You may have heard of doing work to ensure better ‘organic’ traffic on Google, i.e. natural, unpaid traffic. There are certainly many benefits for book authors to capitalise on SEO for their book or author website. (Though this article is not about search engine optimisation).
People will generally find your website through a combination of their remembering your author name and/or book title. An especially rare keyword might also work.
Google isn’t the only source of free visitors; there is also Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. However, these folk mostly won’t click through to your website to find out more. Happy as a clam on FB or Instagram, they often don’t move from that spot.
Whereas, with a Google search, many will click on the top three ‘organic’ spots… unless there is the answer right on the search results page. (An informational search).
As Jin & Co designers have said, you need to find out where these visitors have come from. It may be surprising to find out that your social media sends very little traffic – see where Jin & Co’s authors got their visitors from. You can also see which country they’re from. You can find a lot of data out with Google Analytics or Google Site Kit (a WordPress plugin). More info on this is my website metrics article.
See my own Site Kit graph below.
Don’t worry, once the simple version is loaded in your WordPress dashboard, it’s easy peasy to check. You can see that most visits come from searching online, and the next lot type the URL in.
Some of the Benefits of Organic Visitors
The most obvious benefit: you are not paying directly for website visitors, although you might have spent on website design, hosting and store setup. The thing is you will always pay something – including time – to have a viable author website.
No matter if you try to use free WordPress.com or Wix, paid upgrades will be needed if you want to capture emails or remove their brand.
Returning Visitor Traffic
Returning traffic is a boon for authors, as Jin suggests. If you don’t have a decent email list, or else advertising, then your lovely website probably won’t attract many return visitors. (Have a small cry here).
So, a main benefit of using author websites is to advertise and sell books directly – with nil commission. But remember they will come for the blogs as well, to get to know you.
The other benefit is to capture the emails of readers, something that Amazon KDP doesn’t let you do. However, for fan-building, the “Follow” button on your Amazon author page is good. If you put out another book, an email will go to them with the release information. You have set up Amazon Author Central, right?
Direct to Your Magic
The returning visitors often know you. A visit might be prompted from a talk you did. This is where the ‘direct’ visit metric comes in.
‘Direct’ means the visitor types your URL into Google. They might have seen advertising in print, they read your book, they saw you in a public forum, or any number of reasons. This is a very good reason to use an easy-to-remember URL!
Your name is the easiest to remember of all. That said, other people might also have your name. The money author Greg Smith shares his name with a dozen other Greg Smith authors. He is the author of Stop Living Pay to Pay. I once interviewed Greg for an article on money personality. I LOVED his concept of the three personalities.
Stop Living Pay to Pay is on sale for $19.95. https://booktopia.kh4ffx.net/EK1adW
Our Booktopia partner link means we may get a little commission if your visit turns into a purchase.
So, there are many benefits of attracting organic traffic for authors, including free advertising to people typing in your author name or book titles, interesting them in subscribing to a newsletter, and warming up potential readers with more educational or witty articles. If it’s been awhile since you updated it, don’t let your author website go to waste!
Hey reader, are you interested in author/personal branding? If you reside anywhere in Australia, then I have a special on your Personal Brand marketing plan. Superb value, with my book as well.
I am doing an in-person Steps to Build an Author Brand workshop in Albany Creek, Qld, on 20th April 2024 – check it out and see if you want to come along!
