How To Increase Website Traffic: Strategies for 2013 and Beyond

It isn't always easy to increase web traffic to a law firm website. If you're a brand new law firm starting from scratch, learning how to increase website traffic is one of the most important things you can do for your future. When you increase website traffic, you increase the number of people calling your office. Nearly 9 out of 10 legal clients now use the internet to research attorneys before they choose one, leaving less room than ever before for attorneys to stay out of the internet spotlight—you need to increase web traffic just to stay competitive. In this guide you'll get great tips on how to increase website traffic, including ways to increase website traffic for free and through pay per click advertising.

Design For Humans, Not For Search Engines

No matter what strategies you decide to use to increase web traffic coming to your site, you should always keep this rule in mind. If you increase website traffic to your site but it is clunky, slow, and difficult for users to navigate, you'll never actually get all the business you could have been getting. Instead, you should think about how to increase website traffic only after you've made sure that your website is very much readable and interesting to actual human beings.

Don't overoptimize your website, a practice that Google is good at catching and doesn't work as a means to increase website traffic today. Instead of overburdening your website with keywords that don't really increase web traffic, try making it easy to use and include a lot of actual relevant information. This will do much more to increase web traffic to your site than any other method.

Know Who You Are

Having a consistent and professional brand image will also help you learn how to increase website traffic. You can't increase web traffic very much on a website that looks messy or generic. You want your law firm to stand out, and that means taking a fresh approach in order to know how to increase website traffic. Consider writing out a brand profile of your site before you start learning how to increase web traffic. This brand profile can help you understand what your clients are getting out of your firm and how to increase website traffic for your site most effectively.

Another lesson in how to increase website traffic: don't try to be all things to all people. A well constructed niche site can increase website traffic much more easily than a generic site that promises that a three attorney small firm can handle 100 different types of cases. You'll do the most to increase web traffic by being honest about your capabilities and niches of expertise. It's a rookie mistake for people to try to learn how to

Be a Social Media Butterfly

If you thought Facebook was just for connecting with your old college roommate and the cousin you haven't seen since the last family reunion, think again. Social media is now one of the best ways to increase website traffic, and no guide about how to increase web traffic would be complete without mentioning it.

Social networks allow you not only to build a profile, but also to increase web traffic by purchasing sponsored stories and advertisements. This makes it substantially easier for you to increase website traffic from the people most likely to actually need legal help and already have a positive impression of your work—the people nearest you and people who are already friends with someone who has followed you on Facebook. Foursquare lets you target ads with unprecedented geographic precision, which is extremely useful if you want to increase website traffic from a small neighborhood area in a larger city.

Keep Up on Search Trends

One of the other things that can help you increase website traffic for your site is to look up what's going on in the search world. Advice that would have helped you to increase web traffic a great deal in 2008 would be practically useless today, because the ways that people use the internet and the ways that search algorithms work are very different.

Periodically, you should do searches about how to increase website traffic, but narrow your search to web pages that have been created in just the last few months or a year. Anything older than that is substantially less likely to be accurate and less likely to help you attain your goals.

Respond Thoughtfully to Critique

Anyone who wants to know how to increase website traffic should look at stories of web marketing gone bad. Most of these stories involve a company trying to increase website traffic with something that sounded like a good idea at the time, but later turned out to have been insensitive or problematic. If this happens to your company, don't panic. In some cases, you can actually increase web traffic as a result of something negative. The way to do it? Keep your responses apologetic and kind. No one likes a bully. Don't just do damage control, figure out a way to fix problems and prevent them in the future.

Keep Doing What Works

Once you figure out something that works to increase website traffic, keep doing it. Different firms find that using different ways to increase website traffic work best for them. No single guide on how to increase website traffic can possibly tell you all of the creative and innovative things you can be doing to make your web footprint bigger—the only thing that you can do is keep learning and trying to do better in your web marketing efforts.

You should consider getting some analysis programs to help you analyze the increase to website traffic you get from your efforts. If you don't analyze your data, you'll never know how to increase website traffic most effectively.