Do you know how to boost your website traffic and how to rank higher on Google when you’re marketing budget won’t let you spend what average businesses spend on advertising online? According to Wordstream, “The average small business using AdWords spends between $9,000 and $10,000 per month on their online advertising campaigns.” That’s $108,000 – $120,000 per year!
Meanwhile, according to Quickbooks, small businesses with no employees bring in about $44,000 per year, and two-thirds of these firms produce less than $25,000 annually. If you fall into these categories, extensive advertising’s not even a consideration. You need a way to get the word out on a shoestring budget.
If you already have a website, you know that you can bring in traffic. You, or someone in your organization, will have to spend some time working on a practical solution, but you can certainly pay much less than the average business that uses advertising with the right strategy. Find out how to boost your website traffic and how to rank higher on Google without boosting your budget.
Before you spend your whole year’s marketing budget for two months of online ads, take a look at your website. Use an incognito browser and see where your site ranks on the search engine results page (SERP) when you search for your products or services online.
Search like a potential customer might search, without using your brand name or other words that you know will get your site first place on the SERP. Is your website first? If not, is it among the snippets that appear without scrolling down? Is it on the first page? … the second page? … anywhere on the SERP?
If your website does not fall on the first page, above the fold (the part of the results you see without scrolling), people will never see it. Improving your website’s visibility to search engines and people searching can drive more qualified traffic to your site.
Poor keyword selection can result in little or no qualified traffic to your website. If you want your business to appear in a good position on the SERP, your pages must have useful, relevant keywords.
You can learn about the effectiveness of your keywords by reviewing them with Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner. It can provide information about the number of searches per month for a particular keyword or keyword phrase.
Suppose that your business offers customer surveys to businesses and that you have been using the keyword phrase, “customer survey,” on your website. Is that the best keyword for your site?
According to the Google AdWords Keyword Planner, that phrase gets an average of “1K – 10K” searches, in the U.S., per month. That’s a fair number of searches. It has moderate (medium) competition.
Are the searchers people looking for your services? You have no way of knowing. Perhaps they’re designing their own customer surveys. Maybe they’re doing research for a class. If these searchers are researching their own survey, perhaps they are not qualified to buy your service.
How can you find a keyword to get more qualified searchers? You might grab some of those searching for “customer survey,” if they see your site and if they’re looking to buy customer survey services. If they are not looking to purchase services like yours, you’ll earn bounces, and search engines will move you down the SERP. You don’t want that.
Let’s try some other search phrases: “customer survey expert, hire a survey expert, contract a survey expert, hire someone to survey customers, hire a survey, survey company” The Keyword Planner says that only one of these gets searches: “survey companies.” It also says that it gets modest traffic.
Don’t you think that this keyword might attract more qualified buyers? People searching for this phrase are already thinking about hiring an expert. They’re not just exploring or putting together their own surveys. They have a hire in mind. You’ll get more qualified customers and fewer bounces with an appropriate keyword, according to the Huffington Post.
If your business caters to a particular area, then you need to focus on attracting visitors from that region. If your hypothetical customer survey business concentrates, for example, on customers in Pittsburgh, you’ll want to include relevant keyword phrases. Consider “Pittsburgh,” “Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” “Allegheny County,” “Ohio Valley,” “Appalachia,” Monongahela River,” “Ohio,” “western Pennsylvania,” “the Steel City,” or “City of Bridges.”
Including local images, with your keywords in the title tags, ALT tags, and text captions can also make your website more attractive for visitors and help your SEO.
Your Uniform Resource Locator (URL), more commonly known as addresses, also play a role in how search engines see your website. Look at your URLs. Are they clean and logical? Or would find it utterly impossible to memorize any of them? If they’re difficult and complicated, you can improve your website SEO by shortening and simplifying them and making them more relevant.
Look at this URL, for example:
https://www.thinkbigseo.co/blog-for-seo-purposes-get-your-website-noticed
It’s obviously one of ours; you can see “thinkbigseo” in the URL. You can also tell that it’s about blogging, SEO, and getting your website noticed. That’s an excellent URL because you have a simple structure, with the blog title and subject matter incorporated right into the address. Also, it shows you that the website’s main page (www.thinkbigseo.com) serves as the parent directory: very simple and very effective.
Internet users love content. You can attract visitors to your website by providing them with unique, compelling, well-written content. Customers see you and your business as authorities in your field. Take advantage of that image to draw them to your site.
What do your customers ask you about your product or service? Those questions and their answers belong in your website’s Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.
What kinds of decisions do your customers have difficulty making? For example, if your customer survey business offers different types of customer satisfaction survey formats, a blog post discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each might help your customers decide which of your products best suits their clientele.
Search engines know how frequently you update your website, and they see the fresh material as a factor that helps your website rank higher, says Moz. Human users also appreciate new content. If your site does not produce content regularly, your most enthusiastic visitors will eventually stop visiting.
Look for engaging copy to educate, entertain, inform, and engage your audience. A blog on your website provides an extremely useful medium for getting content out to your customers and potential customers on a regular basis.
If you’re not a good writer, you might consider inviting your co-workers or employees to write about what they do, what they like about products, ways to use products, and other subjects. Invite business associates and partners from other businesses to write on your blog. Your content’s limited only by the creativity of your business network.
Social media provide many opportunities to get your brand in front of an active audience because many of your potential customers are already using it on a daily basis. You can learn how to use SEO and social media to drive traffic to your website.
You can, for example, build a Facebook business page, where you provide Facebook users with exciting information about your niche. Using the case of the survey business, presenting visually attractive infographics about how customer surveys can benefit your customer focus might lead to clicks on your website’s blog.
You can also take advantage of Facebook’s high visibility and capacity for engagement, to ask questions of internet users to see what kind of survey information might best benefit their business or to share their experience about surveys that they carried out.
Don’t limit yourself to Facebook. If your business is B2B, you might find LinkedIn useful to reach out to other companies. If you work in a dynamic market, like finance and investing, Twitter might provide a medium to get quickly summarized tidbits out to your audience. If you cater to food-lovers or hobbyists, Pinterest offers quality visual linking opportunities.
Once you have set up your social media site or identity, be sure to add content regularly and interact with people who engage with your content. Answer questions, like comments, and address issues. Site visitors who do not receive feedback may quickly lose interest or even respond aggressively. Site visitors who feel listened to will enjoy your site and feel motivated to continue engaging and visit your links.
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Here, I’ve given you just a few ideas to boost your website traffic to get more traffic flowing to your website. Once you learn how to boost your website traffic and how to rank higher on Google, you will find that your advertising budget does not shrink faster than your client base grows! Keep at it, and you’ll learn and save at the same time!
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