Every entrepreneur needs a website and digital presence to run a successful business. It’s an essential and active part of a dietitian’s marketing strategy, whether your audience is national, regional, or local.

But having a live website is just the beginning. It takes ongoing work to drive organic (free – not ads) traffic to your website. As more people find and visit your site, you’ll have more opportunities to convert them into nutrition clients. A high-traffic website also opens doors to creating passive income from advertising revenue, media, and brand work.

These strategies can help boost traffic to your nutrition website.

1. Build Your Website on WordPress 

There’s a reason more than 65% of websites are built on WordPress. The framework is optimized for SEO right out of the box. That means it’s designed to help search engines (like Google) find your content easily and show it to users.

WordPress also accommodates a range of themes, plugins, and add-ons that allow you to customize how your website looks and works. One plugin we highly recommend is Yoast SEO. This free plugin provides the tools to help your site perform even better in search engines. 

2. Do Keyword Research

When creating content for your website, write with specific keywords in mind — but make sure they’re the keywords your audience is searching for. For example, you might consider yourself a “digestive health dietitian,” but the term “gut health nutritionist” gets seven times more search volume.

The only way to know what your audience is searching for is by doing keyword research. Keysearch (affiliate link) is an effective but inexpensive tool we recommend for keyword research. It’s easy to use and includes helpful tutorials. Use our discount code KSDISC to get 15% off your subscription.

Once you identify a handful of keywords that describe your business, sprinkle them throughout your content, but don’t go overboard. Write content that reads naturally.

3. Maintain a Blog or Podcast

Even if blogging or podcasting isn’t your goal, these are essential for driving traffic. Search engines are more likely to crawl websites that are updated frequently. And publishing a new blog or podcast is an easy way to update your website. 

Blogging or podcasting also allows you to demonstrate your expertise around specific keywords and provide your audience with value. That earns trust from your visitors, making them more likely to sign up for your email list, programs, or nutrition appointments. 

4. Structure Your Content for Search Engines

Search engines crawl your website to understand your content so they can retrieve it when needed. They travel from page to page through a path of links created by WordPress and the Yoast plugin.

To make your site easier to crawl, structure your content into important keyword categories, use the correct headers (H1 for titles, H2 for subheads), and ensure every page is linked to other pages. 

Also, if you have a blog with recipes, use a recipe card like WP Recipe Maker. This plugin provides “schema markup” that tells search engines there’s a recipe to look at. The same goes for a podcast, videos, FAQs, etc. Schema markups are in your WordPress editor. Just click the correct one and add your content.

5. Don’t Forget About the User Experience

Google (or other search engines) will serve your content to users, but you have to get your audience to click, read it, and, hopefully, take advantage of your special offer (AKA a Call To Action). The best way to get and keep them on your site is to write content that speaks directly to your ideal audience, answers their questions quickly, and builds trust in you.

Make sure your content is clear, concise, and easy to understand. Use short sentences and break your content into scannable sections using H2 subheads and bullets. Include stock images or your own photography for visual interest.

And since 80% of people search on mobile, keep your paragraphs to no more than three sentences. Anything longer looks like a wall of text on mobile, making it too hard to focus and read. 

6. Share Your Content

Shareable content can spread like wildfire, and every person that it’s shared with is a potential visitor to your website and a potential customer. So, whenever you publish a new blog post, podcast, video, or anything else of interest to your audience, share a short description, an image, and the link on social media and in your newsletter or regular emails. You never know what will ignite.

Naturally, you should post these to your social media accounts, but think outside the box too. Look for social sharing groups with other dietitians or food bloggers. And check Facebook for support groups in your niche. These groups often restrict self-promotion, but you can offer helpful tips and mention an article or recipe from your website to attract visitors.

7. Build Backlinks

Any new website must earn authority among search engines before it can climb to the top of the rankings. Besides writing a stellar About page detailing your credentials and experience, one of the best ways to boost authority is by earning backlinks (a link from another respected website). 

Producing great content on your website will encourage other sites to link to you organically.  But there are other ways to earn backlinks too. 

You can offer to write a guest post on a colleague’s nutrition blog in exchange for a link to your website. Or, if you have recipes on your blog, you can join food blogger roundup groups on Facebook. These are opportunities to include one of your recipes in a recipe roundup on another site. 

Another effective way to earn authority and backlinks is by responding to media requests for subject matter experts. Online publications that use your name and quote will usually link to your website. Sign up for a free account with HARO and check for health or nutrition queries. 

Driving consistent, quality traffic to your website takes time and effort. But it gets easier as you make more connections and produce more content. Before long, you’ll have regular visitors, new clients, and opportunities waiting!