Just because you’ve built a website for your radio station does not mean visitors will start flowing in. Thankfully, there are some tactics that you can employ right now to boost your visitors. These are not tips you can do once of twice and expect to gain numbers. These are tips that need to become of your daily routine.
Before we get to the tips, you must think of visitor page views and unique visitor numbers as ratings that need to improve upon month after month and year after year. Unfortunately, many stations do get this concept and they ultimately wonder why the website is worth the time and expense. So, please get on board with tracking your page views and unique visitor counts. Apply Google Analytics to your website and get reports on a consistent basis to see what is and what’s not working for you.
1) Produce Fresh Content
Compelling content will always draw in new and old visitors and it helps to solidify your station’s online footprint. The best content you can provide is something relevant to your market that nobody else has. If your station website exists to import news that visitors can find anywhere else, it might do well for a short period but it’s not going to sustain traffic for very long.
You’re probably thinking, “the small staff I have working for us are not writers”. There’s no requirement that compelling content has to be thousands of words in length. We’ve seen stations generate 4-8 articles per day with just one paragraph of short/concise information that visitors can use.
Here are just a few ideas to get you started:
If you do any local news in the morning or throughout the day, each one of those news articles should be online. This is good in case someone misses a portion of the on-air news. In a very small market, obituaries may work for you.
Are there any new businesses in town or coming to town? Call up the owner for a free interview about the business. You just might turn that business into a customer quicker due to the free publicity.
Do you have local troubles like bad roads, etc? Take opinions and give names and phone numbers to where concerns can be addressed.
Community calendar of local/state events. A short write-up about a flea market that happens once a quarter will be compelling content to someone. A short write-up about a weekend car lot sale at your client ABC Motors would not be compelling content.
There’s always something to talk about about the weather. What to wear this weekend. Allergies. Nearby places to visit when it’s raining outside.
Basically, anything that your live talent can say regarding your market or state is a potential news article.
Are you still not totally feeling confident about generating content? Have your listeners submit questions about your market that they want answers to. Go out find the answers for them and post them online.
Just know that great content gets noticed and it gets people talking. That means more visitors to your site and more visitors means more money in ad sales. So, great content = more visitors = more money.
2) Promote your website on-air often
This should really go without saying, right? However, I listen to local radio stations and rarely hear a reason to visit the website other than to listen online. If your goal is making money with your station website, then your content must be promoted. Everyone knows that if you stream your station online, there’s a link to that on your website. Why else should I go there? Give specific reasons to visit, not generalities like, “More online at wxyz.com”.
“Listen for a chance to win at 10 am. Get clue for a better chance at winning at wxyz.com.”
Previously we mentioned duplicating stories on-air to online. You can also post a story online first and then tease/promote it on-air. “You’ll never guess what our mayor did this weekend. We’ll tell you coming up, but details are online now at wxyz.com.” Even though the only mayor attended a ribbon-cutting, a tease like this will gain your station many page views.
Teasing online stories on-air is particularly great for personality blogs. We have known some personality blog pages to experience more traffic than the station homepage. In this case, the personality has perfectly engaging content and referred to it often during their show. We could tell easily that many followers had bookmarked the personality page so they could go right to it rather than going to the station homepage and clicking on their link.
3) Optimize your site so that it’s SEO friendly
We’ve all heard of SEO (search engine optimization), but not every site capitalizes on it. Incorporating basic SEO elements, such as commonly searched keywords that tie into your community will help Google rank your site and help your audience find you.
Make sure your content is compelling and is clearly written with titles including keywords that are often used in the article. Let’s take an article about the local high school football team winning the state championship. First, the title must contain the high school name, football, and championship. If the article only mentions the final score, then Google will not see that as compelling enough to create a search engine listing for it. If someone does a search for the score, your article will not be found. Instead, within the article, go into more detail about the high school (by name) winning the championship game. Give the final score, the location of the game, and maybe some highlights. Use the high school name often as possible because that’s a keyword that Google will use to score your article higher.
Just remember to minimize unnecessary jargon and do not try to fool Google by packing keywords and locations into content in a nonsensical manner.
Google loves fresh content and will reward you in rankings when you keep your site updated and post regularly.
4) Build an audience with social media
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others are not where you should be posting your content for final consumption. Social interaction with likes and shares is great but think of social as a marketing tool. You will not generate revenue with social media, so use it to direct followers to where you do generate revenue – your website.
Social media is an opportunity to extend your station’s personality and reinforce it with regular posts. Give your audience an incentive to follow you on social media. Simply sharing news posts will not cut it, so mix it up on occasion.
Here are some methods to use with social media.
- Share your news articles.
- Engage in conversations.
- Announce contests and take polls.
- Use live video to tease online content.
Conclusion
Produce great content, promote it often on-air, ensure that your content is optimized for search engines, promote your website content with social. Direct followers back to where you get increased numbers.
Ready to get started and build your website traffic? We’re glad to offer more one-on-one advice. Reach out to us.
