Starting with a new Directory website. Then here are a few tips to promote your Directory websites, and make them
Promoting your directory website is necessary because attaining traffic is important. You need both – advertisers willing to submit a listing on your website, as well as directory users that will use your website and interact with it.
Now, we all know that without promoting your website, it’s impossible to get the desired traction. So how will you promote your online directory?
The following are the very basic, and actionable techniques through which you can promote your directory websites:
- Paying attention to SEO for organic traffic
- Leverage the power of social media for Marketing your WordPress website – SMM
- Multimedia advertisements on various platforms
- Backlinks and referral traffic
- Useful images and relevant content
- Email marketing
Whether you are trying to promote your newly built website or trying to garner more traffic for your existing one, the following are the methods that work. Let’s study each of them in detail.
1) SEO and Organic ranking
Nothing better than being ranked as one of the top results for the organic search for your relevant keywords, isn’t it?
For instance, if a visitor is looking for “best b&b in Doncaster” and your web directory appears as one of the top results, means you are already ahead in the competition.
To survive the competition on the Internet which keeps getting tougher each day, you need an SEO optimized website. A good SEO score can be obtained by the combination of various factors. Some of the few are listed below
Always go for an SEO friendly WordPress theme
When looking for a perfect theme for your directory website, we are so busy looking for features and design that sometimes we ignore to check if it is SEO friendly.
You can obviously take care of the SEO of the content you add to your site, but what about the theme files? what if they are not SEO friendly and negatively affect the visibility of your directory website.
Therefore, choosing an SEO friendly theme is as important as choosing the right design(or more so). Here are a few important things about SEO that you must know.
Firstly, SEO is important, in fact, most important as it is directly responsible for the visibility of your site. And secondly, it is the first thing you need to pay attention to while creating your online directory.
SEO is not something you can take care of once the site is ready. So for your WordPress directory websites, you need to make sure that theme you are using is SEO friendly.
Check out our collection of SEO friendly themes.
Integrate the best SEO tools
To make your website more SEO friendly, you have to make sure that the content you add, the images, and other media are SEO optimized. For this, you can use the WordPress SEO tools on your site. Thankfully, the availability of WordPress plugins helps you optimize the content as well as other aspects of your site. The following are the most popular WordPress plugins that you can integrate into your WordPress website to help its visibility.
Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO is available as a free plugin and for advanced SEO service, you can upgrade to the premium version. The tool guides you with the optimization of the on-stage content on your website. Broken link checker
Broken link checker: As the name suggests this plugin checks all the broken links on your page. It detects the damaged links so that you can fix them.
W3total cache: This plugin intends to make your site faster. Ultimately, it improves the page speed and enhancing the user experience.
Google keyword planner: This helps you decide the keywords you want to target for your page. It helps you find out the keyword that has more scope, and the one that can prove to be beneficial for your website.
2) Social Media Marketing
There’s absolutely no need to explain how social media can play an important role in promoting your website. It is the easiest way to reach people at large. It’s the fastest and most efficient way to reach more people without your direct involvement.
Creating shareable articles
Allow the visitors of your website to share the pages of your site with their social circles. The visitors who become your fans and appreciate the content, and consider it share-worthy, can just click a button to share them on their social media.
The ability of social media sharing allows your best article more exposure, and the ability to reach more people. There are a number of social media marketing tools that let you do this. And some advanced theme even comes with such features inbuilt.
Social media pages representing your business
Creating social media profiles for your business website is a way you get on social media. All your visitors/users follow your social media pages to get the latest updates on what’s happening.
However, you have to make sure that you keep it updated with the latest news so that your audience is informed.
Social media marketing tools
You can even use the social media marketing tools to boost the social presence of your website. The following are the best Social Media marketing tools for WordPress.
All in one auto social marketing – Helps to manage and control the social media updates automatically.
WP to Twitter – Name says it all, lets you send tweets from WordPress
OnlyWire – Content posting, social media campaigns, and more.
3) Direct advertising
To convey your message directly to the people, advertising is one of the best ways. Advertising can be in form of written text, image or videos. Paid advertising is a part of promotions that needs some investments.
Advertising on relevant websites
Direct advertisements include advertising on a relevant website. Now, what are the relevant sites, you may wonder.
Relevant sites are the sites directly or indirectly related to your business. For instance: There are so many community forums for fish keeping where you can post your questions. Different fishkeepers, newbies as well as experienced ones, visit such forums to answer the question or search for an answer.
The forums are the best place for the fish-food industries, air pump makers, as well as fish tank manufacturers to advertise their product.
