Driving users to your football academy’s website is an important part of running your business. The people that come to your website every week are your potential clients looking for football camps or for football training sessions throughout the year at your Academy.
This can either be people who know you and have worked with you before. But it can also be new players and families who have not been on your website before, that are looking for a football academy like yours.
Setting up strategies that consistently drive people to your website is therefore super important to continually maintain a steady flow of relevant families coming to your website and contacting you to start working with you. And there exist different ways on the Internet that you can use to drive people to your website on a consistent basis. In this article, we will outline three of the most common sources of website visitors, also called website traffic:
1. Link to your Website Inside your Social Media Posts
You probably already own social media pages for your football academy on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn or TikTok. Social media is a great way to drive people to your website because you can make use of the community that follow your football academy’s pages to give visibility to the posts that you write and create.
These pages allow you to promote your services to people that know about your business and follow your pages. But are you making it easy for these people to access your website? By adding a link to your website so that they can immediately consult more information, you clearly indicate where and how they can access more information about what you are offering.
Even if users know you have a website, they probably do not know or remember that you have a specific page on your website with the information that they want and that answers all the questions that they have.
While it is often said that social media platforms do not like published posts that contain links (also called website URLs) inside their text (because it drives users away from the social media platforms where they want users to stay), it is still important to do so in order to make it as easy as possible for people to access your website when they see your social media posts.
If you do not like the idea of including a link inside your posts main text, an alternative is to add the link to your website as a comment on your post and let your audience know in your text that they can find the link there.
2. Drive Organic Traffic from Search Engine Results
The term organic traffic simply means people that arrived on your website from unpaid sources. When you create pages on your website, companies such as Google have robots that scan the internet for pages that it can add (also called indexing) to it’s search engine.
This way, when users search for information on search engines, Google can deliver a good service by showing your website with relevant information that they are searching for to the user on their search engine. Some known search engines are Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia but more exist.
While you cannot control, when search engines such as Google or Microsoft Bing will show your website in their organic search results, be mindful that content that you create on your site can be shown for free on search engines. You can even request Google to add a specific page on your website to its search engine results using tools such as Google Search Console.
This way you can make sure that the pages you want to show are eligible to appear in the search results. There also exist techniques of improving the chances that your football academy’s web pages show higher in search results, often referred to as Search Engine Optimisation techniques.
3. Drive Paid Traffic Using Advertising Campaigns
Another source to drive users to websites used today on the internet is what is called paid traffic. This term encompasses all visitors that come to your website after clicking on a paid advertising campaign.
You can use different platforms to create and run advertising campaigns to bring people to your football academy’s website. A common way of creating paid advertising campaigns is through social media platforms with Facebook & Instagram Ads, Snapchat Ads, TikTok Ads or YouTube Ads.
The distinction between social media advertising and organic social media posts that you publish on your football academy’s page is that you are able to show your adverts to people interested in your football academy’s services that do not already follow you on social media, by specifically targeting users based on their interests or demographic data such as their age or language spoken.
You are able to select your specific budget that you want to invest over the entire campaign or a daily budget per day to reach these users with your ads while they are using social media platforms.
Another form of paid traffic can driven through search engines by means of platforms such as Google Ads and Microsoft Bing Ads. This means that you can show adverts that link to your website at the top or bottom of Google or Bing’s search engine results pages.
These platforms use models called Pay-per-click advertising where you pay (usually an amount of cents) each time a user clicks on your ads to arrive on your website.
Search engine advertising is an important source of paid traffic because it allows you to show ads to users based on the specific keywords that users are typing into the search engine, such as for example “Football academy near me”, or “Individual football training”. Based on these keywords, you can show your adverts and reach users looking for the services of your football academy.
Other Sources: Email, Physical Bannering, Flyers
While we covered some of the most used sources of driving online traffic, there exist many other ways of getting users to know about your football academy and onto your website.
Some other channels include emailing, where users arrive on your website after clicking on a link inside emails that you send to them.
Or other non-digital sources such as physical banners or flyers displayed inside football clubs and training facilities where you can show the name of your Academy and website.
While it is more difficult to know how many users are arriving on your website from these non-digital sources like flyers and banners, they are yet another option at your disposal to communicate with new or existing clients.
