action.

Ask someone that’s never seen your site before to take a look at your website. Then ask them what they think your site wants them to do. If they’re not sure, then others that visit your site probably have the same experience. Most visitors will leave your site if there’s nothing for them to do. Yes, there are rare cases where the content is so compelling that it resonates with a visitor enough that they’ll spend an hour trying to figure out how to contact you. But why make them go through that hassle?

You should have a call to action on your site that’s crystal clear. Some examples are call/email you, fill out a form, purchase a product/service, or download a report. Most platforms have tools and plug-ins just for calls to action.

Action 2: Put a Clear Call to Action on your site.

3. Join the roaring 20’s.

Does your site look like something created in Dream Weaver or MS FrontPage? Are you still using Twenty-Eleven as your WordPress theme? Today’s sites are sleeker and cleaner than sites from years ago. Gone are the three-column sites or sites with white text on dark backgrounds. If your site hasn’t been updated in recent years, it might be time for a fresh look. It doesn’t have to be a radical change either. You could just streamline the navigation, use crisper images, or rewrite your copy.

Plus, you want to ensure your site is taking advantage of the latest technologies and is up to date with new regulations. There’s a lot of buzz about ADA compliance on websites. Only government sites need to comply with ADA, but making your site accessible opens you up to a new world of visitors.

Action 3: Give your site a facelift with a new theme or look.

4. Promote, Promote, Promote.

You’ve written some excellent blog posts. It’s time to hit that share button and share them with the world. It’s best to write some copy to go along with your link so review your post and create a summary. It only needs to be a few sentences long as services like Twitter only give you a limited amount of characters. LinkedIn will sometimes share just the title and featured image of your post, so make sure both are jazzed up.

Action 4: Share some posts.

5. Put others to work.

What’s even better than you sharing your posts? Someone else sharing your posts. Make sure every page on your site has links or buttons that make it easy for others to share your content. There are tools out there that can add this functionality to all of your pages, or just your blog pages. But the bottom line is that you want others to easily share content with their networks.

Action 5: Add sharing buttons to your site.

6. Use Keywords.

We can do an entire article series on Search Engine Optimization, but for now, we’ll give you some basics. Pick some keywords – no more than three to start. And then work them into your posts. Here are five effective areas to place keywords:

• The title of the page.
• The introduction (1st paragraph).
• The meta description.
• At least one subtitle.
• At least three other places within the text.

Be sure to work the keywords into your writing, but don’t force it. People will notice if you use the same keywords 100 times in a 300-word article. And they won’t notice in a good way. Just place them where they fit naturally.

Action 6: Work keywords into your content

These steps are things you can do on your own, but we’re always here to help. Remember that building a website is just the first step. Getting it noticed requires effort. But these six actions will put you on the right road for increasing traffic.