Similarly, a directory website for holiday locations is the best place for the hotels and restaurants to advertise themselves.
Therefore, the ideal sites or platforms for advertising differs from business to business. You can select your advertising platform based on your business domain.
This has to be a thoughtful decision. To decide your advertising platform, you have to know your target audience. And then think about the kind of websites or platforms the target audience prefers.
You don’t have to be a marketing expert to make such decisions. Once you start with your website and start exploring your options thoughtfully, you can conclude things wisely.
Advertising on other medias
In the last paragraph, we talked about advertising on the internet, because it is one of the easiest ways to reach more and more people. But, when the scope of your business is limited to a certain geographical area, local media works best too.
For instance- Your website is a city directory for Portsmouth, then the best medium for advertising is local media. This way you can directly target the people of the city and make them aware of your website.
The local media you can use is the newspaper, local billboards or local tv channels. If you know the scope of your business is limited, the kind of audience you want to target, then choosing the advertisement platform becomes much easier.
4) Backlinks and referral traffic
Backlinks are a way through which the search engines realize that your page/website is useful because others are recommending it.
The concept of backlinking is quite simple. When other websites recommend your site, by providing a link to your page on their site, that is how the search engine knows the legitimacy and usefulness of your web page.
However, the value of backlinks depends on the value of domain referring it. Backlinks from the valuable websites are clearly more valuable. Here is a useful document from Moz regarding Linkbuilding.
The other way round, you can just work on the quality of your site. When your visitors become your fan, they won’t hesitate to tell their friends about your amazing content.
You are a winner when your visitors begin to recommend your site on their own, just because they like it!
5)Useful Images and content
Your content is the thing that interests your visitors. There are many ways through which you can bring visitors on your website, but only relevant, fresh and useful content can make them stay there. It is the same for directory websites.
Content is actually the king, and it plays an important role in SEO and usability of your site.
Readable and relevant of the content
When you generate content, that is sober looking, easy to read, and useful, your visitors will naturally love your site.
Regular blogging is one of the ways to keep your site updated with new and useful content. Content marketing is a very interesting subject, that helps you gain more traffic (and ultimately sales) by keeping your website updated with relevant information and blogs.
For Content, what means most is how useful it is, how it is presented, and that it is not copied or erroneous. however, you can keyword optimize the content and make it more relevant for your targetted keyword.
Keyword Optimization
We know the importance of useful and authentic content. Keyword optimization is a technique to include the related keywords, synonyms to drive organic traffic to your site.
You can use various tools can help the keyword optimization of your copy on your WordPress website. One of the best is Yoast SEO. It helps you to improve the readability of your site, determines the keyword density and helps you
Image Optimization
You can use online tools like Kraken.io or SEO optimized images the images on your WordPress website. Optimizing images helps decrease the page load times which ultimately helps the user experience.
Also, high quality and optimized images with proper alt tags can be really helpful for the SEO of your website. Here are a few points that you shouldn’t miss about image optimization.
- Lossless compression of images so that they load faster
- Clear and precise images related to the text
- Alt tag that describes the image
- Proper image name
Images also add to the readability of your pages. They’ve always proved to be more expressive than the words. It’s always a good practice to add relevant and sufficient images to your WordPress pages. That makes your article/blog/page more readable and easily understandable.
Also, when using images on your site, ensure that they are original and not stolen. We really don’t want to get into copyright issues, right? And also see that the images are of high-quality, and not blurry or confusing.
6) Email/newsletter marketing
Email marketing is where you target your visitors and provide them with the news and best offers. The technique is simple – gather all the emails you can, and even ask your visitors to leave theirs at your online web directory.
Email marketing includes sending direct promotional emails to your visitors. The emails are specially crafted with a call to action text and links that the viewers are tempted to click. However, this doesn’t mean that the information can be misleading. When using Email marketing, make sure that the content of your emails is legit and not deceptive.
Also, be very careful when you are forward for email marketing for your promotions. Because, everyone, including me and you, hate spam equally. However opt-in emails are okay. Those are the marketing emails that provides the visitors an option to click a button and stop receiving further emails from you.
Conclusion
However, there are many ways you can inform people about your new directory website.
Traffic, for any kind of website, is the most desirable factor. And not just traffic, other vital things are conversion, low bounce rate, etc. Website building and maintenance need constant efforts. Even though with the modern technologies, you don’t have to learn the technical details and can create and manage your own website.
I hope this article helps you with the tactics that can help you attain more traffic on your directory website. Besides, always keep in mind that great quality and original content on your website is what you should always strive for. When you provide useful, and fresh content to your visitors, they are automatically going to like your site with a few little Marketing efforts.