You are here: Home / Blog / 12 Underused but Very Effective Tips to Drive Website Traffic for Your Small Business
By Eric Poane on Aug 18, 2023
Most people in business know the basics to drive website traffic And we’re not denying that SEO, content marketing, social media, paid advertising (SEM), guest posts and strategic keyword use and the other basics are all vitally important. But what are some underused but very effective ways to drive traffic to your website without breaking the bank? Thinking outside the box can put you ahead of your competition.
You are no doubt already employing some SEO methods to drive website traffic. But are you using SBO – search box optimization? This is pretty new, and you have a window to beat your competition to the punch.
When your prospect does a search on Google, Bing or YouTube, autosuggestions appear as they type. It saves users a lot of time to just click on one of those autosuggestions rather than to complete typing their search.
Through SBO, when a user types your reserved keyword, your company or its product keyword appears as an autosuggestion. Usually this is restricted to a local area, but it is possible to do this nationally. And once you reserve a keyword or phrase, your competition can’t use it for as long as you do!
So, say you reserve the keyword “best pizza restaurants in Cincinnati.” When a user types that in search, they begin to get autosuggestions, and those include your link, let’s say you want to show “Joey’s Pizza.” When the user clicks on that autosuggestion for “Joey’s Pizza” they are taken to a page filled with links only to your website with no competition in sight.
We aren’t recommending that you give up SEO. But adding SBO gives you a huge additional competitive advantage.
It’s a given that any business with a website should be optimizing for search engines. But it’s also important for small businesses to get the most bang for their buck to drive website traffic. But why pay for something unless it’s successful?
So get the best of both worlds, SEO and a sure bet. With Pay Per Result SEO, you pay only when you rank on the first page of Google.
To keep up with how people search today, you need to optimize your content for voice search. Apps and devices like Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa and Microsoft Cortana are only going to become more important as time goes on. Businesses cannot afford to ignore their impact.
When people use voice search, their searches are more conversational so you need to research and use longer tail keywords. Voice search looks for succinct answers to questions, so summarize your articles.
People need reasons to keep coming back to your website. Return traffic means return business and better search engine rankings. So offer valuable content beyond blog posts. Consider offering training courses, webinars, online events and certifications to help your customers and to keep them coming back.
Social media isn’t just for entertainment. People look for answers daily on sites like Quora. Become active giving answers about your industry on sites like Quora, LinkedIn and even Reddit. Not only do they set you up as an expert and drive website traffic but your answers can be shared. They key is to give valuable advice not to just tout your company.
Everyone listens to podcasts these days, and it’s not easy for podcasters to fill their continuing need for interesting guests. Look into podcasts that make sense for your type of business, contact them and offer to be a guest. And of course take the opportunity to send listeners to your website.
It’s no secret that expertise is attractive to both customers and search engines alike. And yet many businesses don’t take the time to present their organization as filled with experts. Google and other search engines want to give their users search results that are reliable, and they will repay with great rankings when you publish well-organized expert content. To do this, you should use the pillar-cluster model where you publish a long-form overview pillar page and several linked cluster pages that discuss aspects of the bigger topic.
This pillar-cluster organization helps search engines crawl and categorize the content on your site, which improves your search results rankings and is crucial to drive website traffic.
Don’t just post to your site and forget it. If you have a new service or if you have just published an article that gives your customers valuable information, let them know. You want to give your customers reasons to keep coming back to your website in order to increase conversions and search engine rankings. Email your list, post to social media, make deals with influencers to drop mentions and issue press releases.
For optimal success, you need to get your brand out there. People today want to connect with the companies they do business with. The more active you are, the more you push people to your website.
Be active in industry-related Facebook and LinkedIn groups. Start your own LinkedIn group. Post Instagram and TikTok videos. The more brand recognition you have, the more traffic you will drive to your website.
If you aren’t using video marketing to drive website traffic, it’s past time you started. Video is a great way to drive people to your website from social media and advertising, and it attracts attention on your website itself.
Always be looking for potential partner companies who have your same audience but who are not competitive with you. You can then promote each other’s events, webinars, seminars, products and services to your own customers and greatly increase website traffic for you both. You gain not only from access to each other’s customers but also by the increased credibility of being recommended by a trusted vendor.
Writing FAQs on all your product and services pages is a great way to amp up your SEO quickly and easily. You can’t always answer all questions elegantly in your content, or you may want some of the answers to pop out. When you put an FAQ section at the end of a page, it is an immense help in ranking for long-tail keywords.
There are all kinds of ways to driver traffic to your business’s website. To schedule a free consultation about how Umbrella Local can help, complete this form or call (646)440-1426.
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