For any business, it’s essential to have a website, and whether your goal is to simply promote your company, generate more leads or sell direct from your site, it won’t work unless you have traffic coming to it. The more traffic you have, the more likely your chances of selling your products or services and build your brand.
There are two ways people come to your site, through organic or paid traffic. Organic traffic is how people visit your website naturally, either through ranking in search results for your industry, social media or word of mouth. To achieve the best results you need to create great content that your customers want, but it may take some time to for search engines to find and place it in the top search result – ensuring that you have the right content that people are searching for. And although organic traffic may take longer to achieve high numbers, it is also a more sustainable option for growing traffic to your site. If you do organic traffic right it can cost you next to nothing.
Paid traffic can return traffic to your site almost immediately, but as the name suggests you need to invest some money to see results and depending on your industry and strategy it can be costly if not done correctly. Paid traffic can allow you to get targeted traffic that returns better results from the incoming traffic.
Below we have included tips, for both organic and paid traffic, to help you boost the amount of people visiting your local business website.
Organic Traffic
As we’ve mentioned before in ‘3 Things to Help Search Engines Find Your Company’, great content is one of the key factors to appearing in the top search results. This content should be specifically written to provide useful information to people and as a result, search engines look on this favourable and rank it more highly. So, whenever you create a new page or piece of content for your site, write it with your customer in mind, make sure that they will find it useful and answer any pain points they are hoping to answer. But remember to use keywords your potential customers might use when searching for information on your industry.
Social sharing
If you’ve created great content, why not share it through social media. It opens you up to a wider audience for free. If you put your content out there on social media it can be shared by those who are interested. Links from social media to your company website are also taken into consideration for ranking.
Social media offers a great opportunity to connect with potential clients. You are able to see those people who have shared your content or company page, which means you have a list of people who have shown an interest in what your company does. Why not contact these people and try to convert them into a paying customer?
Paid Traffic
For each strategy below, you should create a custom landing page specifically made to compliment your ad and convert clicks into paying customers to help receive a greater return on investment.
Pay Per Click Advertising – This includes things like Google Adwords and Bing Ads where you pay for each click on your company’s ad in the search results for specific keywords. The competition for your desired keyword will impact how much you pay and how many clicks you receive. Choose long-tail keywords with low competition, but reasonably high monthly search results for a cheaper price. A simple way to find these keywords is to take your main keywords, enter them into a Google search and at the bottom of the search results will be a list of similar search terms.
Geotarget your ads for your ideal customer. If you’re a local business you want to make sure you are not paying for clicks on the other side of the world. And while we are thinking local, set the timings of your ad to coincide with your business hours but also take into consideration when your customers might be online. This is especially important if your ads are aimed at getting you more calls. There is no point in paying for ads that when someone clicks on them, goes the extra step to make a call and no one answers.
Social Advertisement – These are paid ads that appear in people’s feeds on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These ads appear in front of a targeted audience based on their likes, shared items, geographic locations and a number of other behaviour factors. Again, like PPC Advertising the amount you have to pay is dependent on a number of factors, including competition.
If you are considering social advertisement to market your local business, you need to keep in mind that each social media platform will need a slightly different approach. Focus on the platforms that the bulk of your potential customers will be using.
If you’re selling something mention the price, if it’s a special discount, show how big that discount is.
Affiliate Programs – Affiliate advertising allows you to advertise on other related websites and for every sale that comes through that site you pay them a percentage of the sale. Affiliate Programs can be a great alternative to PPC Advertising as you only pay once your product has been sold. Affiliate marketing is an extremely cost-effective way to market your business and product. It doesn’t carry the same risk as the above forms of paid marketing.
Choose affiliates that relate to your industry. Affiliates who will be excited to become an affiliate and who will actively promote your affiliate links on their site and marketing channels. This will allow your company to reach an audience who are already interested in your industry but may not know about your company.