Increase Online Traffic to Your Small Business Website
Most small businesses now have websites. This is great but what often happens is a small business will contract a web developer to make a stunning website with none to very little consideration to search engine optimisation or SEO strategies. It’s no good developing a stunning website if no one can find it. This article will show you hwo to increase traffic to your small business website.
It’s critical for a small business that their website can be found easily. So how can a small business increase online traffic to their website? There’s a few essential ingredients that you can and should do even if you have a low budget online marketing plan.
1. Education
It’s important for a small business owner to educate themselves on what search engine optimisation (SEO) is. This means knowing how Google and the other search engines work so you can play their game by their rules. There’s a heaps of websites out there which will help you understand SEO and how to achieve it.
2. Get on the campaign trail
Just like a business plan your small business needs an online marketing campaign plan. This sets out what you are going to use to increase traffic to your website. There is so much available from keywords, Facebook optimisation, online article writing, social bookmarking, video for SEO and on it goes. The evolution of online marketing has come long way since banner ads and email newsletters. Make sure you have a clear plan on what online tools you are going to use and how you’re going to use them.
3. Onsite marketing
Once you know what SEO is and how it works it’s now time for your small business to practice some onsite online marketing. This means fine tuning your website with profitable keywords that are high in demand and low in supply (much like real estate). You can use Google keyword tool for this or Wordtracker which is a paid service.
Then you must strategically place your keywords and know the difference between head keywords and long tail keywords. An often underestimated but effective technique for onsite marketing is using images for SEO.
4. Offsite marketing
This means getting online traffic to your website by using websites and tools away from your website. This is all about social media marketing for small business. Confused? Let me explain. A lot of small businesses now have a Facebook page for their business. There are a lot of Facebook marketing tips available but this and Twitter, being the two main social media sites, are where you should be doing most of your offsite marketing do people are enticed to go to your website and see what you have to offer.
5. Trust Marketing
Do you use social media to flog your product or service? FAIL! This is a massive mistake that a lot of small businesses make and it really amounts to spam. You must as a small business use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+ to build relationships through Trust Marketing.
6. Synergy
I mentioned at the start about having a good clear online marketing campaign plan. It’s very important that your strategy is synergised. Make sure that your message is consistent across the different sites and tools you are using.
7. Measure
It’s no good having a great small business website, an unreal Facebook landing page, a regularly updated Twitter account or a thousand online articles all going to your website. You MUST also measure how each marketing channel is working. Just like asking a customer or client who calls your business or comes in “How did you find us?” Well the great news about online marketing is that you don’t have to ask the customer that, you can find that information out easily by various internet marketing analytic programs available. Facebook has ‘insights;, Google has Adwords, and there are heaps of companies that offer similar but more sophisticated measurements.
Measuring what your best keywords are, where your customers are from, what they are clicking on and so on will be enormous help to you in adapting your online marketing strategy to fine tune it for massive results.
These are just come of the essential internet considerations a small business must make in their online marketing. Of course there are many others and these should not be ignored. Online marketing takes time, it takes patience and it takes perserverance. Is it worth it?
Absolutely. Can you do it easily? Yes you can.