With a strong online presence, you can drive local traffic to your website without draining your budget.
Small businesses run a large spectrum of industries, but one thing they all have in common is smaller budgets and less personnel for operations and marketing than larger competitors. One important equalizer among small businesses is the ability to set up a website and drive traffic to that website for little to no costs (outside of your precious time). Learning more about SEO (search engine optimization) will help you create a web presence that attracts customers. However, you don’t need to be an SEO expert to use these tips and tools to drive local traffic to your website.
How to Drive Local Traffic to Your Website
Reputation Marketing
With reputation marketing, you want to build a positive online reputation and use that stellar reputation to get consumers to trust and buy from your business. Reviews, business listings, and even your blog posts are all part of your online reputation. Review sites have a huge impact and finding the right review sites and networks to post and promote your customer reviews gives consumers the information they are looking for when researching the right place to buy something and comparing similar providers of services and goods. In today’s consumer’s mind, no reviews is bad news and a five-star reputation is all the reason they need to choose one business over another.
- Use reputation management services like Reputation Loop to save precious time, gather more five-star reviews, and have the peace of mind that comes with knowing that your reputation marketing is automated and handled at every level. Your customers are being asked for their feedback, you are notified of dissatisfied customers before they get to review sites, and the best reviews are being promoted on the review sites and social networks that matter most to your business in an almost hands-free automated process.
- Manage your business listings and advertise in local classifieds websites to create backlinks to your website. Local classifieds and business listings (such as Chambers of Commerce) not only attract new customers who use local listings, they also provide more websites for customers to write reviews and put more social proof online for your business.
READ The What Why and How of Business Listings and Citations to learn more.
- If you want people to visit your website then that URL should be everywhere you are:
–> Business cards, brochures, letterhead
–> All channels of advertisement
–> Email signature lines for all employees
–> Social media profiles
–> Business listings that allow website listings
–> Review site business listings
–> Part of the conversation when networking
–> Online forums and commenting on other blogs
–> Press releases and sponsorship listings
- Verify and optimize your Google My Business listing to make sure your business website, location and phone number is displayed in search results and on the map when customers Google search.
- Don’t forget to optimize your website for search! Customers are not going to go looking for your business, so you need to show up high in their search results for your good reputation to bring in new customers.
READ Website Pages the Increase Local Search Visibility to learn more.
Email Marketing
Stay in front of your customers with email marketing to drive local traffic to your website. Have an email opt-in on every page of your website or use a pop-up (SumoMe – free) to capture email addresses you can use for your email campaigns. Invest the time to actually learning all the features of your email provider and you’ll be able to automate most of the email marketing process. Fully automated email campaigns can be set up to send a specific email for every action by the customer from sign-up to purchase. Dig into your analytics and segment your subsriber lists to customize content.
Social Media
Social media gives businesses of all sizes the opportunity to interact, educate and advertise to current and future customers and clients. There are hundreds of free social media networks and websites, but the most important thing to remember is to be where your customers are. BE ACTIVE, make connections and engage your followers with posts they find useful or entertaining while sprinkling in some self-promotion.
- Create a Facebook Page for each location to build a platform where you can post updates on your products, offers, the latest events and happenings about your business.
- Customize your posts with offers, previews, and images for your different audiences to get viewers to click to see more.
- Use networks like Meetup.com to organize relevant meetups that can be held at your business. For example, old school Chevy Mustang gatherings at your mechanic’s garage.
- Provide social media customer support by monitoring what is being said and responding to customers.
- Use the social media-like features on Yelp to connect with customers and encourage reviews.
READ Choosing the Right Social Media for Your Business to learn more.
Blogging (Content Marketing)
Customers need a reason to visit your website and blogging is one of the top ways to drive local traffic to your website. Quality content that answers their questions and solves their problems not only gives them a way to find your business in search but also a reason to click through. Grow your business’s web presence by showing you’re a knowledgeable leader in your industry. Build relationships with similar or complimentary websites where you can post content to each other’s website and link back to drive local traffic back to your website.
- Have a call to action on every page whether it is to sign up for a newsletter or purchase a service or product. It should be boldly clear what they should do next after visiting your blog.
- Make your content easy to share by displaying social share buttons prominently on each blog posts.
- Publish helpful and keyword researched content to your blog at least 3 to 4 times a month to keep your website content and provide search engines with websites results for customers looking for answers to the most asked questions.
- The headline is the most important of your content. If it does not spark curiosity or evoke some form of emotion people will not click, and your content will not be seen so prioritize your headline writing.
- Heavily promote your blog posts on the social media networks that your customers use with links, teasers, and images.
- Add variety to your blog posts with videos, infographics, and quality photos.
READ Protecting Your Online Reputation with a Blog to learn more.
Zach Anderson is the co-founder of Reputation Loop (helping small businesses grow by generating customer feedback and online reviews) who loves online marketing and golf.
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