Chances are, whatever your goals are as a company, they could be helped by driving more traffic to your website. There are a lot of ways to drive traffic to your website—some are low hanging fruit. Others, a bit more involved. But whether you’re looking for minor tweaks or major gains, there is always something you can do to drive more traffic.
Think as your target market thinks
When someone sits down to their computer to search for what you do, what are they actually going to type in? Will they use localized terms? Brand name terms? Slang? You need to target what people are actually searching for—not what you think they should be searching for.
Hone your keywords
Keywords are not just a list of words that describe your company. They should be a list of phrases that users will use when searching for a company that does what you do.
Target competitors’ users
Take advantage of your competition’s success by targeting keywords that people would use to find them. Chances are that if your users are searching for a competitor, you’d want to get your message in front of them as well.
Optimize your code
Just because your website looks and loads fine doesn’t mean the code is optimized. And there is a lot more to it than just keywords and metatags. Is your website coded as strict CSS? (Hint: it should be! If it’s not, you’re leaving traffic on the table.)
Format for search engines
Did you know that bold words and headings get more SEO ‘points’ than they would otherwise? Using your keywords in the right place on each page is critical to getting the most out of them.
Target geographically
If your customers are local, why waste your time marketing to people not in the area. Include keywords that the locals would use to narrow down their results geographically.
Establish pay per click
Organic search engine traffic is, of course, the Holy Grail. But what if Google changes the rules (which they do almost weekly) and you go from page 1 to 31? Don’t put all your eggs in the SEO basket. PPC campaigns let you hedge your bets by guaranteeing a certain amount of traffic and a highly targeted, prequalified subset of traffic.
Go viral
Create content that has broad appeal. Then put it on YouTube or Facebook or wherever and let the masses do your marketing for you. Aside from the additional exposure, the additional link-backs to your site will increase your SEO ‘points.’
Blog, blog, blog
Blogs give you a great reason to create topic-specific pages which are highly ‘keyword dense’ (a critical component to SEO). They also establish you as an authority on matters.
Develop microsites
Microsites are simply separate websites, usually only a handful of pages, if that, promoting a specific product or service or promotion. This lets you dedicate a whole site to a short-term goal without having to re-tool your whole website to do so.
Track and update
No matter which methods you employ, search engine marketing is not a ‘set it and forget it’ type of thing. You need to monitor your traffic, analyze the data, and tune and tweak your efforts to maximize the results.
Taoti Creative specializes in search engine marketing. To learn more about the 11 strategies above (as well as additional methods not listed here), please get in touch for a free evaluation of your needs and website.
