4 Smart Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Personal Website - The Muse

4 Smart Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Personal Website - The Muse4 Smart Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Personal WebsitePersonal websites are a great place to showcase who you are and what you do, whether youre simply sharing your resume or uploading an entire portfolio. They can also be incredibly helpful in landing new opportunities and growing your career.But heres the thing With a personal website, the rule if you build it they will come doesnt really apply. Unless youre Ariana Grande, you wont automatically rack up thousands of views, clicks, and conversions.You have to put in the work to get people to visit your site. Luckily, there are a lot of solid strategies and resources out there that you can- and should- leverage to get more traffic to your website.1. Optimize Your Site for SearchYou may have heard the term SEO (search engine optimization). Broadly speaking, this refers to fine-tuning your website so that search engines (mainly Google) can crawl all the pages and understa nd what theyre about. The goal is to get your site popping up on page one when someone inputs a relevant search term- which drives more trafficThis may sound a bit intimidating. But thankfully, there are plenty of places to learn about SEO. For example, Squarespace provides a guide to improving your SEO to help you understand some of the ways you can make your site more visible to search engines, positiv an SEO checklist you can reference when building your site. (If you have a Squarespace site, theyve also got you covered on the technical elements of SEO.)A few simple ways you can boost your sites visibilityStructure your content with headings. Split up blocks of texts with relevant headings. This makes it easier for both readers and search engines to understand the most important points on every page.Add tags and categories. Categories are a great way to organize content by topic or type, and tags operate like hashtags- they help people find specific things you mentioned more easi ly, and help search engines understand the topics on your site.Include a site description. This is a small block of text that usually appears below your site title in search results. It tells readers- and yep, search engines- what your site is all about.List your geographical location. This is especially helpful if you only provide services in a specific area.2. Promote It As Much As You CanGood SEO wont do all the work for you. Youve got to promote your site to real live people, too. Try doing the following to help drive your traffic to the next level.Put the URL on all of your profiles. Any social media profiles you have, your LinkedIn, you name it. Its all about exposure, even if a lot of that exposure is passive.Include it in your personal schmelzglas signature. Think about it- how many emails do you send in a week? (That said, I hope it goes without saying that you should probably leave the URL for your side hustle out of your official work email signature.)Announce it. Share y our site with your Instagram followers, tweet it to the world, send an email to your personal and professional connections. And while you may not want to email people about it more than once, you can plug your site on social media far more frequently- say once a week or a few times a month.Leverage social sharing. Many website builders offer something called social sharing. With this tool, you can link your site to your social media accounts. Every time you publish new content, its pushed to your feeds for your friends and followers to see. All you do is set it up once and voil3. Send Out a Regular NewsletterNewsletters can be a great way to encourage readers to visit your site. Make sure you feature a newsletter sign-up option on your site (on Squarespace, you can do this using Newsletter Blocks), and promote the heck out of it.You can use your newsletter to tell your target audience what youre up to, share new content from your site, advertise your services, even provide extra tip s and advice. Your newsletter doesnt need to be every week, nor does it need to be an incredibly heavy lift. But you should be consistent and always provide some value. Otherwise, your newsletter will end up hanging out in everyones spam folders.4. Analyze Traffic DataYou opened this article because you wanted to figure out how to increase traffic to your website, right? If thats your goal, you need to pay attention to the numbers. Not just because math is fun (or is that just me?), but because Squarespace traffic analytics can help you see if all your efforts are fruitful and where you could make some changes. Here are some examples of data points you might track.Unique Visitors How many people are coming to your site?Popular Content When users get to your website, what pages do they spend time on?Traffic Sources Are people finding your site directly (because you texted or emailed them the link), via social media or your newsletter, or through organic search? You can even break it down to see which social media channel is most popular.Image courtesy of Squarespace.comAgain, this isnt just for fun. Youll want to track the data, interpret it, and take action. For instance, lets say you see a spike in traffic one day. When you dig a little further, you see that most of it came from Twitter. Youd only been posting on Twitter a few times a month, but after seeing this result, you decide to up the frequency to twice a week.Or lets say you analyze your traffic sources and see that almost no one clicked through to the site from your newsletter. You spend a lot of time on that newsletter, and it doesnt seem to be paying off, so you decide to table it for now and revamp it later. Now, you can spend that allotted time on other more fruitful efforts.As much as Id like to tell you that theres a magic spell thatll automatically send your traffic numbers through the roof, well, that just doesnt exist. The good news is, with a little bit of effort, you can start bringing the clicks- and the opportunities- your way. Good luck