A website that doesn’t function properly can turn into a liability. The money and effort used to maintain a useless online presence could be better spent in other ways to promote your business. However, your small business website doesn’t have to suffer and end up as the “black sheep” of the business.
Sure, there is paid advertising campaigns like PPC to help stimulate traffic. And you can spend thousands on professional SEO consultants to help improve traffic to your website. However, there are simple strategies you can do on your own that cost nothing, or very little.
Here are systematic strategies that can help you drive traffic to your business website without spending the tons of money.
Provide Fresh Content Regularly
Professional SEO consultants will tell you this easy known fact. However, rather than pay them hundreds or thousands of dollars for this advice, take it from us for free. A website that is regularly updated gets more attention from search engines – period.
Fresh content may be adding a blog to your business website domain so that each post adds freshness to the entire domain. It may mean updating your home page a few times a month so it reflects any and all current promotions, sales, or happenings at your business. However you do it, continuously fresh content will help your website increase its ranking and be seen by more people searching for what you offer.
Find the Perfect Keywords for Your Website
Keywords are essential. However, you want to avoid the broad, widely-used keywords that give small businesses little chance at a 1st page results on Google. Do at least a little research using Google’s keyword tool on their Adwords site. Plug in a few keywords that are pertinent to your business. You can discover what other words people use to search for your products or services.
Choose a URL with Your Chosen Keyword
Indeed, it’s nice to get a domain with your business name. However, if your business name doesn’t contain any of your main keywords, it doesn’t help you acquire new traffic. A website named “johnsstore.com” doesn’t tell a potential search engine, or a potential customer for that matter, what your business is about.
Instead, you could modify the URL to become “johnsstoreantiques.com” to help all parties know that you sell antiques.
Choose Descriptive Page Titles
All the pages on your website have titles. Usually they are found in the META tags in the HTML coding. Be sure your page titles are not ambiguous. For instance, “About Us” is too general. Use more specific and descriptive titles like “The Story of Janice’s Jewelry” to add more keyword ‘oomph’ to your website.
Link to and Feed From Your Social Media
Your small business website should contain links for your readers to join you as followers and fans on your social media accounts like Twitter and Facebook. Encourage readers to join so they can enjoy the benefits of your exclusive social media promotions.
Likewise, always feed your website updates to your social media. If you have a business blog, you want all your contacts to know about it so they will visit your site. There are online websites that can help you get the most of automatically feeding your website updates to all social media accounts.
Comment on Other Blogs and Forums
There are certainly other popular websites that are related to your industry. Find the blogs and forums that are pertinent to your business and comment on them regularly, and always leave a link to your website. If you can be more specific, such as a link to one of your blog posts that is pertinent to the topic rather than just your homepage, that is more helpful.
When small business owners complain that they do not see any significant changes or improvements in their website traffic, it is no surprise when they admit that core strategies like these are often not applied. You can experience a big difference and explore the potential of your website if you apply this systematic strategy to improve traffic.
