After spending a lot of money and long hours getting a new website ready for launch, the last thing you want to worry about is building traffic. Unfortunately gaining traffic is something that takes time and effort. This is true for brand new domains and for moving your site to a new URL. For people to find you, search engines have to find you. Fortunately, there are several ways that social media can help drive traffic from both users and search engine bots.
Top 5 ways to use social media for driving traffic to a new website:
- Connect your website to Google+
While the effectiveness of Google+ as a social engagement channel is debatable – they simply don’t have the conversation volume of Facebook or Twitter yet – creating a Google+ page for your business and verifying it with your website can have a positive impact on search results. Many businesses are late to the game, so by acting now, you can take advantage of the lower audience and rank very well in the instant search. Traffic also seems to be steadily growing on Google+, so optimizing your presence there now keeps you in position ahead of your competition.
Right now the only Google+ page that comes up in the search for “+vel” is Velas Vallarta - Share links to your compelling content on all social channels
Google and Bing have both publicly confirmed that social media signals impact search ranking. What’s also true is that your content can get crawled and indexed faster by search engines if you share it on your social channels – particularly if it is interesting content that gets shared by many other people. - Post your photos to Pinterest
After moderate initial grown, Pinterest has recently rocketed to the #3 position in the social media war. For those not familiar with Pinterest, it is a social site built around sharing images and videos relating to user interests. By posting compelling property and local imagery on your website then sharing it on Pinterest, you can drive awareness and traffic to your site based on your unique visual selling points. - Contests
Running contests on social media sites are a great way to create a lot of buzz about your brand. When planned correctly, contests and promotions can do a lot more for you besides gaining Facebook Likes. In the entry process, encourage the participants to explore your new website, or incentivize them to share links to the site. This can have a large impact on increasing the flow of social traffic, as can be seen in this case study of a contest for Hotel 1000 in Seattle. - Issue press releases and socialize them
This last point may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s a simple step that is often underutilized. Make sure that you have a press release ready to go the day you launch the new website, and publish it on your site in your press room. Submit it for syndication to multiple news sites and share on all of your social channels. Don’t be afraid to think outside the standard social box here. There are many niche sites for PDF distribution (like Scribd.com) that can help get your optimized content in front of search engine bots where it will have the biggest impact on your organic traffic.
When it comes to building traffic to your website, nothing is more effective in the long run than traditional search engine optimization. That process often takes a lot of time and dedication, so supplementing your SEO with targeted social marketing efforts can help increase short-term traffic while boosting your long-term SEO efforts.
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Contributed by Mike Supple, Sr. Social Media Manager
