I get questions all the time related to getting more traffic to your website.  However, the key isn’t getting more traffic, it’s getting the RIGHT kind of traffic.  For businesses who depend on local traffic, online marketing is still effective if done correctly.  A business owner must have a unified online strategy to be able to take advantage of all the different marketing venues from social media to strategic blogging and everything in between.  So what are some things that you can do that will increase the traffic to your website as well as allow each marketing activity to build upon the other?

All of the methods I mention below will assume and take into account that you have already done appropriate keyword research and know how your target market uses the search engines to find you and your products/services.

Here are 5 things you can do that will increase the local traffic to your website:

1) Submit your website to the Google Places.

Google places is a feature of the Google platform that allows local businesses to place themselves on the maps that you see presented in the search engine results that show you where the local business are.  This service is free and just requires you to enter the information.  Make sure that when you do enter the information, all of your information is current and you are using the researched keywords in your places title (the one that makes the most sense to use in relating to your business) and fill out as much of the information as makes sense on the form.  On a side note, put a picture on your website of your business and in the alt tag of the picture, put your keyword phrase and your business name.

2) Write up and submit regular press releases about your business:

There are usually one or 2 local online news hubs in your area that accepts posts from individuals similar to a site like yourhub.com.  You should create a press release and not only do a regular submission, but do a submission to one of these local news hub sites as well.  What can you write a press release about?  Any event you hare hosting or participating in (teleseminar, training, networking, open house, etc.), a new product or service being offered, new hours, a new market you are serving, anything new that you are doing, or something that you have been doing for a while and are able to relate it to current local news events.  You can also post these releases to your website once you have submitted them through the PR submission service.

3) Start up a PPC campaign:

PPC stands for pay per click and is basically what it sounds like, when someone clicks on your ad in the search engine results, you pay whatever amount you bid.  The more you are willing to bid, the higher up in the search results your site will be.  This is a great way of getting instant traffic to your website from the search engines while you build up your organic search results.  You can also send as much or as little as you want because it all depends upon how much you want to spend. When you start a PPC campaign, it is very important that your ads take the visitor to that part of your website that has specific information relating to the ad and includes a call to action on that page.  This way the visitor doesn’t have to figure out what to do next or try to find the information they were looking for. I have seen many ads take the person to the home page where the visitor has to then figure out where to go next and what to do next.

4) Blog Consistently:

Whether or not you have a product or service oriented business, you should be blogging consistently.  If you blog consistently and strategically, you will be able to enhance your website with fresh content and useful information to your visitors.  If you don’t know what to blog about, start with a list of answering the most frequently asked questions you get from your clients/customers and visitors.  Chances are, if they have those questions, you can bet that others have those same questions as well.  Even if you only blog once a month, be consistent with your posting schedule as once a month is better than nothing.

5) Create a strong social media presence:

If you are a business that is consumer oriented, you should begin by focusing more of your efforts on Facebook.  If you are a business to business type of organization, then you should begin by focusing more of your efforts on LinkedIn.  It doesn’t necessarily mean to be exclusively on one or the other, but you should spend more of your marketing efforts and time on one of these sites as opposed to the other site.  When you do participate on these sites, work on building your network.  One thing I like to do is whenever I meet someone and have a conversation with them, I request to connect with them on one of my social media accounts.  It’s a much better way of staying connected with new associates and more respectful than automatically signing up everyone you meet to your email list, which is not good business etiquette.  You can encourage your social network to sign up for your mailing list and be OK with the fact that those that want to hear from you in that way, will choose to sign up.  You will get a much better response from a smaller list of people that want to be on your mailing list than from a huge list of people who were put on your list unsolicited.  Bigger is not better in this case.

I was digressing, so getting back to the matter at hand…  other things you should be doing with your social media is posting your blog posts as well as sharing other’s blog posts who are related to your topic of expertise, but not exactly the same.  Posting questions that cause your market to think about some specific topic, inspirational quotes and relevant news posts related to your niche are also good things to do when creating a strong social network.  Find niche related images and videos of value and share them with your social network as well.